Seeking Derangements - SD7: The Bernie Postmortem

Episode Date: April 19, 2020

intro/// Jane Duboc - Se Eu Te Pego De Jeito Ben and I have been working on this episode for the last couple of weeks, interviewing his colleagues and coworkers about what happened to Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign. Dimitri and Mia join us to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the campaign, and the role management played in its downfall. outro/// Maxi Anderson - Lover to Lover

I Ah, if I could catch you by the way If I could catch you by the tail of the eye I would pull you by the collar Until your head fell on my shoulder And I would tighten you until I would unclench the knot of your throat To show you how affection dissolves and universalizes pain Ah, if I could catch you by the way If I could make you stop just a little I'm not afraid of pain I have everything to blow our universal chain of love But you can always escape me And I feel without enough strength to reach you It must be because I also need to be caught, pulled and squeezed To free myself

Welcome everyone to our Bernie episode. I've got some organizers on the line with us that worked for the campaign in Iowa and elsewhere. And, you know, I've been talking with a lot of people who worked on the campaign, a lot of my former co-workers, about what they think went wrong inside of the campaign, especially in light of seeing all of these postmortems released by management, advisors, others. A lot of the focus of those postmortems have been on the power of the DNC, the influence of the corporate media, you know, some even citing our electoral system at large. And while these forces can't be denied, emphasizing them as the sole reason for our loss

is really a disservice to our movement. If we aren't willing to take stock of our internal failures, we're losing an opportunity to learn from what is the largest largest political project socialism has seen in America I would say. So with me I've got Mia and Dimitri Max is here. Hey y'all. I'm gonna be taking like a bit of a backseat for this episode. This is mostly Ben's story. I'm here mostly as a producer and someone like a like a stand-in for the audience like a, a Rube, so to speak. Do you guys want to introduce yourselves? Mia.

Okay. All right. I'm Mia. I was an organizer in a couple of different states on the campaign before joining it in a more remote role. So I got to see a couple of different sides of the whole organizing process. Awesome. Now, what about you, Dimitri? Yeah, so I was an organizer on the ground in Iowa for six months for the caucuses. In Marshalltown was my home base, but I covered the five counties basically between Ames and Cedar Rapids. Awesome. Dimitri was in Iowa a lot earlier than I was, so he's going to be here to help fill us in on like the timeline and really everything that went on before I was there and later on as well. Yes, I mean, I think when we talk about the

internal problems on the campaign, we've got to start with what I see and what I think many of us see as like a foundational issue, right? And that many of those who were making crucial decisions on the campaign didn't really act, you know, in accordance with what the ultimate goals were of the campaign, you know, and that essentially we were attempting to amass a movement large enough to take control of the Democratic Party. And, you know, some might say that that seems like a far flung, like leftist idea or something, but it really is the entire basis for our theory of change. It's the basis for Bernie calling himself an existential threat, or, you know, like when he would refer to himself as the organizer in chief. It's the reason why we won Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.

Not me, us, even, right? Just like even that as a slogan is really, really hammering on the fact that we've got to build a grassroots movement to get some semblance of institutional power. That's how we were going to affect anything like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, et cetera, et cetera. So while I think because of this rhetoric, many people would have expected that we had a field program to match, right? That we had many field organizers across the country facilitating a large, large number of

volunteers who were brought out precisely because of this message. And the campaign management made decisions and pursued strategies along the way that really undercut the ability of our field program and of our volunteers to secure delegates, to secure state wins, and to build that movement that would last past the election and affect the changes that we were organizing off of. And to talk about organizing models in particular, right, the campaign was torn between two of them. You know, first, I think we can call the organizing model that was favored among field staff, deep organizing, right? This is the model that was in place for the most part in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, you know, somewhat in California as well. And deep organizing calls for investments to be placed directly into hiring field organizers, opening field offices and mounting,

you know, a long term effort to engage communities, you know, and really emphasizing those that have been excluded from traditional electoral politics. What do you guys think about that as just like a general assessment of the organizing strategy that works to fulfill the campaign's message? Because this is what we had in Iowa and you're both a part of that. So what do you think in general about this assessment?

Yeah, I think. sort of deep organizing you're talking about really, it's kind of based on like, I guess, a little bit of like relational organizing or almost more like community organizing approach where we're really sort of building like, you know, a network within that community around, you know, community leaders. So for people who don't know, or for people who didn't work on the campaign, like, what would that like entail? Like deep organizing, would it be like canvassing or going out in person to like maybe your neighborhood or would it be like uh canvassing or going out in person to like maybe your neighborhood or would it be like phone banking like so let's just let's just define like what the role of a field organizer is

yeah i mean um i mean i guess we can all sort of chime in here but i know from like the day-to-day sort of uh expectations or duties would be you know outside of just your own like canvassing and phone banking which is obviously a part of it for everybody but a big part of the phone making and work that you're doing is actually you know recruiting people to be volunteers and um that really the sort of linchpin of that is these sort of deep conversations that you have with people where you try to, you know, find out what's, you know, getting them invested essentially in the movement and try to sort of escalate them into taking on some responsibility and some volunteer leadership duties.

The key sort of corner piece of that, I guess, is like what we call like one-to-ones you have one-on-one meetings with a staff member and a volunteer and I guess Ben you could probably talk about this a little bit more because you had one as I was I started as a volunteer I mean yeah so like the the process for kind of developing volunteers in Iowa from start to finish was generally, you know, through a phone bank of Democrats or likely supporters, you would call them, gauge their interest in their, in seeing Bernie win, right? And if they seemed particularly enthusiastic, you would try to schedule a one on one with them, where you would try to schedule a one-on-one with them where you would meet in person to establish a connection right and from there you would get them to come out to canvas you would

get them to come out to phone bank you would get them to call like their families and friends to get them to support bernie as well that'd be like relational organizing and like ultimately you would get sustained long-term voter interaction for this person to to do voter interaction and you know eventually become like a precinct captain or something on caucus night so that was the that was the work and that it's it's a big undertaking to kind of have enough staff to develop those relationships with a very, very, very large volunteer base that we have in Iowa. So, Demetri, you were there in Iowa from the very beginning. What did it look like when you first got hired? Well, longer than me. What did it look like when you got hired in Iowa? Yeah. So I was hired in early August, August 6th, my first day.

And at that stage, we had an all staff field meeting, my second day of work. And we had I think 35 field staff members, including management. So it was really like 25 to 30 or so. And, you know, at that stage, it was really just getting through that sort of summer phase. I think you were a little bit more familiar with. There was a lot of the barnstorms, which are kind of like community meetings where you try to sort of get people involved in the campaign, but they're a little bit less um formal like phone banks or canvases you have them at like a bar so people will come right right um or a barn if you're real loud yeah but um but so yeah that that's basically

what the campaign had been doing kind of through the summer. And then we were sort of transitioning into more kind of traditional field organizing, canvassing, filmmaking, recruiting volunteers in August and September. And so that's kind of when I came on. At that stage, the field organizers were covering fairly large turfs. Like I said, my original turf was five counties. I was doing kind of rural-ish organizing. I don't want to steal rural organizing valor from 12 counties. So I think by early to mid-September, though, I think it became clear to me that we weren't quite at the capacity that we should be at. Like, we didn't have enough field organizers to basically,

to cover all of the ground and to work with all the volunteers to the degree that they needed to be. Well, and I'm sure, like, you know, for instance, instance you know i mean in uh urban organizing it's a little different because people it's very easy like centralized activities right yeah you can say hey like there's a canvas happening in downtown des moines you can drive 15 minutes from west des moines to come canvas right but in my turf if i'm out of working out of my apartment in marshalltown or my car in marshalltown sometimes and um or wherever i am and i have to say oh there's a canvas happening an hour and a half away on the other side of my turf um i'm trying to recruit people remotely for it sometimes in areas that i've never even been to yeah personally um yeah and

