Harris Campaign Desperate Staffers ‘Went Rogue’ to Reach Minority Voters
Back in mid-October, reports began to surface about deep worries among Democrats familiar with the Kamala Harris campaign’s efforts in Pennsylvania, with some openly saying she needed to do more to reach black and Latino voters and that their ground operation was sorely lacking.
External and internal grumbling was going on along with meetings that were called after repeated complaints that state HQ did not have it together:
Top Democrats in Pennsylvania are worried Vice President Kamala Harris’ operation is being poorly run in the nation’s biggest battleground state.They say some Harris aides lack relationships with key party figures, particularly in Philadelphia and its suburbs. They complain they have been left out of events and surrogates haven’t been deployed effectively. And they’ve urged Harris staff in private meetings to do more to turn out voters of color.[…]For some Pennsylvania Democratic elected officials, party leaders and allies, 20 of whom POLITICO spoke to for this article, they’re anxious the in-state operation has set them back.
As we reported at the time, their worries were particularly pronounced when it came to winning over male Latino voters, who they believed were gravitating towards Donald Trump in part because they supposedly didn’t like the idea of a woman president.
In the immediate aftermath of Harris losing the Keystone State – and her chance at the presidency along with it – tensions boiled over as Bob Brady, chairman of the Philadelphia Democrat Party, went off on resource management and what he said was the campaign’s failure to connect one on one with local leaders and voters:
“I would’ve liked to see the Harris campaign – especially the national campaign – coordinate with us a little bit. Talk to us a little bit. Give us a little bit more resources. Show us some respect. Didn’t happen,” he told NBC10 on Wednesday. “They were just elitist and went out there, did their own thing and didn’t include Democratic city committee or (ward leaders) or committee people. They just didn’t do it.”[…]“I don’t think that the Democrats that live in the city related to her,” he said. “And I don’t know why. I don’t know whether there was an elitist factor out there. I don’t know why she didn’t talk to them.”
Fresh reporting confirms that the concerns from Democrats about Pennsylvania were real, so real in fact that staffers were “going rogue” in an effort to reach the minority voters that they felt the campaign wasn’t doing enough to win over:
Two days before the November election, a rogue team of campaign organizers for Vice President Kamala Harris turned a Dunkin’ Donuts in Philadelphia into their secret headquarters.Their mission was simple: Knock on the doors of as many Black and Latino voters as they could in neighborhoods that they believed the Harris campaign had neglected in its get-out-the-vote-operation. And they could not let their bosses find out.[…]Many of the thousands of Black and Latino voters they talked to said they had never heard from the campaign, a stunning breakdown so close to Election Day.“I was the first one knocking on these doors,” said Amelia Pernell, a Harris campaign organizer involved in setting up the clandestine Dunkin’ Donuts field office in North Philadelphia. “They hadn’t talked to anybody. It was like: ‘Hey, nobody has come to our neighborhood. The campaign doesn’t care about us.’”
In the words of the New York Times, “The covert operations, many of them led by Black organizers, represented extraordinary acts of insubordination against the Harris campaign.”
The report also detailed that despite Harris raising $1.5 billion, staffers said some of the campaign offices in the Philadelphia area “were filthy and lacked basic supplies like tables, chairs, cleaning products and printers.”
The strategy, it appears, was to focus primarily on what they felt were white voters in the suburbs who weren’t fans of then-GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. This was a strategy that also was in effect in other battleground states including Georgia, according to at least one local Democrat Party official:
Keith McCants, the chair of a county Democratic Party in a rural part of Georgia with many Black voters, said the Harris campaign’s get-out-the-vote operation had been nonexistent, even as he had pleaded for resources.“They didn’t do nothing, absolutely nothing,” he said. “They thought: ‘Those Black voters are going to come home. They will vote for her regardless because she’s a Black woman. So let’s just focus on the suburbs.’”
Black staffers also allegedly complained of “outright racial discrimination” in a campaign survey, according to the Times report. But after the election was over, staffers were told by the deputy campaign manager to refrain from talking to the media or he’d ruin their careers:
Between this, the tens of millions they spent on the election-eve concerts, the hundreds of thousands they donated/paid to prominent celebrities and media figures for their time and endorsements, it makes you wonder: is there anything this campaign did right?
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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