THE DAY AFTER BERNIE’S May 26 announcement, he was off to New Hampshire. Tad Devine and a crew were following him to capture footage that could be used later in paid media efforts. As would be the case throughout the campaign, Revolution Messaging’s video and photo team chronicled Bernie’s travels on a day-to-day basis. (A lot of their footage would also find its way into many of the ads that DML would create.) He held events all day. All of them were packed houses. He finished the night in Portsmouth. All of us were relieved. It wasn’t just Vermonters who wanted to come and hear Bernie Sanders. Someone we know in Obama-world contacted us to let us know what a great success the events had been. The ball was starting to roll down the hill. What the media would dub the “Summer of Sanders” had begun.
That designation was not entirely, or even mostly, positive. It suggested that, like many insurgent campaigns, his would burn hot through the summer and then burn out by the time voters actually had to cast their ballots. Throughout the summer, there were a lot of comparisons to the past presidential campaign of the libertarian Republican Ron Paul, who had also excited crowds of people—but who was not able to translate that into votes.
The political pundits and the media, as we know now, were missing something fundamental about the 2016 election cycle and about Bernie Sanders. Voters felt a deepening distress about the growing systemic problems in this country—income inequality, racial inequality, environmental degradation. The American promise that all people shared a common dignity and that anyone who played by the rules could get ahead was becoming less and less true. The Summer of Sanders was not a flash in the pan. It was a spark that ignited a powder keg of pent-up disgust with the status quo that continues to burn even to this day.
Because we only had Bernie when the Senate was not in session, his schedule was packed. But getting him around the country took a tremendous amount of planning, because until he flew out of Iowa on the night of the Iowa caucuses, he continued to fly commercial. There are great pictures on the web of Bernie, Jane, communications director Michael Briggs, and the rest of us schlepping our bags through the airport to make the next connection. The cell-phone photos of Bernie sitting in the middle seat in coach as he traveled the country in the summer and fall in pursuit of the presidency of the United States became iconic.
That’s not to say that the Summer of Sanders started without a hitch. On the day after Bernie’s big announcement in Burlington, Mother Jones ran a story about some articles Bernie had written decades earlier. The focus was on one particular piece—“poorly written,” as Bernie admitted—challenging traditional gender roles. It begins in a shocking fashion, with quite graphic language clearly designed to yank the reader in, before moving to the substantive discussion of what continues to be a critically important societal issue. The timing of the Mother Jones story was interesting. We suspected that it came out of the Clinton campaign’s opposition machine, but perhaps its publication reflected an editorial decision made to take advantage of the news interest in Bernie right after his big Burlington event. It could have been both.
Of course, graphic language was enough to get the rest of the media interested. I’m not sure how many of the people reporting on the article actually read it. Clickbait and provocative headlines are more and more valued in our twenty-four-hour news cycle than substantive analysis. The irony is that the media used the graphic first paragraph for the same purpose it was used for in the original article—to draw in the reader with an over-the-top opening.
The Mother Jones story represented our first real media rapid-response crisis, and it exposed some organizational shortcomings that we would remedy. Bernie was on the road in New Hampshire with a jam-packed schedule of public appearance. Michael Briggs was with him. I was in Burlington. It created some logistical challenges in getting everyone on the same page message-wise and in responding to the flurry of media inquiries.
Having Michael Briggs on the front lines day to day with the senator was in hindsight the right move for our campaign. Bernie was very much in control of messaging, and having the top communications person with him 24/7 meant that the substance of what Bernie wanted to convey was in fact what was put out. It also allowed our top communications person to be in constant contact with the traveling media corps. Of course, it was also true that we were so short-staffed that Briggs, like everyone else, was performing the functions of four people. That’s possible in an environment when the campaign just has to put out its positive message. The quadruple-duty arrangement does not work when you are also taking incoming from opponents or the media.
That the articles had been exposed was not a surprise. We had found them in our self-opposition research for the Senate race back in 2006. Our expectation, though, was that they would surface later, once Bernie’s campaign gained real traction. We didn’t think that the media would be going for the political headshot right out of the gate. We responded as best we could, and the media lost interest after a couple of days, because the whole point of the coverage was its shock value. And the shock value of any story has a very short shelf life in the age of the internet.
