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.
I’ve got this thing called a phone that accesses this other thing called the internet which has this other thing called a campaign website with links to these other things that the person running for office has stated in an official manner about their policies. Why the hell would I want someone to come talk to me in person, where they are going to lack information, bumble about trying to set the right tone, and take far longer to get the point across than these five words: Harris is better than Trump.
I can see it for a small, local candidate… but for the example given of the Harris campaign, the fucking presidential race? Come on, let’s be serious.
The average voter is a dumbass who doesn’t seek out real political information. Dumb as they are your vote counts the same as theirs. A significant number of people didn’t even know Biden had dropped out (per Google search spike) and that Kamala was the Dem candidate.
The average voter is a dumbass who doesn’t seek out real political information
And to make matters worse, the MAGAts developed their own russian-funded misinformationsphere which is how not a word got through to them.
Democrats have only ever tried to copy this and it only ever fails. We have got to have E2EE anonymous sharing with some sort of data ownership that runs everywhere and can do video. Are we working on that? Nope. Are there any fucking billionaires helping out with that? Nope.
We got Signal. That’s something, I guess. But it’s a far cry from something your average ignorant red state captive can access and appreciate.
Only campaign that ever knocked on my door was the Bloomberg campaign in the 2020 primaries.
Once they said which candidate they were working for, I immediately put my hands against the wall in the “stop and frisk” position. They got the idea and left.
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)
They assumed all Black people know each other already, so no need to doorknock.
I wish I was fucking joking. They assumed it would be impossible for brown people to not hear all they needed to know via organic word of mouth.
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.
its the paid stuff. staffers can be fired and while some volunteers may be that close to the campaign many are several degrees of separation from it.
Based on the information available in this article it seems like this was a mix of paid campaign staff and volunteers who were close to the campaign
Nothing to indicate they were rogue though. Just because some got together and said hey lets do this. I mean kamala does not micromanage every endeavor. its just like a business with broad objectives but then you get memos about some specific strategy or such. I don’t they were told, don’t you dare do this. Some local folks had a good idea and went with it. My main thing is the use of rogue in the headline and the whole sensationilist thing. Without it though its not much of a story. Staffers and volunteers campaign for canidate, news at 11.
This isn’t news.