trying to maintain relationships with people that i may not have met in person yet i'm trying to schedule like one-on-ones those kind of things can be really difficult um and so um we needed more capacity than we had at that stage i know know we've talked about this before, but like in that time period where I was covering four to five counties, depending on kind of what it was, Pete and Warren, especially Pete, had like four organizers in that turf. Yeah, they staffed up, they both staffed up very early um and we're kind of had like full coverage um or more full coverage than we did in terms of organizers working with volunteers like across the state but eventually like through hiring freezes and you know lifting

and implementing hiring freezes the campaign essentially grew to scale in like mid-November, early December, I would say. Like I was hired in like October. And once we got there, you know, I think we really saw what was possible with a robust field team, right? We could effectively capacitate all of the volunteers and really expand voter interaction, right? We were able to do community canvases, like go to farmers markets with like six people and talk, just talk to the crowd and get people to sign commit to caucus cards so we could call them and follow up and make sure that they were going to come out and caucus for Bernie. You know, we were able to do community canvases. We were able to spread a network caucus for Bernie. You know, we were able to do community canvases,

we were able to spread a network of just traditional canvassing wider than we would have had we not had more field staff. We essentially were just building to scale, right? And it came at a point where we really needed it, especially after like Bernie having his heart attack was in October, right? October 3rd. Do you remember the exact date? No, I was actually organizing a town. Bernie was supposed to be in my turf that week. Oh, holy shit. Yeah, it was not fun.

Is there a meme about October 3rd or something? There should be. I don't know. Whatever. It's a sacred a sacred day um but yeah i mean we we got to the scale that we needed to and with this you know came a constituency team to focus on like ethnic and racial minorities uh and organizing organizing those people mostly in des moines where there's a large non-English speaking

refugee populations from like Southeast Asia a lot from from Africa from Latin America really from a lot of Bosnians as well people who had never really been brought in by the four every four years when you know there's just an onslaught of political campaigning in Iowa trying to get people out to the office these demographics are like really traditionally ignored. And we developed a constituency team. It wasn't necessarily easily developed, but we did get a constituency team in place to organize these voters. On top of that, you know, we also around this same time got our student organizing fully fleshed out where we were active on like 26 college campuses throughout the state, organizing those young voters that we know were very, very, very likely

to support us. And because of all of this, we saw poll numbers start to rise after that dip in October when Bernie had his heart attack. There are a lot of reasons to thank for that rise, but just to speak specifically about organizing, it kind of is that those poll rises are in tandem with the hiring increases, wouldn't you say? Yeah, I think. Yeah, totally. And just to speak for a second to like why um you know like why organizers on the ground as opposed to just like hiring up nationally or like having a lot of remote volunteers or whatever like you know there's a qualitative difference yeah ad spending like why not that right well there is a qualitative difference between having people on the ground who are there to make you know connections in person with people uh versus another alternative and i

think that's really important to emphasize obviously we were never going to staff up to the level where like a staff member could knock every single door right of the 500 000 that we knocked in january but like having i don't know just like you know several hours a day um calling through our iowa lists um to get people to come to our events um that requires not like getting on a phone bank but rather like having numbers saved in your phone having those one-on-ones like testing people constantly back and forth like it really does i know it sounds kind of like trivial but no a fair amount of organizing is like badgering your volunteers. Yeah.

And that's what we did. So. And that's what we did. But. I literally just cleaned up my phone contacts. Like I have like. Oh my God. I gotta delete all of that.

I haven't done that yet. I, whenever I had a volunteer, I would just save them by their first name and their last name. Bernie. Bernie. Josh Bernie. Mary Bernie. Yeah, literally.

But I take Bernie into my phone. It's just like so many so many contacts but that really does go to show that like this is what we needed to win right yeah to develop those one-on-one connections with people and to really just overall have a structure that was easy for them to come in and out of and to give their all to not have to worry about the stuff that organizers were doing like 50 60 hours a week as a full-time job you know the fact that we had that staff place there to have that structure goes to show that that's that contributes a lot to our win in Iowa and I wanted to speak to like sort of the importance of like those one-on-one relationships and why it's so important to build those.

I know the Iowa staff has talked about this a lot, you know, just comparing to like the PE camp campaign, we were talking about how much they had staffed up and sort of the tactics that they were using was very much like relational until like November. They weren't doing any canvassing or phone banking in the traditional sense. And what that does is, you know, you can build these really close relationships with somebody. And once you've actually gotten your like kind of foot in the door, so to speak, it makes of the like messaging and reaching out to people and

that sort of stuff a lot easier you can break through kind of like media narratives a lot easier which is particularly important for the kind of campaign we're trying to run right if if right like we talked about if the central like thesis of the bernie campaign is that we can win by expanding the electorate and you know it being that our oppositional forces are like corporate media the power of the dnc the only thing that can like effectively counter that is this kind of deep community organizing that right was was necessary for our wins um that's the craziest part about going to iowa just like meeting real pizza borders in person. Like guys, they exist. They're just all in Iowa. They're freaks.

They do the job there. The Pete supporters, the Pete organizers use that like relational organizing for evil. You know, it was like, because they are, they are, I've said this before, but like they're literally,

they all look and act exactly like Pete. Yeah, they're little clones. They're all preps. It was so fun. It's sort of mold that they just like inject. They're all like the human embodiment of a knee high sock and like boat shoes like a boating shoes yeah yeah yeah but like but but again like it it worked for pete like pete had a lot of organizers they're doing a lot of rural organizing and this

is not just like boat shoes of people they're also like pete pete carried rural counties there are a lot of reasons for that. You know, you could talk about campaign messaging, campaign strategy, but to keep it focused specifically on field, he had a lot of organizers out there. And you can't discount the difference that that makes. And it makes twice as much for us, for the goals that we're trying to accomplish, and for the campaign that we were running. And I think there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of examples that illustrate what the organizing operation in Iowa accomplished for us, right? We knocked what, 500,000 doors just in January. We had, was it 2000, between 2000 and 3000 out-of-state volunteers

basically come into Iowa in the last two weeks, right? Our office was a zoo. It was crazy, right? But again, like, we were there. It's impossible to work there. Yeah, it has put so many lines in my face. It's awesome. You couldn't have done it without a long-standing team of trained full-time organizers, right? It just would not be, the system would be completely overwhelmed if we were not there to give it somewhat of a direction, right? And to speak specifically about what happened during the caucuses that proved the theory of change

that Bernie was espousing, that our campaign was built around, I think a lot about the satellite caucuses that we have mostly to thank our constituency team for, right? We had satellite caucuses were, they were permitted by the party for the first time ever, you know, to allow for a wider participation in the caucuses because, you know, it's one night, two hours, three hours, specific time, the party granted for there to be satellite caucuses held on the same day, but at a varying time. So, so it would allow for wider participation, right? So the

campaign managed for there to be satellite caucuses for Asian American Pacific Islanders, for Latinx people, for immigrants, refugees, for Arab Muslim people, people, for immigrants, refugees, for Arab Muslim people, generally based around there being a language spoken other than English, right? Because caucuses can be very chaotic and dense, even hard for people who, you know, have English as a first language to understand. So to have this be accessible for people who don't speak English or, you know, want to go to whatever, a mosque to caucus or something, right, we organized these satellite caucuses and Bernie won every single one of them, right?