What was important is that dealing with the Mother Jones story demonstrated that we had to accelerate our efforts to build up the press office. Briggs had put out the word that we were looking for additional press people. Arianna Jones, then a producer with Ed Schultz’s MSNBC show, heard that we were looking and reached out to Briggs. Bernie met with her on June 6. I talked with her on June 7. And she was on staff by June 22. Arianna took over the day-to-day management of the headquarters press office and built out an operation that could support Bernie and Briggs. When we hired her, we could not have known what a central role she would play in helping Bernie and Briggs get Bernie’s message out to the world, and in responding to the inevitable attacks that came later.
Campaigns and the media each need the other to do their respective jobs. And while those jobs require frequent contact between the two, their aims are often not aligned. The campaign wants positive stories about the candidate and the candidate’s message, and wants to see stories that support the campaign’s larger narrative—all with the goal of persuading people that its candidate is the one they should vote for.
The narrative is the overarching message of the campaign—the elevator pitch for why a candidate is running. Use of the term “narrative” is not pejorative. In our campaign, the narrative was the rigged economy: an economy held in place by a corrupt campaign finance system, which could only be defeated by everyday people standing up and electing a president who would fight against the economic and political elites and for a more people-oriented government and economy.
Campaigns often have multiple complementary narratives, although having too many can leave voters confused. One of our supplemental narratives was that Hillary Clinton’s vast experience showed that she would not be sufficiently aggressive with the economic and political elites to bring about the kind of change the nation needed—and voters wanted (not a change agent). Another was that Hillary Clinton’s long career showed that her positions on some issues were fluid (as on guns) or too conservative (Iraq War). This latter one played as much to Bernie’s strength (consistent principled leader) as it did to Clinton’s perceived weakness (what you see may not be what you get).
The Clinton campaign’s narrative, or at least my takeaway, was that the country had the opportunity to elect the most qualified person ever who would move the country steadily, but not recklessly, forward and could actually get elected in November (a progressive who likes to get things done). Having the opportunity to elect the first woman president was certainly a positive subnarrative of theirs (“I’m with her”). Their counternarratives included Bernie as wide-eyed dreamer (that’s a positive and generous statement of their characterization) who overpromised, was unelectable, and even if he won wouldn’t be able to deliver (dishonest Santa Claus). This latter narrative was targeted to people who might otherwise be attracted to Bernie’s campaign but would move to Clinton once they realized the futility of the whole exercise (“resistance is futile”). Another was that Bernie was a single-issue candidate who only cared about the economy and not about other issues, such as race and gender (very thinly veiled code for Bernie doesn’t give a damn about women and minorities).
From a campaign’s perspective, it is always good to get positive press coverage, and almost always good for one’s opponent to get negative coverage. But both kinds of coverage have the greatest impact when they align with the campaign’s larger narrative. That’s why Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s shutting down our access to our own data created such a backlash in our favor. It fit exactly with our theory of the case—the political elites controlled a rigged system.
Being able to place or initiate stories that support one’s theory of the case or rebut the other’s is critical. It is easiest to do when the reporter, columnist, or editor accepts the larger narrative. Trying to pitch a story that goes against a narrative that the media has accepted is tough. Knowing who is sympathetic to one’s narrative is key to influencing coverage.
In contrast to the campaign, the reporters’ role in the abstract is to write stories, both positive and negative, that they believe are relevant to voters’ selection of the candidate. In that regard, there is often strong disagreement between a campaign and the press about what constitutes a story worthy of print or airtime. What reporters cover in the real world is heavily influenced by editorial assignments and what other people in the media are writing about. There seems to be a strong aversion in the press to being the only outlet that is not covering a particular story when everyone else is.
From the media’s side, access is a central issue to success—access to the candidate, access to the campaign, access to information. This access is important today in the twenty-four-hour news cycle—the media constantly needs new material, and being first becomes in many cases as important as the substantive importance of what is being written.
