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.
They called it Operation Dunkin’kirk, a gallows-humor joke about the desperate World War II mission to save Allied troops trapped by Nazi armies in France.
Fueled by boxes of coffee in their impromptu boiler room, the small team of operatives crunched internal campaign data beneath purloined Harris-Walz signs and directed dozens of volunteers across the city’s core Democratic wards. 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.’”
The Dunkin’ Donuts office and several similar efforts in Philadelphia, often funded independently by Democratic donors through nonprofit voter-education groups, reflected deep frustration within the campaign. Numerous Harris organizers believed it was failing to invest in mobilizing Black and Latino voters in the nation’s sixth-largest city, the biggest prize in the election’s most populous battleground state.
This article is based on interviews with 11 Harris campaign staff members and volunteers who were directly involved in organizing the stealth efforts in the weeks before the election, most of whom insisted on anonymity to talk candidly about internal campaign matters. The New York Times also spoke with more than 20 other campaign officials, volunteers, Democratic Party operatives and elected leaders who were involved in voter outreach around the country and described how it fell short.
The covert operations, many of them led by Black organizers, represented extraordinary acts of insubordination against the Harris campaign.
Campaign organizers in Philadelphia said they were told not to engage in the bread-and-butter tasks of getting out the vote in Black and Latino neighborhoods, such as attending community events, registering new voters, building relationships with local leaders and calling voters.
Instead, they said, they were instructed to spend most of their days phoning the same small pool of volunteers and asking them to knock on voters’ doors and help run field offices. The strategy essentially turned experienced organizers into glorified telemarketers making hundreds of calls daily, with some harried volunteers begging to be taken off call lists.
Staff members also said that the campaign did not hire enough Black and Latino campaign workers or political consulting firms that were owned by people of color and had expertise in reaching such voters — a source of continuing frustration among Democratic operatives that they say has contributed to the erosion of the party’s multiracial base.
Archived at https://archive.is/NClEe
Related reading,
It is so intriguing to me that there are people out there who want a campaign to come knock on their door.
It’s one of the ways of showing that there are real people involved in the campaign. That the candidate cares enough to send someone to your neighborhood.
Like other outreach does similar (flyers, local ads, etc) but as social creatures we feel more connection if we actually talk to someone.
Please don’t knock on my door. I’m voting, yes, thank you. No. Don’t knock. Don’t call.
And text-banking; please stop. The same radio and tv ads over and over. Pain.
I also get annoyed with the excessive contact leading up to election night but how do you expect a candidate to make you aware and feel like they represent you if they don’t even bother to say “hi”. How do you want to learn about your candidate? Especially at a local level information paucity is a real problem that goes both ways.
With two days to go?? What the fuck, exactly, were you expecting would happen ??
They called it Operation Dunkin’kirk, a gallows-humor joke about the desperate World War II mission to save Allied troops trapped by Nazi armies in France.
I don’t think they had any illusions about the situation they were in (which is more than can be said for campaign leadership)
title says staffers and then the article says organizers. Maybe because the whole rogue thing does not work with organizers as they are as independent as they want to be. My brother was regularly going up to wisconsin to help register people to vote along with outreach because he was worried about his family with a trump regime. He was as disapointed as anyone.
This article is based on interviews with 11 Harris campaign staff members and volunteers who were directly involved in organizing the stealth efforts in the weeks before the election, most of whom insisted on anonymity to talk candidly about internal campaign matters. The New York Times also spoke with more than 20 other campaign officials, volunteers, Democratic Party operatives and elected leaders who were involved in voter outreach around the country and described how it fell short.
yeah but who exactly went rogue. staffers and volunteers are two very different groups.
Seems like a lot of people who wish to remain anonymous so they don’t get blackballed by the Democratic party
staffers and volunteers are two very different groups.
How so? Every campaign is different but the ones I’ve volunteered for had e.g. volunteers handling confidential internal campaign data, paid staff jumping into phone bank shifts alongside the volunteers when extra hands were needed, etc.
This isn’t news.
