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.
. . . .
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.
I read that yesterday and questioned the validity of what was leaked. If this were true, the Harris campaign would have been blatantly incompetent, and I don't understand why any campaign wouldn't go after every vote they could get.
It almost sounds like a hit piece to try to keep Harris out of 2028.
I am inclined to agree. Under A.G. Sulzberger, the New York Times have pretty consistently been negative to Kamala Harris and, before her, to President Joe Biden. Media analysts have pointed out the NYT’s manipulative headlines, hit pieces, less-prominent placement of positive articles, etc etc etc. My wife and I long since cancelled our subscription in disgust.
And in 2016, this New York Times’ monomanic focus led the wolfpack’s frenzied "but her emails!" attack that sunk Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
Unlike the WPost, I've kept my subscription. Although I may not like all their coverage on several issues, it's still the best paper in the country. And access to the TimesMachine is worth the price of subscription, at least to me.
I don't know what the best paper in the country is, but it sure isn't the NY Times nowadays IMO, and it hasn't been for a while (if it ever was). Certainly not for the last decade. The reputation as the "paper of record" has long been resting on its laurels.
Regarding the Washington Post, I didn't cancel even after the non-endorsement blunder and Jeff Bezos' lame explanation of it (basically "oopsy doopsy, we should have stated it earlier than late October.") But for me there's the matter of all its local coverage. If it weren't the local paper here I might never have subscribed at all. (I dunno what if any paper I'd subscribe to if I lived in the NY Metro area.)
For now, I have kept my subscription to the Washington Post. Imho, Jennifer Rubin alone is worth the price of subscription (especially since I received and absurdly chief offer), and there are some really good articles by others.
(Yes, I am of the opinion that Jeff Bezos and William Lewis, and more than a few others, ought to take a long walk on a short pier.)
I obtain access to the NYT online with a free library subscription. I also subscribe to NYT games through the library for access to their crossword puzzle that I'm getting used to doing online but prefer pen and paper. Admittedly, I'm old school.
I mean, to be fair, though, her campaign was run by the same people who supposedly had hidden some of the more troubling polling from Biden for a while, so I'm not sure how competent they actually were.
But also some of the answers they gave on Pod Save America about, for example, why Harris wouldn't separate herself from Biden doesn't help the impression of their competence levels, nor does the way they handled some of the issues regarding inflation, etc.
It's entirely possible this article is bullshit, but I also don't particularly trust the competence of the people on the Harris campaign who started on the Biden campaign.
Also, I've worked on campaigns that were this incompetent (not presidential races, granted), so I guess it's not that unbelievable to me.
I'm endlessly skeptical of stuff like this, telling us what we want to hear - that the Harris campaign fumbled the election, failed to reach out to Black and Latino voters, leading to the massive rightward trend among the latter. We want to believe this simple narrative rather than consider the big picture, that the shift among Latinos in 2020 against Biden, and then the voter dropoff and shift to GOP voting in diverse areas in the 2021/2022 governor races in CA, TX, FL, NY, NJ, and VA, can't just be scapegoated on one campaign, that its causes, and any solution, must be significantly more complex. All those shifts of the past few years were replicated exactly for Trump, only with one unfortunate addition - white voters also went back towards Republicans. This top to bottom movement caused all 50 states, regardless of demographics, to shift right.
But yeah, campaign staffers and consultants seem all too eager to talk to reporters about how the big dumb Harris campaign, distant, aloof, even arrogant, didn't want to win and didn't want them to talk to Black and Latino voters. An easy story, and the solution is to simply do what they wanted to do, that we can organize, campaign, and power our way to victory via turnout! We've got plenty of other evidence that we did in fact knock on millions of doors, doing everything we could to reach voters, problem was we did and it turned out more of them wanted to vote for Trump than usual. A problem no amount of outreach and GOTV could fix.