We expanded the electorate into communities that were traditionally not organized and we swept every single satellite caucus. It is a big reason why we ended up tying. I don't have, what are the delegate counts? Does anyone know yet? We won the popular vote. It's gonna be like locked in a vault

and like, I don't know, underground somewhere. It's on epstein island but like i mean we won we won the popular vote by 6 000 votes and there was a time when those those caucus results were just like slowly trickling in and i remember looking at the new york times that stupid little needle they had about who was likely to win and who wasn't and they were counting state delegate elects and the whole time we were ahead of pete in the popular vote but pete was ahead of us in state delegate elects after the satellite caucuses were factored in the needle broke broke the needle got fucked it got wrecked And that was because of the satellite caucuses.

Anything else? Like, I want to move to what happened after Iowa. But I guess what we should say here is that this model that we are accounting our wins for, right? We should say that this model is essentially replicated in New Hampshire and Nevada. And Mia, I know you have a lot of like, you have a lot of perspective on what happened on the Vegas Strip because of this kind of deep organizing. Do you want to talk about that? Because you know more about it than I do. Oh, I mean, I wouldn't say I have a ton of perspective on it. I wasn't actually there.

So I mean, yeah, like I think a major tenant of Bernie's entire, like I was just, you know, reading a bunch of stuff about like Bernie's past, like as a legislator and, you know, as a politician and like the whole time when we talk about Bernie's consistency and like his messaging right that hasn't changed over the past 40 years he is hammering over and over again the importance of combining electoral work with like a broader movement of like worker power and like multi-racial multi-generational movements and that means that you have to include that when you are doing electoral work. You cannot just land on a plane in a state,

you know, a few months before the election and think that you are going to like elect your candidate and then leave, right? It's much deeper than that. And you have to be on the ground. And I think what we saw in Nevada with the Vegas strip workers, the taxi drivers, was an unprecedented level of incorporating labor organizing into being folded into campaign organizing. So, like, yeah, you know, there was a massive amount of fear mongering about Medicare for all in what was it again? I forget the exact one. The Culinary Workers Union. culinary workers union yeah yeah and we countered that just by i mean i think surely by the power of the conversations the numbers of conversations we had um relational outreach so asking people after we have a conversation with them to reach out to their networks their friends their workers

um and spreading it out that way and we were able to win um you know resoundingly it was a complete blowout in nevada and yeah um i think i mean we'll talk about this later but is a lot of the reason why we didn't have similar success in states with maybe like somewhat similar makeups or like heavy latinx communities like in texas um it's because we didn't have that level of organizing yeah and just just to speak on like one second about that specific instance right like this shows how that person to person organizing can counter bad faith advertising, right? Because there was a lot of advertising about how Medicare for all would actually be bad for unions. It took a lot of our organizers going

in, talking to the rank and file of that unit. And if they weren't already supporting Medicare for all, tell them, you're like, this is why the ads you're seeing that say Medicare for All is going to take your healthcare away are wrong. You know, in fact, it actually is going to give your union way more leveraging power against your employee, against your employer, right? That would not have been as effective had we not had that staff on the ground, right? So I want to go in to what we see happen next in the campaign. After our wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, where we've got constituency teams,

we've got longstanding organizing efforts, we've got, you know, union organizing, and we've got student organizing, where we had our bases covered in terms of reaching the widest amount of voters and building our movement out as wide as we possibly can where we're essentially fulfilling the theory of change that was put forward by the campaign we then move into in super in south carolina and super tuesday states and on

the campaign made a decision to heavily heavily rely on a practice known as distributed organizing, which is very different than what we were doing in these earlier states that we won. This model, it shifts the role of these paid, trained, full-time field organizers. It shifts that role onto volunteers to basically do all of what a paid staff was doing 50, 60 hours a week. This decision really served to undercut the ability of our field program and our volunteers to secure delegates, even state wins. And like most importantly, it effectively capped the amount of people our movement could hold. And in no way could it fulfill that theory of change that we had to if we were going to win and implement any of the policies we wanted to see here, right? So when it comes to distributed organizing, I saw a bit of it after I was redeployed to

Michigan. When I got on the ground in Michigan, there were eight field staff, top to bottom. And just to give a bit of context here, there were, what guys, 200 field staff just in Iowa? Yeah. In Michigan, more maybe. Yeah. In Michigan, we had no constituency team. We had no student organizing.

We barely had like a communications team or like a political team securing endorsements. All of these roles were shared by two people at the top and then the field team, right? Field organizers, regional field directors, like me, there were six for the entire state that we needed to win, right? We had to win Michigan for, for a lot of reasons, right? But. And you were sent there a few weeks before the election, you know? Yeah. And that's also, we got there five

weeks before the election. So no long-term organizing, even if we had sent 60 people there or something, right? Of course it'd be better, but you don't have the time to develop those long-standing relationships that got us those wins in the earlier states. I have plenty more to share on Michigan, but I want to know what your interactions with the campaign were after we switched to this distributed model, where one more thing, these volunteers were essentially doing the work of field organizers, and they were all assisted by, like, a remote team of paid staff to walk them through training, like, to walk them through, like, how to do volunteer recruitment, how to, like, launch canvases, phone banking, et cetera, et cetera. But what were your experiences with the distributive model let me make sure do you want to go first uh you can go first since you were you're actually part of the remote organizing team right um at a point yeah i mean i guess to go back a little bit like

um after wrapping up with iowa i mean i think we maybe we'll we'll go into this a little later um but you know a lot of staff was laid off. They decided they didn't two thirds of the staff, just two thirds of the staff. Yeah. Which was a shock to us. I think a lot of us expected that we would all be sent to the next states at a minimum. Right. And you know, it was a little strange to see that, like, even when I was first applying for the job that the listings were all only for the first four states. And that was like a little red flag early on that I didn't really pay attention to.

But after we realized two thirds of us were being laid off after Iowa, you know, we had a nice call with our campaign manager. Faz Shakir, campaign manager of Faz Shakir. Name and shame. Yeah, I mean, and it wasn't a very clear process we all kind of assumed that given the scale of the program uh the program the campaign um we were in a place where we were gaining momentum and of course like we're gonna need every single step person we can get we need more than that um and to our to our disbelief um we were sent home um after iowa essentially but you know

i like continued organizing um on a more informal scale and like was in direct contact in other states with um bernie victory captains who are awesome by the way like they're amazing people who decide to dedicate a good portion of hours to the so bernie victory captains is is the term for the the volunteers who have essentially Victory Captains is the term for the volunteers who have essentially agreed to take on the field organizing role. So if we refer to Bernie Victory Captains, it's a whole program where, I mean, they were given training, they were given like pamphlets to read beforehand and asked to do, I mean, we can go into what the Victory Captain was because- Should we do that now?

Yeah, let's do it now. What the Bernie victory captains did was amazing, right? Distributed organizing is not horrible, but it has to be paired with a robust field team on the ground. It's supplemental to a fully staffed field organization, right? fully staffed field organization, right? What Bernie Victory Captains were doing specifically was they signed up to take this role. They were asked to do basically one event a week, whether that be like, most of them were launching canvases, right? They had to do their own volunteer recruitment for it. And when you do volunteer recruitment, you call someone, you sign them up, right, on like Monday for a canvas on Saturday. People will just say yes to fucking whatever.

