Although the dust is still settling on the 2020 US presidential election it is clear this cycle was one of significant breakthroughs for Democrats. With historic voter turnout for recent times, Joe Biden’s team secured a Democratic win in Georgia, something that hadn’t happened since 1992, and there was record turnout among young people and Black Americans.
Ashley Allison, Biden and Kamala Harris’s national coalitions director, said the campaign put a greater effort into building a broad coalition of voters than ever before.
“This campaign made a larger investment in coalition work than any other presidential campaign by a mile,” said Allison, who worked on African American outreach for Obama’s 2012 campaign in Ohio, which swung for Obama that year almost entirely due to the Black vote.
She may well be right: the Biden camp had close to 500 employees working on outreach this year. It had a virtual headquarters and people on the ground in key battleground states. Biden’s organizing team reached more than 37 million by phone – and in the final weeks of volunteering, they called, texted and knocked on more than double the number of doors the Obama team did in 2012 even as Obama’s campaign is frequently referred to as ground zero for the technological revolution in political campaigning.
But with the coronavirus pandemic largely preventing the team from physically knocking on doors, they needed to find a way to safely create an in-person presence. That consisted of dropping literature at people’s doors with handwritten notes and following up with phone calls. Phone-banking teams would call in to video chats, trying to recreate the energy of a traditional phone-banking room, to overcome the ennui of calling alone during a global shutdown.
In Arizona, which the Democrats flipped for the first time in 24 years, Biden’s coalitions team did extensive outreach in the Navajo Nation, with indigenous people playing the ceremonial drum to engage voters as they were coming in so they would see themselves as part of the voting experience. In Nevada, horse parades marched down the streets.
“We wanted to engage voters in a time where people were feeling so distant due to the pandemic,” said Allison.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