One of the pressures on the media is the reality that if a reporter writes too many bad stories, he or she may find him- or herself shut out from contact with the candidate and even in some cases campaign officials. In the most extreme case, Trump’s campaign and his White House have famously barred certain reporters and media outlets from access altogether. The Clinton campaign went long stretches during which it held no public press events. Our campaign also was not always accommodating (another generous characterization) of consistently hostile reporters, columnists, and media outlets. (Concern about losing access is even greater when the candidate in question is more likely to be the future president of the United States.)
A reporter’s ability to contact well-placed sources quickly to get information others don’t have is an invaluable professional asset. You can see that play out on CNN and other cable news networks when there is a breaking story. Often the journalists sitting on a panel will be busily texting and emailing sources with whom the journalist has an established relationship to get as much information as quickly as possible.
Part of that relationship-building is made up of off-the-record meetings between groups of reporters and the candidate or senior staff. We certainly held them, including one I remember quite well in the living room of Bill Press’s house. The Clinton campaign held them as well. Theirs included dinners not just with reporters but also top media broadcasters and executives. Smart! It is just human nature that people are much less likely to be needlessly hostile if they have met you and had a conversation with you. That’s true in dealing with the media and in almost every other aspect of human life.
There is a substantial amount of off-the-record interaction between campaign staff and reporters at restaurants and hotel watering holes after hours. Both sides have a professional interest in better understanding where the other is coming from and trading information. I remember one evening at the Des Moines Marriott, where the media stays when the Iowa caucus is going on. It was a who’s who of virtually everyone covering the Iowa race from the national media. I stopped to mingle with the press corps in the lobby bar. John Heilemann showed me some clips from the next episode of the Circus, a political program that he was doing for Showtime. I spoke with Peter Nicholas of the Wall Street Journal. He suggested we join a circle of people seated at one side of the lobby. “Sure,” I said. Turns out it was a group of Clinton press staffers and a big chunk of their traveling press corps. Awkward!
We sat down with the group anyway. You could sense the Clinton folks’ guard going up immediately. The conversation became very stiff. To make an uneasy situation even worse, Nicholas quickly left the circle to talk with O’Malley communications director Lis Smith, who had just entered the lobby. I could have gotten up as well, but I was on some level (okay, honestly, on every level) enjoying the clear (and frankly unnecessary) tension. I was in good humor. The Clinton camp appeared not to be. Even the press corps seemed much stiffer than in my prior dealings with them.
After what seemed like hours, Nicholas returned, accompanied by Smith. They both sat down. No relief of the tension in the circle. I guess Lis Smith wasn’t any more popular than I was.
On another occasion, I remember sitting with a group of reporters in the lobby of a South Carolina hotel where our campaign was staying. Bernie was meeting with Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to discuss her possible endorsement of his candidacy. These conversations were not public yet, and we wanted to keep it that way until it could be properly announced.
One of the reporters in the circle said, “Wow, what a crazy coincidence. I just saw Tulsi Gabbard in this hotel.”
Damn, the jig was up.
I said, “Wow, that is a coincidence.” And we went back to our former conversation. Crisis averted.
Once staffers have developed a good working relationship with journalists or columnists, it is possible to pick up the phone and have an off-the-record conversation and to pitch a story that the reporter or columnist might be interested in. Because columnists’ and editorial writers’ political and ideological leanings are obvious that they become important contacts. Through their writing and by the nature of their work, they can amplify their preferred candidate’s cause more directly.
Because of the value of these media relationships, having a much larger press staff is an advantage, because a campaign can take the time to keep in close contact with reporters and columnists. A bigger press staff should mean that the campaign has people who already have established relationships with a broad representation of the media. We were at a disadvantage in 2016, with a press staff a fraction of the size of the Clinton campaign, even when we were staffed more fully. In addition to its official campaign press staff, the Clinton camp also relied on the super PAC Correct the Record (CTR) to peddle dirt on Bernie without soiling their own hands.
