When then-Sen. Barack Obama kicked off his 2008 presidential campaign with a raucous rally in Springfield, Illinois, eagle-eyed political observers might have noticed a surprising face in the crowd: San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris.
Harris was both an early Obama supporter and a fierce convert to his bold vision for reshaping Democrats’ costly and inefficient state field operations. She hit the doors for Obama in Iowa in 2008 and later went on to manage his California field operations as state campaign co-chair. As Harris rose through the ranks to become vice president, she continued to advocate for Obama’s aggressive style of registering and engaging new voters.
Sixteen years later, Harris is now applying lessons learned during the Obama campaign to a political operation that is both larger and more flush with cash than Obama’s ever was. With less than a month until election day, Harris is staking it all on the hope that a better-funded version of Obama’s operation can provide a critical boost in closely contested swing states. If she’s right, Democrats could soon be hailing the “Harris model” of voter activation as the blueprint for 2028 and beyond.
Harris’ recent campaign moves suggest she’s serious about implementing Obama’s strategy of pouring money into state and local grassroots voter outreach. Back in August, Harris was quick to sign Obama campaign veterans David Plouffe, Stephanie Cutter, and Mitch Stewart to senior-level roles within her own campaign. She’s also reshaped her campaign message to not-so-subtly frame her “freedom” message as a natural progression of Obama’s effective “hope” imagery.
The burst of enthusiasm for Harris’ campaign from Democratic grassroots circles has been tough to miss. Democratic voter enthusiasm is rising at record levels, according to recent data from the conservative Wall Street Journal, and that’s translating into a tidal wave of new voters and first-time donors. In July, Harris’ candidacy helped Vote.org hit a new record for voter registrations, with nearly 40,000 people signing up in just 48 hours.
Registering new voters is (comparatively) easy. Getting those first-time voters out of their homes to cast a ballot on Election Day is harder. That’s why Obama’s 2008 campaign invested so heavily in efforts to connect first-time voters with early voting resources and offer rides to the polls for voters with mobility challenges. Those kinds of complex offerings require a campaign to build a robust local presence with plenty of staff redundancy. Harris’ campaign is already moving to ensure that won’t be an issue.
Last month, the Harris campaign announced it would open over a dozen new campaign offices in the key swing state of Virginia. The campaign also celebrated opening its 50th field office in Pennsylvania and recently announced six more local field offices in North Carolina to support over 12,000 new volunteers there. Harris is now nearing over 300 field offices and 200,000 volunteers spread across all 50 states.
That includes Florida, a state once considered unwinnable by Democrats. With about a month until the election, Harris currently trails Trump by a scant 4 percentage points.
“I saw field work pay off as an organizer in Florida in 2008. That’s why I’m not surprised by the surge in field operations I’ve witnessed here over the last couple of months,” said Evergreen Strategies founder Ben Sharpe, who also served as a Florida Democratic Party voter targeting staffer.
Sharpe adds, “What stands out is how quickly [Harris] understood what resources she had on the ground. They are letting people take ownership of these programs and letting them fly, which is a fundamental part of organizing a community. People become more invested in their work and outcomes.”
For once, Democrats actually have the money to build the field organization of their dreams. Harris has raised more money in less time than any presidential candidate in history, and enters the final stretch of the campaign season with a monumental $361 million August fundraising haul. That’s more than enough money to build a field operation more than double the size of Obama’s—and Harris is clearly making the investments necessary to build a formidable voter engagement machine.
Things aren’t looking so good on the Republican side. Last month, the Trump campaign quietly announced it would reduce its field investment in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Virginia, citing reduced competitiveness. The campaign has also reported spending more than it raised for the second month in a row, according to September fundraising figures. Republican insiders are now raising the alarm about Trump’s lack of a serious ground game in the face of Democrats’ organized effort. Others already fear it’s too late for Trump to recover from his sizable disadvantage.
Harris’ shrewd decision to reactivate many veteran state-level Obama operatives allowed Democrats to quickly scale up a campaign operation that had been sagging under President Joe Biden. By forcing Republicans to spend ever-increasing amounts of their dwindling cash on once-safe states like Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina, Harris has achieved one of the biggest victories in organizing: expanding your electoral map.
Harris’ team now spans outreach efforts to Latinos, women, young people, Black Americans, Native Americans, city dwellers, and those living in rural communities from North Carolina to Nevada and even Alaska. It’s a well-financed, professional operation filled with campaign veterans who have spent nearly two decades turning out hard-to-reach and first-time voters. It’s also the turnout machine that could give Harris her critical margin of victory in razor-edge races like Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Thanks, Obama.
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