August 29, 2006. I'm standing outside of Mercy Lounge, a club in downtown Nashville. We had just had a resoundingly successful event inside of the club for young voters, to convince them to vote for Harold Ford Jr. Afterwards, I (the intern) have to direct traffic outside. Only problem is, we're having a torrential downpour, and under the Law of Comic Inevitability, I'm wearing a white shirt. But I'm still on such a high from the event that I barely even notice.
I think this story nicely sums up the experience of an intern or a young staffer on the campaign trail. It's at once euphoric and draining, thrilling and mundane. It's a job that will give you the time of your life while leaving you broke and soaking wet in the parking lot.
I've now worked two campaigns, and I wouldn't trade the experience for anything in the world. And I'd like to tell you what it's like and how you, as a young Democrat, can get involved.
Kossacks Under 35 is a weekly diary series designed to create a community within DailyKos that focuses on young people. Our overall goals are to work on increasing young voters' Democratic majority, and to raise awareness about issues that particularly affect young people, with a potential eye to policy solutions. Kossacks of all ages are welcome to participate (and do!), but the overall framework of each diary will likely be on or from a younger person's perspective. If you would like more information or want to contribute a diary, please email kath25 at kossacksunder35 (at) gmail dot com
Before I go any further, a caveat--yes, I was an intern for the Harold Ford Jr. Senate campaign. I'm not here to discuss him or any issues anyone may have with him. I gave my final word on the subject here. I only bring it up in the context of the experience I got out of it.
Everyone always asks me how they too can get involved in campaign work. It's kind of a difficult question for me to answer, because both times, I got into the campaign purely by accident. In 2006, I spent June and July interning for my Congressman in DC as part of a Cornell program. While there, we heard a lot of buzz about the Senate race back home in Tennessee. I returned to Nashville in August, needing to find something to do for the two months before I left for my junior year abroad. I went by the Harold Ford office in downtown Nashville, and asked if they needed anyone to make phone calls or something. After seeing my resume, they said "Actually, we need another intern, we'll hire you for that!" And then this past summer, when I worked as a research assistant for the Karl Dean for Mayor campaign, I hadn't even thought of doing more campaign work until one of the former senior advisors to Ford let me know he was working for Dean, and that I should come by that office when I got back from London.
But I just got lucky. For most people, opportunities like that don't just fall into your lap. There are multiple ways you can get involved in any kind of campaign, from local elections to the Presidential race. If you're a student, I would highly recommend applying for an internship. That way, even though you'll still end up doing the most mundane tasks (phonebanking, photocopying, getting coffee, standing out in the rain to direct traffic), you'll still get a valuable inside look at how a campaign runs, and more importantly, you can use the time to network, and get to know the people who can help you move up the campaign ladder. Most staffers I've met got their start as interns or as volunteers, got to know one of the head staffers or advisors really well, and were offered further positions through that. Even if you can't do an internship, you should still offer to volunteer. All campaigns, from the local level up, always need people to do phonebanking and canvassing.
So what exactly did I do as a campaign slave? As an intern on the Ford campaign, my job was to do whatever any given staffer needed me to do at any given moment. At any given moment, I would be running errands, data entry, monitoring the blogs (which sort of became my unofficial job after awhile), or helping with research. The staffer I worked directly for was in charge of student outreach, and he gave me a huge project to do to help him with GOTV efforts. I was given passwords to get on the Facebook networks of each of the major colleges in Tennessee, and it was my job to find the students at each school who listed themsleves as "Liberal" or "Very Liberal", and then check them against the Tennessee Democratic Party's database to find out whether or not they were registered to vote. In that way, my staffer and his volunteers at each school would know exactly who to target. The database of students I created became my baby, and I was very sad when I had to leave the campaign and hand over the project to someone else.