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Following New Hampshire, Bernie headed to Iowa for a three-day swing. Jane was with him, and this was her first trip to the Hawkeye State. At their first stop, in Davenport, some 650 came out to hear Bernie. The New York Times’s Trip Gabriel tweeted that the “crowd of 500+ … may be largest for an individual candidate in Iowa this year.”
On the final day of the Iowa visit, an overflow crowd of some 1,100 people greeted Bernie in Iowa City as he was introduced by local county supervisor Rod Sullivan—an early backer. Emilie Stigliani, of the Burlington Free Press, reported that the auditorium was full, with people packing the lobby of the local recreation center (“appropriately abutting Burlington Street”).
From Iowa he went to Minneapolis. In Minneapolis, we started experiencing a phenomenon that took us a while to get used to, and that was the throngs of people who wanted to see and hear Bernie. We spent a lot of time early on having to change venues in city after city because the building crowds outstripped the room size.
We were trying to live by the cardinal rule of political events: Hold the event in the smallest space that will accommodate everyone. If you hold a 5,000-person event in a space that accommodates 4,500, it will be judged a huge success, with an overflow crowd. On the other hand, if the room only holds 2,500, then half the crowd is outside, which is not good—you are only speaking to half the folks you are there to see. If you hold a 10,000-person event in a venue that holds 20,000, the report will be that the room was half empty—no doubt a sign of Bernie’s waning support. It’s really the Goldilocks rule—not too big, not too small, just right.
We weren’t experienced enough with Bernie’s rallies to make those calls well in the beginning. We would advertise the events and ask people to RSVP online and then make an initial call as to the size of the room to secure. But as the date would approach, the number of replies in the affirmative would explode, and the room would become totally inadequate. In the case of the Minneapolis event, we had to upsize the location three times.
In addition to the big crowds, there was other good news. Wisconsin Democratic convention caucusgoers in a straw poll gave Bernie 41 percent of the vote, compared to only 49 percent for Hillary Clinton. And this was with no campaigning on our part among the convention delegates. Perhaps more significantly, the executive committee of the South Carolina AFL-CIO passed a resolution urging support for Bernie’s campaign. The resolution stated, in part:
We call on the AFL-CIO, union members and working people everywhere to unite behind Bernie Sanders and elect the President America’s workers desperately need, and
Be it further resolved that: The South Carolina AFL-CIO Executive Board strongly urges the AFL-CIO to support Bernie Sanders 2016 and his campaign to become the nominee of the Democratic Party for president.
In Iowa, Steve Abbott, the head of the State Labor Council and president of Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 7108 in Waterloo, came out for Bernie. The Gazette quoted Abbott: “We need a presidential candidate willing to confront big money and its corrupting influence on American politics.… That kind of leadership is not going to come from someone trying to raise a billion dollars from Wall Street banks and other business interests. We need a voice of our own, not an echo of the Republicans.” The paper also reported that Abbott expected “a resolution along the lines of one approved by the South Carolina AFL-CIO executive board supporting Sanders and recommending his endorsement by the national labor organization … at the Iowa Federation of Labor AFL-CIO annual convention in August.”
This “recommendation” for an endorsement, along with the support Bernie received from the Vermont AFL-CIO, the Vermont-National Education Association, and Iowa labor leaders, was just part of an explosion of grassroots support for him among rank-and-file union members and many locals and state labor groups.
National AFL-CIO head Rich Trumka sent a memo admonishing locals and forbidding them from making endorsement separate from the national organization. A Politico headline at the time called this an effort to “quell [a] pro-Sanders revolt” within labor. In that Politico story, Massachusetts AFL-CIO president Steven Tolman’s quotes summed up a lot of what we were seeing among labor around the country:
“Bernie Sanders has spent his life actually fighting for working people. He’s made no secret of it, and he’s used it as his mantra. And that I respect very much.”
When asked about Clinton’s candidacy, Tolman was less effusive: “Who? Who? Please. I mean with all respect, huh?”
