A new report in the New York Times laid out how many Kamala Harris campaign staffers believed the campaign severely neglected reaching out to Black and Latino voters in Philadelphia, the largest city in the nation’s most critical swing states.
”I was the first one knocking on these doors,” a former Harris campaign organizer, Amelia Pernell, told The New York Times. ”They hadn’t talked to anybody. It was like: ‘Hey, nobody has come to our neighborhood. The campaign doesn’t care about us.”’
Pernell, alongside other Harris campaign volunteers, believed that campaign leadership was ignoring Black and Latino voters and instead focusing their efforts on White suburban voters.
The Times report described “deep frustration” and “extraordinary acts of insubordination” by Black staffers who didn’t heed campaign leadership’s strategy.
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“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,” the Times reported.
Staff members described to the Times having dirty field offices that lacked basic supplies like tables and chairs, or ones for majority-Black areas that weren’t anywhere near the center of voters they were trying to reach. So some of them essentially went rogue and set up a separate headquarters for door-knocking efforts in neighborhoods they believed had been ignored.
Philadelphia City Council member Isaiah Thomas criticized the Harris campaign for letting their momentum fade, according to the report.
”The blitz that happened at the end of the campaign was too little, too late,” Thomas told The Times. ”The momentum got down because there was no activity happening.”
”There were no yard signs, there was no visibility, there were no T-shirts,” Harris campaign volunteer Donnel Baird said. ”There was nobody handing out literature. There were no bumper stickers. There was no sign that we were in the fight of our lives in the most important city in a presidential campaign.”
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Harris lost Pennsylvania, along with every major battleground state, to President-elect Donald Trump, in part due to underperformance in major cities in the same manner as Hillary Clinton in 2016.
”You know politics is local,” Mayor Dwan B. Walker of Aliquippa said. ”We keep saying that. But this campaign didn’t touch it.”
Philadelphia labor leader Ryan Boyer Sr. pointed to the Harris campaign’s weak messaging on the economy for Harris’ loss.
”I think that we had a lot of reproductive-rights commercials and not enough bread-and-butter economic messaging,” he said.
Some senior advisers rejected the idea the Harris campaign didn’t do enough to reach Black and Latino voters.
”This campaign did more in Philadelphia to reach Black and Latino voters than any campaign has done in a long time,” senior Harris campaign adviser in Pennsylvania, Kellan White, told The Times. “The issue is not that we didn’t knock on these doors — we knocked on a ton of doors. The problem was that the message itself didn’t connect — and that’s what we as a party need to spend our time and energy on, trying to understand why when we knocked these doors, what we had to say didn’t resonate with enough voters.”