Imagine if in 1980 Carter had pulled the plug over the summer and VP Mondale had tried a 4-month campaign to stop Reagan, and lost; I'd be super uninterested in hearing campaign people blaming him after the fact or talking about turnout. It wasn't quite that hopeless this year, but bad polls obscured the extent of the problems we faced, still showing us headed to 270 when that path had likely closed off well ahead of the election.
I'd like this twice if I could. I think this goes back to Dems wanting to replace Biden amidst the bad polling in the summer . . .whereas the underlying problems went far deeper than the candidate leading the ticket.
The underlying problems do go deeper and broader, but replacing Biden almost worked. We lost by 120,000 votes. With Biden on top, it was looking like a landslide and likely 3-4 more Senate seats gone. Harris and Waltz nearly pulled off a miracle and they're mostly always going to be remembered as losers.
Maybe. This was a bizarre election in so many ways. Special elections (including the vaunted WA primary) and most economic indicators pointed to a comfortable D/POTUS incumbent victory. Yet Biden got unpopular even pre-inflation surge after the Afghan withdrawal and just could never recover, even as all of the economic indicators (including inflation) were almost entirely positive begining in the summer through the election. So going by the fundamentals of POTUS approval and consumer sentiment, we were cooked, but those fundamentals just weren't in line with the other fundamentals they're historically always paired with.
Which is why I think at least 70% of the problem is social media misinformation and group think.
Yeah, something like 9 out of 10 indicators suggested to me that we were going to win. Than on election night it became very clear quickly that we weren't. It still feels very odd.
I wish I could give your comment 10 upvotes, because it describes exactly how I feel. I was totally convinced that Harris & Walz would win, and the fact that they didn’t just feels ... off.
Still doesn’t make sense to me, but four years of continuous disinformation from the MAGA-embracing "news" ecosphere and social media, combined with Vlad’s psyops, may be as close as we get.
An article like this gets written about every losing presidental campaign. If Trump had lost there would have been an flood of article about his shambling campaign.
This quote from the article makes for an more balanced picture.
''The Harris campaign said it had made sustained and comprehensive efforts to reach voters of color, including a paid canvassing operation that knocked on the doors of 1.3 million Black and Latino voters in Pennsylvania. It also said it had teams of staff members separate from its field-organizing division who were dedicated to community engagement.''
The campaign absolutely made mistakes, like every campaign did. Still the fact remains that she did better in states Harris contested then the rest of the country. Which points towards the campaign doing something right.
A presidental campaign is a sprawling organization, where few people outside the top know every part of it.
The vast majority of people quoted in this piece does not have comprehensive access to the polling, focus groups and research informing the campaign strategy. While that doesn't make their criticism invalid, it makes it fragmented.
I believe the lower level people quoted in this campaign that they could have done more with access to a higher amount of money. Though that doesn't answer the question if that money was doing better somewhere else, for example in ad spend.
Dem activists, campaign workers and lower level electeds have their own biases. For example there is an enduring belief among them that you can organize your way out of everything. That door knocking is the most effective way to reach voters.
While discounting the broader trends like inflation hurting incumbents everywhere and education polarization.
Research clearly shows that door knocking at a presidental campaign is not cost effective compared to ads.
CHESS: In this weekend’s Open Thread, I mentioned that Gukesh Dommaraju won game #11 against Ding Liren, the challenger thus taking a one-point lead against the defending World Chess Champion. With only three games to go, things were looking bleak for Liren.
During the night and early this morning, however, Liren mounted a brilliant attack around move no.23, scoring a devastating win just before the time control. The match is now tied at two victories each, the rest draws, with two games to go. If a tiebreak is necessary, they will play rapid games, and, if needed, blitz games to decide the World Championship.