Trumka’s memo also came shortly after Bernie received the endorsement of Larry Cohen, the recently retired president of the CWA. Larry joined the campaign to head our labor outreach. He offered to work ten hours a week. I laughed inside when I heard it. No one on a campaign works ten hours a week. Neither did Larry. Soon Larry was going full-time and often more. He not only did outreach to the unions themselves but also helped coordinate, with other leaders like Rand Wilson and Carl Shafer, Labor for Bernie, which was comprised at that time of over 10,000 union members and local union officials supporting Bernie.
Things really looked to be firing on all cylinders. Huge crowds were coming out to the rallies and meetings. The grass roots of the American labor movement, including in places like the all-important early state of South Carolina, were standing up for Bernie. And Bernie was already dictating the terms of the political debate. He had pledged to only choose Supreme Court nominees who would overturn Citizens United, the case that had deemed corporations people and had eliminated caps on “noncoordinated” campaign spending by corporations and others. Citizens United led to the birth of the super PAC, a political entity that can take unlimited contributions and make unlimited expenditures for favored candidates. Clinton was backed by affiliated super PACs. Bernie chose not to be.
Bernie was also taking Clinton on over her support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an international trade deal that threatened, among other things, to move even more American manufacturing abroad. While secretary of state in the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton had called it the “gold standard” of trade agreements. The American labor community did not agree. Clinton would be on the defensive on trade throughout the primaries, even after her flip-flop on the TPP, and it would follow her all the way to the general election.
Bernie gave a successful talk at the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO) in Las Vegas. Speaking about his own story as the son of an immigrant, he laid out his vision for comprehensive immigration reform. He spoke about the plight of undocumented workers, such as the people in Immokalee he had helped a decade before. And he called into question people who had advocated denying entry to children fleeing violence in Central America, as Hillary Clinton had done.
Although Bernie did not call out Hillary Clinton by name, everyone in the room knew who he was talking about when he described those who wanted Central American children to be “shipped back to their country of origin like a package marked Return to Sender.” They were strong words. But taking a position that would lead to children being sent into danger was strong and extremely poor public policy.
The same day as the NALEO speech, Bernie held one of the more unusual town hall meetings of the campaign—in Las Vegas, at the Treasure Island Casino. The Summer of Sanders was proceeding well. Neil Young, upset that Donald Trump was using his song “Rockin’ in the Free World” without his permission, told Bernie he could use it. And we did at most rallies thereafter. Not even Hillary Clinton’s announcement rally, on June 13, could dampen the growing momentum of the campaign. (She had previously announced her candidacy on the internet on April 12.) For many of us on the campaign, in fact, her announcement rally reflected the real weakness of her campaign. Held on Roosevelt Island in New York City, it drew only about 5,000. The event in New York City was heavily choreographed and professionally done. But where were the people? After all, this was the largest city in the country. And Hillary Clinton had been a two-term senator from New York. The fact that she could not draw more people to her announcement than Bernie had on May 26 was a signal to many of us that the Clinton campaign faced a real enthusiasm gap.
Another piece of good news came in June. Efforts to draft Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren into the race ended. MoveOn.org and Democracy for America (DFA) had joined together in an effort called Run Warren Run to promote the candidacy of Senator Warren as the progressive alternative in the Democratic race long before Bernie got in. They had hoped to demonstrate support for Warren and hired staff in Iowa and New Hampshire to begin the organizing. Both MoveOn and DFA, along with groups like the Working Families Party and Friends of the Earth, would endorse Bernie during the campaign.
Bernie and Elizabeth Warren had always had a great relationship. They continue to share a deep dedication to fighting income inequality and corporate power. Given the similarity of their economic message, a Warren candidacy could have presented us with a challenge in the primaries. The converse was also true. Bernie’s candidacy would have made hers impossible. As the spring of 2015 turned to summer, it seemed less and less likely that Senator Warren would run, but it continued to be a concern as long as there were Run Warren Run staff on the ground.
Even before that, we had hired Kurt Ehrenberg, who was running the program in New Hampshire to be our state coordinator. And we had made a point of reaching out to the much larger Run Warren Run team in Iowa. I had personally visited their offices in Iowa. A lot of people, including the staff on the ground, saw that the draft effort was probably not going to be successful. My view was that we had to bring in the Run Warren Run staff and bring all progressives together in this fight.