So then you've got to do a round of confirmation calls to make sure people are actually going to show up. And if they say no, then you shift them into the next one, right? It's day by day work. You're guiding people for them to show up for this canvas, right? It's a lot of work. they were supposed to do that supposed to launch canvas once every week on top of taking group zoom calls about updates on the campaign you know other other stuff and it was all kind of based through like slack it's like all just like so many emojis and just like just shit like that where

so that that's the Bernie victory captain I want to add also really quickly like another testament to how important it is to have on the ground organizing is that the drop-off rate of these programs was incredibly high I don't know about um the numbers for like Bernie victory captain or whatever but the general rule of thumb in remote organizing is that you will have, you know, a hundred people sign up for your webinar. You'll have 40 at 10 and maybe 20 will make it to the actual thing that you recruited them for. And that's because of how the internet works. You know, people sign up for shit, they forget about it, whatever. And you have organized on the ground to call them up personally. To follow up up so much of

organizing is just following up with people right which people did do on the remote team to be fair like it was an element of it but who's like it is so much more likely for someone to say yes to you if you've met with them beforehand if they know you if they've been to your office if there even is an office to show up to it makes a huge difference it makes a huge difference it makes a huge difference i just wanted to add to you because i sort of had the experience of being like a bernie victory captain i guess after iowa um i so sort of anyway so i i just want to know about like the redeployment process kind of what you were saying is that we were all expecting to be redeployed and that that's kind of maybe not a hundred percent of us,

but like a large chunk anyway. Yeah. And that we, that the campaign management really hadn't animated that like two thirds of us were going to be laid off. They had made hints like, you know, about 50% of us wouldn't make it through like April, you know that's kind of what we expected. But on top of that, you know, when we were shifted to those March states, kind of like Ben was saying, you know, they were sent to Michigan five weeks out from the primary there with no existing infrastructure. I think a lot of us, at least me, I just sort of naturally assumed that the campaign had been building

infrastructure in those states while we were in Iowa, and that we would just be slotted in, basically. And we're talking about stuff as like basic as like an office. Didn't have an office when we went to Michigan. And it wasn't just Michigan. This was Illinois. You experienced this in Illinois where you were, that there was a lack of campaign infrastructure. Same thing in Texas, like states we needed to win. Ben, talk about working in a kebab shop we had none of that I I actually really liked working in the kebab shop I was in I was in Dearborn in Michigan uh as a regional field director didn't have an office so we were just working in a kebab shop it was really good and one one thing I want, I gained a lot of weight in Dearborn also.

I do want to like specify here is that I don't want there to be a misunderstanding on the part of anyone that we are like his staff, that we didn't have jobs. Like, of course, you know, we would have liked to remain employed by the campaign longer. But none of us were under the illusion that this would be like a career, right's you're working on a campaign we're not expecting to be but but really i mean like we are talking about this not because we are like disgruntled employees but because the only way bernie would have won and the way that we would have built the large movement that we need here is through this deep organizing model right we are not disgruntled employees we are like disgruntled bernie supporter disgruntled but we're not disgruntled because of that no like look fire me like if if i had been fired and five people have been redeployed in my place absolutely right 100 that's that is that's the angle we're coming from here I just I just want

to stress that but yeah Dimitri will you talk about what it was like because you can you talk a bit more about what it was like to be on the volunteer end yeah um it was weird. I, so just coming from being in Iowa and the way that we engaged with our volunteers, the amount of responsibility that we entrusted them or expected them to take on. I was not really prepared, I guess, for that switch to sort of like the distributed model. So, you know, when I came there back to Illinois, I was surprised that we didn't have any staff already and we were still holding like barnstorms like four weeks out from the primary. And then, you know, I volunteered. I was like, hey, I'll be a canvas captain, which is what we would have had in Iowa. Bless your heart. What's that? Bless your heart.

That's awesome. I would be too bitter. I got fired by the campaign and still went and volunteered. That's true. We both did. Yeah. Yeah. I volunteered to be a canvas captain,

and you helped launch some canvases out of the campaign's only station location in like the kind of majority black neighborhoods on the south side which was in Englewood and um you know I was the only ex-staff member in Chicago so that's crazy um which you know I was like hey I already. Like, why don't you just hire me? But it didn't happen. Anyway, so I volunteered to be a campus captain. And the first week that that happened, I actually just kind of expected that the campaign was doing recruitment for the campus. the campaign was doing recruitment for the canvas um like because that's what we would have done in iowa that we would have been calling through our volunteer recruitment list you know following up with old leads getting people confirming people and so i texted the organizer like day of day

before something like that i was like hey how many people am I expecting at this thing? And they were like, oh, I don't know. That's crazy. You cannot organize in those circumstances. And really, most importantly here, you cannot create the conditions for organizing that can prove the thesis of the Bernie campaign. That can do what needs to be done to win, right? You just can't. And something that I think about a lot was when we were in Michigan, we had huge lists of people who expressed some level of interest in the Bernie Victory Captain program, right? These are people like, like you said, Mia, a lot of people who are just like, yeah, I guess I'm kind of interested in this. Their email ends up on a list, their phone number ends up on the list, but they don't follow through with any of the like remote trainings that they're

required to take, right? So we have this huge list of people and from this list of like hundreds we had a handful of bernie victory captains because the ask is so high to to essentially beat brass and be a field organizer because that is such a high ask the campaign served to really alienate a lot of people who were willing to do some amount of work not not all of the work but some amount of it and from the work they did actually get out of bernie victory captains it just could not match the performance of what a trained paid field organizer could have done right so it is not because like volunteers can't do that work though, just quickly. You know, like people have full-time jobs. They have families. Obviously you can only do that type of work if you're being paid full-time. Yeah. Yeah. No, it would be impossible to do that work to the degree it needed to be

done if you have just like one part-time job, you know, like it's a lot of work and this goes without mentioning we had no student organizations in michigan in many many super tuesday states texas washington you know there were none of those you know for even just when it comes to not even expanding our base but just turning out our base if we're not active on high school campuses on college campuses working with students what what we're full of shit we're full of shit right i went to you know i went to lansing to volunteer the week of the michigan primary of like the basically three days before the primary and i actually wasn't aware before i got there that they didn't have any student organizing going on. They had some student staff come in like the last couple of days to do a turnout, essentially. But I remember seeing videos, you know, the campaign kept posting videos of like the three, four hour long lines at the city office for students.

And I was like, we just could have been registering them for weeks. And I was like, we just could have been registering them for weeks. But Demetrius, there was, it wasn't like not even, not even like a matter of getting them registered to vote. There was early voting in Michigan. There was essentially early voting in Michigan where in Michigan it instituted this no reason absentee voting. So you could just go show up at the county clerk, say, Hey, I'm not going to be able to vote on voting day. They'd hand you a ballot.

You can turn it in. so not only were we like we could have been organizing five months before in michigan to really turn out every single college student and we had the money and we had the money to do it and i dimitri you've you've done some math and i want you to talk about that but like we could have been have we have we been there long term we could have gotten every single one of those college students who was in line waiting because the DNC fucking sucks, right? We could have worked around that. There are ways to work around that entrenched power. Had we been there earlier, getting those kids to early vote, that would not have been a

problem, right? It shouldn't have been a problem in the first place, but we could have worked around it and we didn't. And some people might say, oh, well, you know, it's a campaign. it and we didn't and some people might say oh well you know it's a campaign we have you have to make hard decisions on a budget but Dimitri you you've done some math that I'm not capable of. This is like very back of the envelope. So I you know we had like I said we've got 200 of us that weren't redeployed from iowa and new hampshire combined um it was around 200 or so um especially after nevada that was definitely around

200 um so the cost of keeping all of those staff on for another month at least through super tuesday if not like mid-march um for just four weeks or a month we made about 3 500 a month so um before taxes and so that would be um seven hundred thousand dollars a month and that's not including you know insurance premiums whatever else costs go along with having people on your payroll. But for a campaign that is making between $30 million, $40 million, a quarter, the total cost of a staff this size would at no point been a liability. Could have been larger, frankly. frankly yeah it could have been much larger yeah we could have staffed up to like the level of the congressional district across the entire

country yeah um yeah and and and why not then spend that money on ads then right like people might ask that question why choose organizers over ads or over other media spots um i think it's kind of what we were saying earlier you know it's just when you're facing like a nearly unanimously hostile media uh communications is not going to be to make a break for you um and i think you really got to break through with the people on the ground and really discover what's important to them because a lot of people just haven't heard the issues framed in the particular way that we would talk about them and building those relationships is really just key I mean I think like kind of like we were saying with the the Pete team you know once you build that

relationship with somebody and you attach you know your relationship with them to the movement as well it becomes really hard to like break through that like talking to people who are already pizza borders in iowa is like talking to like a brick wall well and like a lot of people like you know it's i i would get so pissed off talking to the pizza borders i remember one just one time, Mia, maybe you were there, but I was, we were community canvas. We were, me and, I actually think this was when I was a volunteer.