And of course, I phonebanked. I called up voters to encourage them to vote for Harold Ford until I lost my voice (several times). I don't like phonebanking--I've been told I have a very pleasant phone voice, but I always feel awkward. Phonebanking is crucial to any campaign effort, but it's also the most mundane. It's not so bad most of the time--most of the people you call won't be home and you can just leave a message. And as I told the volunteers, if you can get just one person per page of phone numbers to just say "maybe", then you're doing a good job. And sometimes you will get lucky, you'll call an enthusiastic supporter or someone who's undecided but more than happy to listen to what you have to say. But you also have to worry about the other extreme--in the end, I stopped phonebanking altogether after one session where at least three different people, upon hearing that I was working for Ford, told me that they weren't voting for "that n----r". At that point, I flat out told my staffer that I was through with phonebanking, and he didn't blame me.
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The next summer, I was back in Nashville, working for Karl Dean, the former Public Defender and Law Director, who was running for Mayor. This time, I was a Research Assistant, sort of an unofficial staffer (they had already filled all the staffing positions by the time I came on, but they acknowledged that I was more qualified than an intern). This time, my job was a little more defined. Karl Dean was always going to different forums and debates sponsored by different interest groups, and part of my job was to help figure out the important issues for these groups, and to compose forum briefings. I prided myself on my 30-minute turnaround time--the Press Secretary would send me the info, and within half an hour, I'd have the briefing ready to go. I'd also help them formulate specific policy positions before these forums.
Blogging remained an important part of what I did. I would prowl around the local blogs, see if anything interesting popped up, and report back to my bosses if it did. I don't like to think of myself as a shill--to me, that implies that the campaign was feeding me talking points, which never happened. Instead, I did my best to correct misinformation where it occurred. One of our rival campaigns had a whole group of people who would go on the blogs and say horrible things about Karl and his wife, and I would have to contend with that. But after awhile, I found myself needing more of an outlet than blog comments to truly express myself and fully articulate why I felt people should vote for Karl Dean. That's how my own political blog (shameless plug alert), Silence Isn't Golden came to be.
I wasn't sure how it was going to be, but I enjoyed working for a local campaign. True, it's impossible to match the excitement and the intensity of the Ford campaign, and the issues that were at the forefront in this election weren't nearly as "sexy". But there's something to be said for working for a candidate who actually knows who you are. In the few times I've seen Harold Ford, I've never gotten to speak to him for more than a few seconds. In contrast, the morning after Karl Dean won the election last month, this was the picture on the front cover of the paper:
This is Karl Dean, taking time out from the victory night celebration to say hi to me and my whole family (I'm on the right, my face partially blocked by my mom's arm).
So to sum it up, here's my advice for those looking to get involved in campaign work:
- Work out your money situation in advance. I'm not at liberty to give the full story behind why I say this. But bear in mind that you never know what a campaign's financial situation is going to be in the end, so make sure you know exactly how much (or whether) you're getting paid before you start.
- Network! Get to know one of the top advisors, ask them how they got to where they are, and observe everything they do and say. The most important lesson I've learned since starting my campaign work came from the Karl Dean campaign manager, who made me understand that you can't be on the offensive all the time, and sometimes have to make nice with everyone.
- Likewise, realize that campaign advisors are not infallible, and learn to identify their mistakes. I still maintain that we would have won the Senate race if someone had simply said "Actually, Congressman Ford, it'd be a bad idea for you to go confront Bob Corker in the airport, it may make you look unhinged."
- Talk to everyone outside the campaign and make them want to vote for your candidate. People would always see my Harold Ford bumper stickers or my Karl Dean buttons, and want to know why they should vote for them. In this way, I managed to convince a random woman in the gym to vote for Ford, and my LSAT teacher, who had previously been backing another candidate, to vote for Karl Dean.
Depending on what happens with this campaign in the next few months, I may be back on the campaign trail next summer, working to take down "Lockstep Lamar!". I would encourage you all to get involved in some way in a political campaign between now and November 2008. I have no doubt that 2008 will be a resounding Democratic victory, but we're going to need all the help we can get to reach that result.