In a June op-ed, Ready for Warren campaign manager Erica Sagrans and cofounder Charles Lenchner wrote, “Sanders has captured the imagination and support of people looking for a real progressive challenger in the 2016 Democratic primary.” We announced quickly that we had brought on Run Warren Run staff in Iowa. The Run Warren Run Iowa field director, Blair Lawton, became the political director for Bernie in Iowa. We also brought on Susana Cervantes, Beth Farvour, and Margaret Jarosz.
Overall, it was an enormous success. We acquired experienced staff, sent a message to the many supporters of Elizabeth Warren that the people who had been working for her on the ground were with Bernie Sanders, and could rest a little easier knowing that we would not be facing a fellow progressive in the long primary process that lay ahead.
As we neared the end of what I call Part I of the Summer of Sanders, Bernie finished strong, with two wildly successful rallies. The first was in Denver, Colorado. He was greeted by a crowd of over 5,000 at the University of Denver. He was introduced by law professor Robin Walker Sterling, a family friend of mine whose work focuses on criminal justice and juvenile justice issues. A story by John Wagner in the Washington Post pointed out the significant fact that the rally in Denver rivaled the number of people that Bernie had had at his announcement in Burlington and Hillary Clinton had had at her kickoff rally in New York City.
The next rally, in Madison, Wisconsin, blew the lid off anything that any candidate in 2015 had yet done—10,000 people came out. The MSNBC headline read, “Bernie Sanders Draws Biggest Crowd of Any 2016 Candidate Yet.” The Washington Post downplayed the significance of the event by pointing out what a liberal enclave Madison is, but the attendance was a significant milestone as Bernie’s campaign continued to gain steam.
The size and frequency of the events was a huge strain on our staff resources. John Robinson had dispatched Arianna Jones to Madison ahead of the rally after we learned that an earlier event had not had the sound boxes that the media need to hook into. He wanted to make sure that this problem was corrected. When Arianna got there, she discovered that there was no lighting beyond the house lights. To TV viewers, it would have looked like Bernie was giving his speech in the dark. She quickly improvised by borrowing lights from the media to create a spotlight effect. It looked great on TV. But having Arianna there doing the job of a press advance staffer meant that she’d had to leave her post in Burlington.
The day after the Madison rally, we announced that Bernie had raised some $15 million since his initial announcement. That amount came from almost 400,000 contributions from over 280,000 donors, 99 percent of which were under $250. We had spent only $2.9 million. That may seem like a lot, but it was a pittance for a presidential campaign. The Clinton camp spent over $18 million during that same quarter, although their campaign operated for a month more than ours did during that reporting period. Even prorating it, the Clinton campaign was spending over $6 million a month, while we were spending less than $1.5 million. And we had over $12 million cash on hand. The frugality was paying off. Small donors across America were stepping up to support Bernie’s campaign. Maybe we’d reach $50 million after all. Maybe we’d have the resources we’d need in the first four states.
Bernie then went back to both New Hampshire and Iowa. In Iowa he set a new attendance record for the season when 2,600 people came out to see him in Council Bluffs.
June 2015 was marked by one great tragedy that cannot go unnoted—the murder of nine African American congregants at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist gunman who had joined them at a prayer meeting. Their names were Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson, and Clementa C. Pinckney, the church’s pastor.
Besides the unspeakable horror of the murders themselves, the location added symbolic weight to what Bernie called an act of terrorism. Known by many as Mother Emanuel, the church is one of the oldest black congregations in the country. Its founder and over thirty others had been hanged on suspicion of starting a slave revolt in the early 1800s. The killings on June 17 shocked the nation and every one of us on the campaign—and I’m sure all the campaigns. We quickly canceled an upcoming South Carolina event. We also pulled down all of our donation requests and links.
But we needed to do more than show respect. The Charleston massacre caused a sense of powerlessness. Bernie and I quickly decided that the best way we could help was to ask our supporters to donate directly to the church. We felt that we could perhaps help the community that was left to deal with this grievous loss.