I'm on the other side of the river, so my read on the situation could be off, but I don't think either the scion of the Patriots or the councilor for Southie would pose much of a threat to Wu.. This isn't Raymond Flynn's Boston, where an economic populist / cultural conservative was a good fit. Nor does his son have his reputation for going after monied interests. (The elder Flynn went after banks, utility companies and landlords, both as councilor and as mayor.) Both men read to me as the right of center disgruntledness that lost in a landslide in the 2021 race and don't have a constituency or a platform that reaches the broader city of Boston. (This is somewhat unfair to Essaibi George, who was more going for "pragmatic centrist", but that's who ended up voting for her.)
I've not yet relocated myself, but my read of things is the same. Wu manages to get her name out there and gets headlines of her doing stuff. I think one of the biggest potential weaknesses progressives have in blue areas is if they can be labelled as ineffectual because of their endless pursuit of ideology. Something she has avoided.
I don't see the pathway for Flynn. He's making the most noise about Wu's commercial real estate tax proposal... Regardless of if it is good policy, it's going to be very good for elections. Run of the mill voters are not going to revolt over a mayor fighting for taxes to go up for major businesses in an aim to keep taxes lower for homeowners.
Wu hasn't gotten her name attached to any major failures or headaches in the region, gets her name out for the passive positive stuff, and neither of her two most prominent opponents strike me as people having any serious pathway. Surprises happen but I'd expect her to win comfortably at this stage.
Wu is one of the more effective reform-progressive mayors in my opinion and agree that she doesn’t seem to have stepped on the types of land mines that often await mayors of all ideological stripes
I tried and succeeded in naming all seven of them from memory; in addition to the newly minted George Helmy, there's Bob Menendez (Sr), Jeff Chiesa, Jon Corzine, Bob Torricelli, Bill Bradley, and Nicholas Brady.
Helmy, Chiesa, and Brady all only served as appointees; in Brady's case he was later Secretary of the Treasury, and at 94 is now the oldest living ex-US Senator (since Daniel Evans died at 98 in September.)
How about Colorado's? Gardner, Salazar, Mark Udall, Nighthorse Campbell, Wayne Allard, Tim Wirth (I did not get this one), Gary Hart, Hank Brown (did not get this one either).
She's appeared on NewsNation many times, and on Fox News to a somewhat lesser extent, attacking Democrats (in particular, the party's political consultant/operative class, although she's also attacked progressives as well) since Trump's victory last month. I remember her specifically accusing Harris of buying a political endorsement from Oprah on at least one occasion.
That’s vile! She’s not only running the Republicans’ errands, but serving them up additional talking points as well. With regional chairs like Lindy Li, Democrats have little need for political enemies. /s
Sounds like Linda Li is another Jeff Van Drew! Let's give her a voter registration form so she can join the GOP where she belongs.
After the Chinavirus propaganda that Trump was spreading during 2020, I can't understand how any Asian man or woman would want to pull crap like Li does.
KSDK's Mark Maxwell interviewed two of the three candidates (Kim Benda [running for Mayor] and Jennifer Flores [running for Ward 2 Alderperson]) disqualified from the ballot at the Monday election hearing at the Granite City Hall that I was at (and spoke in favor of two of the three candidates). The third disqualified candidate was Colton Baumgartner, who also ran for Mayor, did not attend the meeting. #twill
Disclosure: I supported two of the candidates in question: Colton Baumgartner and Jennifer Flores.
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.
. . . .
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/07/us/politics/harris-philadelphia-black-latino-voters.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
I would tend to cut the Harris campaign some slack here only because of the late start of the campaign.
I read that yesterday and questioned the validity of what was leaked. If this were true, the Harris campaign would have been blatantly incompetent, and I don't understand why any campaign wouldn't go after every vote they could get.
It almost sounds like a hit piece to try to keep Harris out of 2028.
I am inclined to agree. Under A.G. Sulzberger, the New York Times have pretty consistently been negative to Kamala Harris and, before her, to President Joe Biden. Media analysts have pointed out the NYT’s manipulative headlines, hit pieces, less-prominent placement of positive articles, etc etc etc. My wife and I long since cancelled our subscription in disgust.