I'm not entirely sure. Regardless, we were doing community canvassing at this LGBTQ gala in Des Moines. And community canvassing is just when you go to a a public event and do crowd work right just walk up to strangers and be like hey you like Bernie I remember going there and it's gay people lesbians you know transgender people we were going and I walked into a group of lesbians like hey guys you like Bernie and like this interaction literally ended with one of them being like you need to walk away before i punch you because they were because they were god what did you say to that well they repeat lesbians and

i was just like well you know like i was trying to like appeal to some kind of self-interest like what is it that you care about why do you like pete you know asking those open-ended a list of questions that that do actually work to get to get to what someone cares about and it was all just like well bernie is misogynist bernie cost hillary the election you know bernie's gonna he's toxic etc etc they called me a bro like three times and the one thing that i said that really pissed her off was she was like bernie people voted for trump because they didn't win they pouted and I was like well you know I mean like that might have been some but it was never at the amount that was a critical mass it was like you know actually in fact like more Hillary people voted for McCain

than Bernie people voted for Trump you know it was a party movement it was the Pumas party unity my ass Hillary supporters were so pissed that Obama got the nomination that they voted for McCain. It was like a really kind, it was like a third of Hillary voters. I told her that and she was like, if you don't get out of my face, I'm gonna fucking punch you. And so I walked away because she might get invited to the lesbian because she honestly probably would have kicked my ass. Well, you are

a very well-known Pete admirer, as I know, on the internet. We won't get into that. We love Pete. We love Pete here. I want to jump in real quick and say that Americans are the scariest people on earth.

Like, even scarier than Islander Latinos. Anyway, carry on. Pete lesbians in particular. But, yeah, let's get back. Sorry, guys. Let's get back to the back. Sorry, guys. Let's get back to the vegetables. Sorry, guys. So yeah, I mean, I think we've done a pretty good job of detailing what this distributed

model was, where exactly it failed, and exactly, you know, like why it was a big departure from the central thesis of the Bernie campaign, right? You could not expand the electorate given these circumstances. You just could not, right? You could hardly do turnout for the base we did already have, right? It did not help us in any way. And I think when we get to talking about whys that we had around 10 staffers in Michigan, Texas, Washington, Massachusetts, Maine, you know, like all these states throughout Super Tuesday, even South Carolina, which was just a shit show, right? When we talk about like why these decisions were made, why these decisions that are departure from what we needed to do, why were those made? You know, we've got to look at management and

exactly detail like what the ideological rift here is, because clearly they were not operating in tandem with what we needed to see with even the rhetoric of the campaign, what our supporters wanted. All of that was not, that was not the basis for their decisions, right? So let's talk a bit about the decisions made on the campaign by management and why we did them. You know, I think a good way to open up this conversation is to talk about the electoral strategy that was kind of, that was pursued by Fash Kheir, campaign manager, with Jeff Weaver.

It's clear to, it's fair to say that, you know, and of course, like their deputies, like our field directors and stuff like that, they all made this decision to follow distributed organizing. But beyond that, they had, they had a plan that, you know, if we won Iowa, we won New Hampshire, we won Nevada, we could not win South Carolina we could stand to lose South Carolina because that loss it's already lost right it's already lost why try you know that loss would be dented by big win a very big win in California which honestly we did not get we won California by like seven points or something they they have the loss of South Carolina could be dented by a big win in California,

a win in Texas, a win in Washington, Minnesota, Massachusetts, right? They thought that winning these first three states would give us the momentum we needed to lose South Carolina, sweep Super Tuesday. And at that point, they thought, hey, you know, if we win this much, the media, the party, they're just gonna, they're just gonna accept it. They're just gonna let it happen. And Bernie will be, you know, given front runner status. Or at least like people won't listen to the media narrative as much, right? The momentum will be enough to overcome whatever is thrown at us. And that was the strategy that the campaign,

I mean, it was working until Super Tuesday, right? That was the campaign that they, that was the strategy that they followed. And of course it failed spectacularly. But not only does this strategy like betray movement politics that were essential to our win, it also betrays the idea that like Bernie was a formidable opponent

to the powers that be, right? If Bernie is an existential threat to the corporate rule, if Bernie is an existential threat to the status quo of the Democratic Party, which I would say, you know, had we followed, had we stuck true to what our tenants were, we were that existential threat, right? But if that's the case, why are you not expecting an unprecedented consolidation of party power? Why are you not expecting bad faith smears by the media to be ramped up? Why are you not expecting voter suppression? Or even, you know, like, you couldn't expect expect this but it just goes to show like the DNC was encouraging people to go vote in a pandemic right there was clearly like no end to this and the campaign was not campaign management was not evaluating it to that no and I think kind

of to your point is that the strategy was working to a certain extent and I think if it had been executed the way I think we all sort of conceived of it in our heads or at least I did you know when they sort of said like we're placing a big emphasis on the first four states and Super Tuesday states right and the thought was that Bernie racks up such a big lead by Super Tuesday that he's just kind of the inevitable nominee and it seemed like it was trending that direction and frankly i think the campaign could have weathered a loss in south carolina if it was five to ten points we lost by what 30 30 points 30 points 29 point something um but you know that was like the forecast going into south carolina a 10 point loss was not out of the cards entirely um it could have happened if we had a field team that had been given the

resources that they needed which the it wasn't even just that you know they just didn't step up enough or that um you know maybe there was some strategic errors or something on the ground south carolina was intentionally deprived of resources yeah staff because what distributed what the distributed model is the way i've been thinking about it to kind of give myself perspective here essentially it is an austerity program or a kind of like, like, yeah, it's like Google, it's like a, it's like a Lyft or Uber or like middle, what is the term? Middle management marketing. Multi-level. Whatever, that bullshit. It's, it's, it's a form of austerity for a field program. Right. And

yeah, South Carolina was, was factored to be a a loss I think no one on the campaign expected us to lose by the margin we did but not only and this is another good way of thinking about like not only did distributed organizing keep us from winning it kept us from losing it kept us from like losing by a lesser margin right had we lost South Carolina and Dimitri I've heard you make this point before but like had we lost South Carolina by five points by 10 points maybe even by 15 points Pete uh Klobuchar the kind of fledgling centrist may not have had such an incentive to drop out and endorse Joe Biden because you know what he only won South Carolina by 10 points so it's hard to say what a continued deep organizing model could have got us but clearly it is would

have worked much better than than what the current than than how it did pan out with the distributed model right and I just want to make a quick modification if it's okay, time-wise, to like the statement before that, you know, maybe senior management didn't anticipate this consolidation. Do you guys see the labor report? Like, I just can't stop thinking about it ever since I read. The reason I ask is because the labor party in the the uk um pursued a very similar no jeremy corbin sorry yeah that wasn't clear i thought you meant there was like some they did distribute organizing yeah no corbin did distributed organizing yeah right and that's all fine and well whatever um but now there's reports coming out um and i'm not trying to make a connection between these two things directly at all but like there are reports coming out that there were people on the campaign oh yeah purposely undermining corbin because of who he was as a candidate

because there were internal divisions there was a whole like email cache that was leaked that was just like talking about like how people in the camp they were they were skinny whatsapp groups yeah literally and i'm not saying this half i don't want to sound like a conspiracy there's that's not what i'm saying right now the reason i'm bringing it up is because there are people so bought into this strategy they are not willing to see the potential pitfalls if it's such a consolidation or these factors are to come into play it's not even i don't want to say that like weaver or faz or whatever didn't think there would be opposition to Bernie's campaign. Like, they're not dumb. But they have advisors.

