Don’t try to get it to do anything else,’” she said. “I remember him saying to us, ‘Listen, you guys, you’re the dancing dog. Sandberg recalled a meeting with a leader of the field program, who didn’t end up sticking around, as indicative of how traditional campaigners viewed what they were trying to do. Even as the team began putting people to work, expectations were low. The team’s charge was to figure out a way, with very little budget, to channel the energy behind the Sanders campaign into an effective volunteer army. A third was Alexandra Rojas, who Exley met as she organized community college students in Orange County, California. Another was Saikat Chakrabarti, who’d been the first engineer, and the fifth employee, of the Silicon Valley firm Stripe but left it behind to join the campaign. He reached out to Exley about a job, and Exley, without a lot of other options, took a chance on him. One of those super volunteers was Corbin Trent, a chef in Tennessee who sold his food trucks to volunteer for the campaign full time. “The professionals that joined were really true believers, like me and Zack, and then we really had to fill out the ranks from the super volunteers who’d never worked in politics before,” Bond said. Exley also brought on Bond, his longtime friend and ally. Exley was brought on as a senior adviser and Sandberg was made director of digital organizing. The pair pitched themselves as a package deal, and Weaver bit. She reached out to everybody she knew who might have some tangential connection to the small circle of Sanders advisers and eventually connected with Zack Exley, who had been talking to the campaign about joining. Improbably, she won, and by 2015, was looking for her next thing. As a high school student, she was swept up in an illegal mass arrest at a protest of the World Bank and IMF in 2002 and used the settlement she got to launch a group in New York dedicated to banning fracking. That meant that, by definition, the staff had to be filled out by renegades, people with activist rather than campaign backgrounds, and operatives accustomed to taking on the establishment. Even vendors who weren’t employed by the Clinton campaign didn’t want to work for the Bernie campaign, because they were worried about not getting business in the future.” “We really had to fill out the ranks from the super volunteers who’d never worked in politics before.” “You have to remember in the very beginning, it was very hard for the Bernie campaign to hire pros,” said Becky Bond, an adviser to the 2016 Sanders campaign, “because it was just very clear that you’d be totally blackballed, not just from a White House or a federal agency job, but from any of the Democratic-aligned institutions. Jeff Weaver, who left Sanders’s office in 2009 to run a comic book store, came out of retirement to work as campaign manager, but few others joined the official campaign. His 2016 presidential campaign was no different - in part because nobody who wanted a future in Democratic Party politics thought they’d survive coming near his challenge to Hillary Clinton. Part of it was philosophical: Sanders for decades believed that staff were inherently corrupting of a politician, more likely to push him toward party orthodoxy, and undermine the iconoclastic independence he had nurtured. Throughout his career, Sanders resisted hiring any more campaign or even congressional staff than absolutely necessary - and oftentimes less than that. Sanders built this movement, however, largely by accident. helped elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress and is now guiding Sanders’s 2020 campaign. Image: Courtesy of Strong Arm PressFor all its revolutionary sensibility, the 2016 campaign was organized around a traditional strategic approach: Raise money to put ads on television and fund a field operation in key early states.īut outside of the watch of the campaign’s top brass, a collection of activists working in the bowels of the campaign tested out a variety of experimental approaches to organizing, eventually producing a breakthrough that has been copied by organizers in Spain and the U.K.
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