And in 2016, this New York Times’ monomanic focus led the wolfpack’s frenzied "but her emails!" attack that sunk Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
Unlike the WPost, I've kept my subscription. Although I may not like all their coverage on several issues, it's still the best paper in the country. And access to the TimesMachine is worth the price of subscription, at least to me.
I don't know what the best paper in the country is, but it sure isn't the NY Times nowadays IMO, and it hasn't been for a while (if it ever was). Certainly not for the last decade. The reputation as the "paper of record" has long been resting on its laurels.
Regarding the Washington Post, I didn't cancel even after the non-endorsement blunder and Jeff Bezos' lame explanation of it (basically "oopsy doopsy, we should have stated it earlier than late October.") But for me there's the matter of all its local coverage. If it weren't the local paper here I might never have subscribed at all. (I dunno what if any paper I'd subscribe to if I lived in the NY Metro area.)
For now, I have kept my subscription to the Washington Post. Imho, Jennifer Rubin alone is worth the price of subscription (especially since I received and absurdly chief offer), and there are some really good articles by others.
(Yes, I am of the opinion that Jeff Bezos and William Lewis, and more than a few others, ought to take a long walk on a short pier.)
I obtain access to the NYT online with a free library subscription. I also subscribe to NYT games through the library for access to their crossword puzzle that I'm getting used to doing online but prefer pen and paper. Admittedly, I'm old school.
I mean, to be fair, though, her campaign was run by the same people who supposedly had hidden some of the more troubling polling from Biden for a while, so I'm not sure how competent they actually were.
" by the same people who supposedly had hidden some of the more troubling polling from Biden for a while"
Per the above, any actual evidence this happened beyond a dodgy leak?
There's a reason I said "supposedly."
But also some of the answers they gave on Pod Save America about, for example, why Harris wouldn't separate herself from Biden doesn't help the impression of their competence levels, nor does the way they handled some of the issues regarding inflation, etc.
It's entirely possible this article is bullshit, but I also don't particularly trust the competence of the people on the Harris campaign who started on the Biden campaign.
Also, I've worked on campaigns that were this incompetent (not presidential races, granted), so I guess it's not that unbelievable to me.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t true, I did canvassing in Philadelphia and there was a ton of work being done in Black and Hispanic communities.
I'm endlessly skeptical of stuff like this, telling us what we want to hear - that the Harris campaign fumbled the election, failed to reach out to Black and Latino voters, leading to the massive rightward trend among the latter. We want to believe this simple narrative rather than consider the big picture, that the shift among Latinos in 2020 against Biden, and then the voter dropoff and shift to GOP voting in diverse areas in the 2021/2022 governor races in CA, TX, FL, NY, NJ, and VA, can't just be scapegoated on one campaign, that its causes, and any solution, must be significantly more complex. All those shifts of the past few years were replicated exactly for Trump, only with one unfortunate addition - white voters also went back towards Republicans. This top to bottom movement caused all 50 states, regardless of demographics, to shift right.
But yeah, campaign staffers and consultants seem all too eager to talk to reporters about how the big dumb Harris campaign, distant, aloof, even arrogant, didn't want to win and didn't want them to talk to Black and Latino voters. An easy story, and the solution is to simply do what they wanted to do, that we can organize, campaign, and power our way to victory via turnout! We've got plenty of other evidence that we did in fact knock on millions of doors, doing everything we could to reach voters, problem was we did and it turned out more of them wanted to vote for Trump than usual. A problem no amount of outreach and GOTV could fix.
Imagine if in 1980 Carter had pulled the plug over the summer and VP Mondale had tried a 4-month campaign to stop Reagan, and lost; I'd be super uninterested in hearing campaign people blaming him after the fact or talking about turnout. It wasn't quite that hopeless this year, but bad polls obscured the extent of the problems we faced, still showing us headed to 270 when that path had likely closed off well ahead of the election.