You know, they have people who are in senior roles, very bought into the strategy. And it's hard to break away from the belief that this is the way to go. And that has been in trend since 2016. Yeah. I mean, like, whether or not it was intentional, the function was still the same, right, between Matt and Weaver and us. Like, I could care less whether or not Faz and Weaver were

scheming with, like, Neartanin or something to, like, tank Bernie's campaign. Like, that doesn't matter. If the function is still similar, right, like, if they're still relying on these models that helped tank Corbin, I could care less yeah if you can't tell the difference between incompetence and malevolence it doesn't really

matter yeah right and i think to understand though absolutely you know that to my mind i think i don't think it was like intentional in that way where they were like actively sabotaging i think it goes what you know ben was saying is that they had a different conception, I think, of what Bernie represented than the rank and file field staff did. Where they, I don't think, really saw Bernie as the type of threat to the Democratic Party infrastructure. I mean, maybe like certain sort of factions of the Democratic Party, but the overall party infrastructure in the same way that we did. sort of factions within the Democratic Party, but the overall party infrastructure in the same way that we did it. And I think also, I think

because I've heard that FAS had some reservations about the distributed program to a certain extent. Not really. But I think a big motivating factor outside of just like budgetary concerns, which weren't really, I don't think,

big. But outside of that, i think it really was partly that um there was a lot of internal tensions between the rank and file field staff and senior staff even if you have less of them you don't have to deal with them exactly and and you know we can we can talk some about like the union here, because I think the union was a big, a big factor in the decision to essentially cut back staff. But, but what you're saying to me, like, yeah, there is a division between low ranking staff and senior advisors. But even to take one, just like one very light step out of the framework of talking about slowly about organizing, to talk about about like why more widespread political strategy that um where i i think the same um division in ideology holds true right so among our among like senior advisors jeff weaver fascia cure um have been found out to be the ones who are like okay you know what bernie like don't go after biden it's not important to go after Biden. They were also the ones who, you know, of course, pursued this distributive model, believed in this flawed electoral strategy. They were also the ones who

were like, you know, Bernie, it's time to drop out. Before Michigan voted, sorry, before Wisconsin voted, they were telling Bernie, you know, drop out, drop out. That shows that there actually is somewhat of, not even, there is an ideological difference here, right? These are the advisors who are consistently telling Bernie to do, to pursue strategies that were not in keeping with the urgency of our message, right? And what brought out the movement that we saw, we had these advisors pushing bernie away from that um but let's talk about about the union right i think i think just as a lot of uh the not me us sloganeering was used more to a rhetorical end than it was to a

material end i don't know exactly how to say that but like it was it was way more of a rhetorical end than it was to a material end. I don't know exactly how to say that, but it was way more of a rhetorical tool for the campaign than it was actually followed through on the ground. I personally, I was not too involved in the union, but it became pretty clear to me that there were union tensions and my idea of the union is the same as that movement rhetoric, right? Where the union was set up,

maybe in good faith in the beginning, but grew into be more of a, something for Bernie to lean on to get him out of a rhetorical trap of not practicing his values or something, right? I know you guys have more to say about the union. Yeah, really quickly, before we get into like the weeds of that, I think it's really important to emphasize why it's important to talk about the union. And I think the reason is that it's

emblematic of all of the internal tensions on the campaign. And we've talked already about senior staff, but there was also divisions among just regular staff too, because we had a whole national organizing team, which was essentially the heart of the distributed model. Right. And then you had field staff and they had entirely different experiences. who were hired, like they didn't have, they weren't subject to the same uncertainties of their job as the field staff were. So like, you know, they were mostly located in DC, a lot of them hired on early, stayed on for the whole duration of the campaign. So their interests within the union and, you know, the level of militancy to exercise was not the same as field staff. And also it was not the same in terms of strategy. So like, these are also people bought into the distributed model fully because they're not on the ground. They're not there organizing. And again, both works have their merits, but it caused kind of an ideological

tension too of what the best strategy to pursue was. So there was a really, really big rift there. So I don't know, Dimitri, if you have more specifics there. Yeah. I mean, I think that's definitely true. I think a lot of it has to do with sort of, there's just those like material factors, I think just like, you know, they, they were much more secure in their jobs. So the urgency to act really wasn't there. They're also just literally closer to the management, like just

physically. It's almost a cultural difference too. Yeah, it is. I think, you know, I mean, this is maybe a little bit more conjecture-y to a certain extent, but like, if you look at sort of the makeup of a lot of like the national staff versus like the rank and file local staff um a lot of like national staff whether it was policy team political team comms whatever come from that sort of like progressive non-profit sort of world um and the rank and file field staff came from i mean uh some of us were like you you know, activists, organizers beforehand. We're all rank and file though. Yeah. But, you know, I know you're like Ben,

you were, you know, I was a waiter. Yeah, I was a waiter. And I just graduated from school. You know, I think it was much more the working class, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I think that that might've been a factor as well.

Um, absolutely. Absolutely. I union. Oh, go ahead. No, no,

go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say, cause I love telling this story to people who haven't heard it before about the union. And, um, when the union worker or the,

when the workers first announced that they were unionizing, which is something I actually wasn't there for, it was a couple of months before I got on the campaign. Apparently Faz called the Iowa field staff, which is where the unionizing was taking place and just cussed them out for five minutes and then hung up. So I don't know, he might've, he might've picked up some habits from his old boss near Tandon. She punched him in the face, which I've said on the part,

but the one good thing she's ever done in her fucking life. There are a few things that happened on the union that I think, now that we've established the timeline of how the campaign worked, we can go into like where the union fit in. Because there were measures, you know, during the redeployment process where many people were finding out that, hey, you know, there's not going to be the staff that we need to win in Michigan and Texas, et cetera, et cetera. When people were finding out that like we were not pursuing the strategy that won us these first three states, there was action taken by the staff to pressure management into course correcting. the information but i want to say that like even before people were aware of the plans for redeployment

there were union actions and committees set up and all like petitions letters sent in regards to the transparency of management because that was our main concern yeah um for a long time in iowa right um and later on it would prove to be like a bigger omen of what can you specify um transparency around what issues in particular just across the board across the board i mean like people didn't feel like they could give input on how to do things. I know personally, people I worked with, if they tried to pass like critiques up the chain, they'd kind of get shut down. There was no clear way to communicate with upper management about anything really. And there were, you know, other issues regarding like overtime and regarding safety and like all kinds of things that, you know, you don't have to

get. I can say one thing that's, I think, illustrative of this is the constituency program. Because for a long time, Demetria, you're laughing at me. But this is like right after I was hired. And I remember like stepping into this like, oh, this is not a good sign. But it was at an all staff meeting. Many organizers were all Black to kind of show like a widespread discontent with the fact that we did not have specific organizing efforts for Black people, for racial and ethnic minorities across the board. We did not have those organizing

efforts, which did, again, prove our central thesis that we can expand the electorate and win because of it. Those programs were not implemented. And even when there were attempts to point out that we were lacking here, it's clear that organizers who were right about this were forced to the point of taking a collective action of their own to show management how how like pissed off everyone was about it and it wasn't even just field organizers i remember hearing that nina turner sat down with black organizers and asked what is happening for specific outreach to organize

but not to like pander to black people not to do like virtue signaling or whatever but to actually organize in black communities right real organizing What real organizing is being done in black communities? And when she was told there were no specific efforts for that, she clearly was not happy about that either. And it did change and it did prove to be a winning strategy for us. Shout out to Nina Turner. She's been on the right side the whole time. We love you, Nina. I was so looking forward to vice president nina turner i know i'm nina turner mike pence debate would be can you imagine oh fire but yeah you would be like is like the part one of reparations so fucking he would end up crying but but sorry sorry to cut you off me i was just that that right there is a very is a very clear example of the fact that there is a long-standing tension here between

field staff and management where field staff is attempting to get attempting to correct course right and not being listened to um you can continue unless i've completely said yeah no no not at all i I was just going to make a quick point. I mean, we don't have to get into the details of all like the things that happen within the union, but you know, there, there were efforts to organize. Um, they were shut down pretty quickly and it was incredibly hard to organize, um, partially because of just the structure of the job. You know, people are in remote, different towns all around Iowa.