I'd like this twice if I could. I think this goes back to Dems wanting to replace Biden amidst the bad polling in the summer . . .whereas the underlying problems went far deeper than the candidate leading the ticket.
The underlying problems do go deeper and broader, but replacing Biden almost worked. We lost by 120,000 votes. With Biden on top, it was looking like a landslide and likely 3-4 more Senate seats gone. Harris and Waltz nearly pulled off a miracle and they're mostly always going to be remembered as losers.
Maybe. This was a bizarre election in so many ways. Special elections (including the vaunted WA primary) and most economic indicators pointed to a comfortable D/POTUS incumbent victory. Yet Biden got unpopular even pre-inflation surge after the Afghan withdrawal and just could never recover, even as all of the economic indicators (including inflation) were almost entirely positive begining in the summer through the election. So going by the fundamentals of POTUS approval and consumer sentiment, we were cooked, but those fundamentals just weren't in line with the other fundamentals they're historically always paired with.
Which is why I think at least 70% of the problem is social media misinformation and group think.
Yeah, something like 9 out of 10 indicators suggested to me that we were going to win. Than on election night it became very clear quickly that we weren't. It still feels very odd.
I wish I could give your comment 10 upvotes, because it describes exactly how I feel. I was totally convinced that Harris & Walz would win, and the fact that they didn’t just feels ... off.
Still doesn’t make sense to me, but four years of continuous disinformation from the MAGA-embracing "news" ecosphere and social media, combined with Vlad’s psyops, may be as close as we get.
An article like this gets written about every losing presidental campaign. If Trump had lost there would have been an flood of article about his shambling campaign.
This quote from the article makes for an more balanced picture.
''The Harris campaign said it had made sustained and comprehensive efforts to reach voters of color, including a paid canvassing operation that knocked on the doors of 1.3 million Black and Latino voters in Pennsylvania. It also said it had teams of staff members separate from its field-organizing division who were dedicated to community engagement.''
The campaign absolutely made mistakes, like every campaign did. Still the fact remains that she did better in states Harris contested then the rest of the country. Which points towards the campaign doing something right.
A presidental campaign is a sprawling organization, where few people outside the top know every part of it.
The vast majority of people quoted in this piece does not have comprehensive access to the polling, focus groups and research informing the campaign strategy. While that doesn't make their criticism invalid, it makes it fragmented.
I believe the lower level people quoted in this campaign that they could have done more with access to a higher amount of money. Though that doesn't answer the question if that money was doing better somewhere else, for example in ad spend.
Dem activists, campaign workers and lower level electeds have their own biases. For example there is an enduring belief among them that you can organize your way out of everything. That door knocking is the most effective way to reach voters.
While discounting the broader trends like inflation hurting incumbents everywhere and education polarization.
Research clearly shows that door knocking at a presidental campaign is not cost effective compared to ads.
Something totally irrelevant…
CHESS: In this weekend’s Open Thread, I mentioned that Gukesh Dommaraju won game #11 against Ding Liren, the challenger thus taking a one-point lead against the defending World Chess Champion. With only three games to go, things were looking bleak for Liren.
During the night and early this morning, however, Liren mounted a brilliant attack around move no.23, scoring a devastating win just before the time control. The match is now tied at two victories each, the rest draws, with two games to go. If a tiebreak is necessary, they will play rapid games, and, if needed, blitz games to decide the World Championship.
https://analysis.sesse.net/
I'm on the other side of the river, so my read on the situation could be off, but I don't think either the scion of the Patriots or the councilor for Southie would pose much of a threat to Wu.. This isn't Raymond Flynn's Boston, where an economic populist / cultural conservative was a good fit. Nor does his son have his reputation for going after monied interests. (The elder Flynn went after banks, utility companies and landlords, both as councilor and as mayor.) Both men read to me as the right of center disgruntledness that lost in a landslide in the 2021 race and don't have a constituency or a platform that reaches the broader city of Boston. (This is somewhat unfair to Essaibi George, who was more going for "pragmatic centrist", but that's who ended up voting for her.)
I've not yet relocated myself, but my read of things is the same. Wu manages to get her name out there and gets headlines of her doing stuff. I think one of the biggest potential weaknesses progressives have in blue areas is if they can be labelled as ineffectual because of their endless pursuit of ideology. Something she has avoided.
I don't see the pathway for Flynn. He's making the most noise about Wu's commercial real estate tax proposal... Regardless of if it is good policy, it's going to be very good for elections. Run of the mill voters are not going to revolt over a mayor fighting for taxes to go up for major businesses in an aim to keep taxes lower for homeowners.
Wu hasn't gotten her name attached to any major failures or headaches in the region, gets her name out for the passive positive stuff, and neither of her two most prominent opponents strike me as people having any serious pathway. Surprises happen but I'd expect her to win comfortably at this stage.
Wu is one of the more effective reform-progressive mayors in my opinion and agree that she doesn’t seem to have stepped on the types of land mines that often await mayors of all ideological stripes
https://newjerseyglobe.com/congress/n-j-now-has-seven-living-former-u-s-senators-second-most-in-u-s/
The answer to the question is in the article.
I tried and succeeded in naming all seven of them from memory; in addition to the newly minted George Helmy, there's Bob Menendez (Sr), Jeff Chiesa, Jon Corzine, Bob Torricelli, Bill Bradley, and Nicholas Brady.
Helmy, Chiesa, and Brady all only served as appointees; in Brady's case he was later Secretary of the Treasury, and at 94 is now the oldest living ex-US Senator (since Daniel Evans died at 98 in September.)
How about Colorado's? Gardner, Salazar, Mark Udall, Nighthorse Campbell, Wayne Allard, Tim Wirth (I did not get this one), Gary Hart, Hank Brown (did not get this one either).
WTF is up with Lindy Li, Mid-Atlantic Regional Chair of the DNC, praising Pete Hegseth as “a pretty good guy”?
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5028472-dnc-official-defends-hegseth-i-actually-think-hes-a-pretty-good-guy/
"old school ties", it sounds like. I hope she is soon the former chair.
She's appeared on NewsNation many times, and on Fox News to a somewhat lesser extent, attacking Democrats (in particular, the party's political consultant/operative class, although she's also attacked progressives as well) since Trump's victory last month. I remember her specifically accusing Harris of buying a political endorsement from Oprah on at least one occasion.
That’s vile! She’s not only running the Republicans’ errands, but serving them up additional talking points as well. With regional chairs like Lindy Li, Democrats have little need for political enemies. /s
Prepping for her RW media gig . . .disgusting.
Sounds like Linda Li is another Jeff Van Drew! Let's give her a voter registration form so she can join the GOP where she belongs.
After the Chinavirus propaganda that Trump was spreading during 2020, I can't understand how any Asian man or woman would want to pull crap like Li does.
Well, there's a low hanging branch to be pruned in the DNC's forthcoming changeover....
KSDK's Mark Maxwell interviewed two of the three candidates (Kim Benda [running for Mayor] and Jennifer Flores [running for Ward 2 Alderperson]) disqualified from the ballot at the Monday election hearing at the Granite City Hall that I was at (and spoke in favor of two of the three candidates). The third disqualified candidate was Colton Baumgartner, who also ran for Mayor, did not attend the meeting. #twill
Disclosure: I supported two of the candidates in question: Colton Baumgartner and Jennifer Flores.
https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/politics/granite-city-mayoral-hopefuls-booted-from-ballot-over-technicalities/63-34d984a7-6663-41f9-aafa-f2589f4d77c7
Donald Trump taps right-wing culture warrior Harmeet Dhillon for the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-gives-anti-woke-warrior-key-civil-rights-role/