It's very hard to get people on the same page, but also because there was a widespread fear of damaging the campaign brought by it, like getting, you know, word getting out that staff are unhappy, that the management isn't transparent, that, you know, very plausibly could have hurt us. Because it would get to media and they would get to media, they would spin it in all types of terrible ways and people were terrified of that pretty rightfully um but to a certain point um at least from my perspective it got to a point where um we realized that the campaign was not going to go in the direction of truly grassroots structure or transparency um and many of us believe that

that outweighed um that threat outweighed the possibility of something getting out because that could have actually worked as leverage to get like fast to pay attention um i know when we were because i was sort of somewhat involved in drafting that that letter um can you can we specify what the letter what the letter was intended to do like with the content yeah which letter are we talking about there There were several. There were several, yeah, there were several letters. Love to write letters. It was right after we were not redeployed from Iowa. There were several field staff that got together.

I believe the, I just wanted to mention this as far as like leverage points and things we wanted to talk about with the media and the public that didn't get released. The major sort of leverage point that we were thinking about using was this call that we had had with the union in like mid January or whatever, where they had mentioned that the, if Bernie was to get the nomination it would be the responsibilities of the field campaign would

be turned over uh to the democratic national convention which might sound crazy to people who aren't really familiar with like that's just how it always happens it is how it always works yeah just fold it in right yeah so know, the Democrats just start running your campaign, basically, which now that we know, you know, what happened in the UK with Corbyn, it seems like that would have been a fatal mistake. They would have. Oh, my God. Can you imagine?

They would have fucking tanked it. Yeah. Yeah. So there was already discussions after that call that we were either planning on unionizing the DNC field staff or convincing senior Bernie staff to not turn over field operations to the DNC or really any campaign operations to the DNC, which I think would have been the right thing to do. But I think it goes back to that ideological difference that you were speaking to earlier, is I think Faz, Weaver,

the sort of more democratic infrastructure aligned advisors in the campaign, I don't think were on board with that kind of action. And I don't know that, I don't think, you know, that it was a conscious thing, like, oh, we're gonna lay off all the staff so they can't do that. But I think, had a lot of us been able to stick around

through April or May, you might have seen more concrete action being taken there. If their goal is to essentially run a traditional campaign with a traditional top-down structure, why would you then, if your goal is to have control, essentially, right? Why would you then continue to keep on a 200-some unionized staff? Especially, why would you increase that unionized staff? It would eventually jeopardize the amount of power you have

because clearly there was already this contentious relationship between these two parties within our campaign. But Fash Akir does come from, he was working with Harry Reid, he was working with Nancy Pelosi. He was even working, I don't know if this was ever published as a story or something, but a little birdie out there was, told me that there was a piece being written in a publication about Fashakir's work at the ACLU. He was a director at the ACLU, and he essentially was turning over, he was changing the role of what that operation at the ACLU was intended to do, and essentially making it an

auxiliary arm of the Democratic Party, right? Which, someone given that background... He's a hack. He's a hack, right? Someone given that background to then be the campaign manager for the Bernie Sanders campaign is a little befuddling, but it really does beg to ask the question, one, who else could have been there? And then two, does just the traditional structure that the Bernie Sanders campaign had, regardless of the union, does that structure itself preclude any kind of truly grassroots, I don't want to say non-hierarchical, because of course you need a hierarchical organization. I don't want to do like jazz hands, like Occupy,

because clearly that's ineffective, but you can meet somewhere in the middle there where you do not have such a traditional, stringent, consolidated campaign. Mia, you were making this argument very well earlier. Go ahead, take it. Yeah, I will. Yeah, I'll speak to that in just a second. Just before we move away from the union stuff, I wanted to really quickly make the point also that there was a lot, just going back to like the fear of things getting out and word getting out about labor tensions. It was used, it wasn't just coming from the top, right? There was a lot

of division among staff on the ground too, about what was strategic to do. And a lot of the time that fear was used against us organizing. So like, oh, you want this to leak. You want like, you want Bernie to fail. You're not committed. And that's typical anti-union language that is prevalent among people who are, if you're not careful, basically. And just a lesson kids, like the more militant your union, the better, because I'm not saying this would have saved us necessarily, but if we had a militant rank and file on the ground, right. Who was ready to mobilize, um, the second management misstepped or like showed that they were not willing to listen to us. Um, you know, bam, work stoppage, bam, like whatever else we could have potentially changed the path of our strategy,

um, using that control and leverage that we had. Unfortunately we did not have that leverage. So I think that is a big reason and a big lesson on just why unions are so goddamn important. But to go back to what the point that you were making about just the structural setup of the campaign, right? Like we've been talking a lot about, you know, where our advisors were coming from and kind of their different perspectives and ideologies. And I just want to add, like, it's very important to have, forgive me for being insufferable, but it's important to have a structural analysis of how their campaign was because they couldn't have understood what was going on in the ground

by virtue of their position, by virtue of their income, by virtue of their proximity to Bernie, you know, the fancy events they went to, whatever else. It's, like I said this before, but it's literally Marx 101, right? Like, I wish somebody wrote a book about this, right? The importance of your power and its relationship to how you perceive the truth

or whatever. But yeah, it's completely a structural issue. And if you don't reinvent, if you don't disrupt the campaign structure, you're not going to get the same results. It's like the definition of insanity. You're not going to get a different campaign by doing the same thing that all other campaigns do. And again, we could have, yeah, sorry, Dimitri, go ahead.

I was just going to say like, as far as like the structure and you talk about, you know, what's that sort of sweet spot, right. Between like this hierarchy that you need to like coordinate strategy and like message discipline and things like that that's important right um but and and like you know and have that sort of room to maneuver within like local communities on the ground and really have like deep organizing and I think um one thing that's striking to me is like you know we're especially working in like um where i was i actually one of my volunteers was on staff in 2016 um and so we sort of like sort of swap stories about the difference between like 2016 and 2020 um and i think a lot of people

you might not realize this but like the 2016 campaign was mostly an accident. Yeah. In terms of success. And I think Bernie, God love him, he is a really skilled politician. He genuinely is. We love Bernie. But he's not. He would have been probably the best president This country has ever seen

He's not really A campaign strategist though But he would have been A great president I'm inclined to agree And so he He wasn't really super aware Of what was going on on the ground

In 2016 honestly And I think what happened to a certain extent he wasn't really super aware of like what was going on on the ground in 2016, honestly. And I think what happened to a certain extent was that there were a bunch of people that were hired in 2020 who kind of made their bones off of the back of the 2016 movement. You know, some of the senior field staff, senior advisors, people who went into like, people who went into Sunrise or Art of Revolution or whatever, came back to work on the campaign in 2020.

Yeah, yeah. Right. And I think there was a certain extent of like, getting high off their own supply, you know what I mean? Like they sort of really bought into it, like they had cracked it in like 2016. You know what I mean? I guess. I can't, again like like we've been i we can't i

can't actually like exactly blame them as individuals it just goes to show that like what the effort that we were trying to undertake here right to amass a movement large enough to to seize institutional power of the democratic party right right? And in fact, things like Medicare for All, etc, etc. We like, we did not stay true to that route of change, or we did not operate based off of that, that tenant. And that's where I, that's where I see some of our biggest failures, right? Of course, people will say, people can list off any kind of external forces, right? Like, this whole thing is just to speak specifically about the organizing missteps, why they've happened. I think we've got most of it covered. I mean, as much as we can, we could clearly talk about this for hours and hours. But just to move, to see the case that we've laid out, right?

I think we still see that in action, right? Bernie, of course, has dropped out. But when we see which advisors still have power to, I guess, I don't know what, change, like pull Joe Biden left, which is insane to me. I don't think that's going to happen. But we have had this task force. Whatever's left of him. Yeah, we have had this task force, you know, set up to ostensibly convince Biden to adopt policy platforms from us and how he can integrate them with his own. If you look at who's being excluded from these things, who is being distanced by the campaign, it's distance from the campaign, from the marginal amount of power that campaign still has. The ones being distanced are Nina Turner, they are Breonna Joy Gray, they are David Sirota, the ones that were acting in accordance with the stated goals and the organizing principles of the campaign.

Those people are now being pushed out. And Bashakir, Jeff Weaver, I don't know, the other ones. They didn't get in line. Yeah. Exactly. And so this goes to show that the case we're making is still happening. It's still in action. And we've got to learn from these mistakes i don't have any clear answer to to what the next step is i know everyone wants to know but i know that before we we get there in good faith we have got to really take we've got to have a sober criticism of what went wrong internally in the campaign and we can't we can't be doomers about it and say well it's all fucked nothing's ever going to happen and we can't be triumphant about it you know i see a lot of people out there saying

oh well you know this is just the first step and it's like no we need to be honest about what what we've lost here right like bernie sanders the movement we had was it's crazy to even think about the movement we had was it's crazy to even think about how close we've gotten right we need to be really honest with ourselves that we have lost what is a product of such a specific circumstance that it's so rare we probably will not see it again in our lifetime so we've got to be calling it a first step is insulting yeah exactly insulting and belittling and if you keep saying that then then honestly make it a long hard day i am i'm looking at you yeah make a day like please just you've been called out or something wow okay well save that for another episode

but but but really you know we've we've got to find a way here where we can we can so really assess what has gone wrong and find that the way forward is here the first step is is having that that transparent assessment that we've done be out there for everyone to to take their own inventory out do you guys have anything to add when it comes to like next steps any specific organizations that you think you'd like to direct people to anything else because i'm honestly kind of at a loss um go ahead um no you go first. Okay. I have a... I mean, I myself, I'm a dues-paying member of DSA in Chicago. You know, I definitely acknowledge that there are valid criticisms of certain chapters of the organization as well as, like, the national leadership in certain areas.

But I think, overall, it has a good balance of some of the features that we've talked about. I mean, it's pretty open and democratic in its structure. There's a lot of input from, you know, ground level members, especially on the chapter level. And I think it's also, you know, it's a membership basedbased organization in terms of its funding, which is something that I've definitely become much more aware of, I think, since working for Bernie is sort of the amount of nonprofit grifting that there is out there. So if you can find either just a flat broke nonprofit or organizing group or a group that has membership funding that's probably the route to go yeah um so you know i think for me as far as

next steps strategically um i don't think that the answer is um aoc 2024 um the and i think this primary has also shown too that the it's it eats up so much resources i think it could be going to other projects um and i think also one thing that this has definitely demonstrated me is that the Democratic Party has an infrastructure for their primaries anyway. They suck at winning general elections. But on the local and the state level, they have- It's almost as if they only exist to contain the left and serve a larger purpose. Almost. Almost.

So I think, you know, a project that we can work on to a certain extent, if your route is electoral politics, I think there's definitely critiques of that route, is sort of finding a way that we can replicate that local and state level infrastructure, building networks of activists, of elected officials that we can trust that are rigorously, ideologically disciplined, you know, so we don't have any more, you know more we don't need any more Justice Democrats where Ayanna Pressley endorses Elizabeth Warren we don't need any more of that I'm tired that's exactly it me personally

I'm not really interested in any progressive organizations like if you don't have the stones to call yourself socialist I'm not really interested in any progressive organizations. Like if you don't have the stones to call yourself socialist, I'm not really interested. You know, whatever socialist means to you, I think that you at least got to get to that label. Yeah. You know, I think there, some socialists don't count, but there you at least got to get to that label. and i think um yeah for me it's also just an everything at once kind of strategy you know we need to be doing labor organizing community

organizing yeah electoral organizing and doing it all at the same time and i think a really good way to do that is that sort of deep organizing strategy campaign had in some places you know we can really build networks that are really based around the issues that are affecting communities where they live you know um and use that for whatever ends that you want to use it for whether it's to do a sit-in or um a protest or um you know a calling campaign letter writing campaign you're yeah official whether it's running for office there's you can activate that base for any purpose but I think building that base is really nice definitely yeah yeah I have any any solutions any yeah

I have actually you've got all the answers yeah let's let's have a look at it um yeah i mean just like parting thoughts i guess is just first of all like to to summarize everything of what we're saying to listeners right like i hope that this is like invigorating to people or like inspiring um not because not like our ourselves talking in general but just like the message that we're trying to send here is not a depressing one it's um it's to me it's hopeful right because we didn't if i had known that we pulled all of the strings and pulled out all of our whatever tricks in our sleeves um and still lost that would be discouraging but in fact we didn't um so we have a ton of opportunity to do that and i think one of the main things we have to do is like remember bernie's campaign as an unprecedented consolidation of the left

and demonstration of the power of the left we're still very small but that was a great example of how we should be um making ourselves central in the fight rather than staying in the margins um you know obviously local organizing is extremely important but we cannot scatter back into our respective um things with and not like demand more power as we have been in this election so i think that's really important to remember can i plug a book is that yeah for sure um no i have never written a book unfortunately i'm sure people would love that just kidding um jane mackalevy this organizer who i love wrote this book called no shortcuts um i don't remember the full title but it's a it's a guide to organizing essentially and has lots of examples but the title says it all right there's no fucking shortcuts to organizing like

it's a long slow build it's a slow process and bernie bernie is completely a like anomaly to this and he like yeah organizing is something that is a science or an i forget what she said oh god she's gonna kill me um whatever it's it's a science yeah it takes certain um training it takes certain things and and discipline um and we cannot if anything sounds like it's too easy, it's not going to work. Okay, so no fucking shortcuts, guys. And just really quickly to end, I was asked earlier today on a different panel about how to reconcile, right,

like this procedural diagnosis we have of like not having enough field staff, not doing specific things as campaign strategy with the fact that we didn't turn out, you know, independent voters in the same way that we did last time. We didn't turn out certain people who went for us, but didn't this time around, like disenfranchised folks who don't even normally vote. And I, to that, I said, like, and I think it's a good way to bring all of this home is that our messaging is our organizing. Those two things are irreconcilable because if we, you know, no matter how popular a platform is, if we don't have people there to talk to people about it, there are people in rural

places and in certain communities who we knocked on their door for the very first time ever as a campaign. So if we are not there to spread the message that we are preaching, people won't hear about it because of the media bias, because of all of those things that we are preaching, people won't hear about it because of the media bias, because of all of those things that we talk about so much. So yeah, no shortcuts, guys, please. Yes. Yes, queen. Okay.

That, thanks for listening, guys. That is about it on the episode here. Mia, Dimitri, thanks so much for coming. Thanks so much, guys. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having us. Bye, guys. Mwah.

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