THIS BOOK IS A CHRONICLE of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign for president of the United States. It is an attempt to give the reader a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of this historic endeavor.
I have tried to be true to events as they occurred, but this account is admittedly written from my own perspective. I have worked for most of my adult life with Bernie Sanders in his effort to create a more just and equitable society. He inspired me as a young man of twenty, and he continues to do so to this day. I hope the reader comes away with an appreciation for why I consider him one of the great modern American political figures and why I am honored to have been his lieutenant in this most recent fight.
The number of people who are responsible for the success of the political revolution Bernie gave voice to is huge. At the peak of the campaign we had some 1,200 staff and canvassers. Hundreds of thousands of people knocked on countless doors, made phone calls, or otherwise volunteered. Even a book this size cannot capture every important detail of how we took on the entire establishment, almost won the Democratic nomination, and changed modern American politics for the foreseeable future. I apologize in advance for those whose important contributions do not get the recognition here that they deserve.
As with any campaign this size, we had our share of personality conflicts and personal disagreements. Except to the extent they are important to the story line, I have omitted them. I am pleased to have served with each and every person on the campaign, and I have no ax to grind with any of them, here or elsewhere. I wish every one of them well and hope they all continue to push the political revolution forward in their own way, even if we choose not to exchange holiday greeting cards. That being said, I have included accounts of some internal policy disagreements because it is important to understand what was going on at critical moments.
In addition, I have spent a lot of time in a very intense environment with many people. I hold many confidences from people on our own team, from folks in the media, and even from Clinton-world. I have no interest in gratuitously embarrassing anyone; I have no interest in airing anyone’s personal matters; and I have taken my responsibility as a keeper of trust in the writing of this book seriously. I have at times, because a fact is important to the story, attributed comments to an unnamed source, the way reporters use information “on background.” If you don’t blush when you read them, no one will know you were the source. I have tried, however, to limit the use of unattributed material. A book based almost entirely on such sources does a great disservice to its readers and its subject. Without the source, it is not possible to weigh the credibility of what is recounted; nor is it possible to make judgments about whether a recollection is just a self-serving narrative meant to advance the source’s or the writer’s personal or political agenda.
With every good story, there are heroes and there are villains. Such is the case here. Most of our opponents competed in an honorable way—most of the time. But that is not universally true. I have tried to be fair to everyone who opposed us—even those whom I believe acted in a scurrilous manner or worse. But many will no doubt find the portrayal of at least some of their actions unflattering. It would be wrong to sugarcoat, for instance, the extent to which the Democratic National Committee worked to advance the Clinton campaign and, as has been widely documented, worked to harm Bernie’s. Of course, I was not privy to what was going on in the other camp, and the lens through which they would view events would shade them differently. I will leave that to their book.
Campaigns are hard-fought efforts. There is an overwhelming personal and organizational drive to win. That was as true in our campaign as in any other. Bernie Sanders himself is a fierce competitor. It is a quality that has allowed him to continue fighting for his beliefs against tremendous odds for decades. It was true of our opponents also. Many of our opponents’ actions laid out in the book that were harmful to our campaign were entirely within the bounds of acceptable political conduct. Just because they are detailed here does not mean that I consider them to have been out of bounds or that I think the actors should be condemned.
On the other hand, there were times when our opponents inside the Clinton campaign and outside it, or elements clearly sympathetic to them, went beyond decency—engaging in slander, deceit, and behavior destructive not only to our campaign but to the democratic process. I have called those out as well. I leave it to the reader to make her or his own determination in the end about what is acceptable in the heat of a vigorously contested presidential campaign.
During the general election, following Bernie’s lead, I and many other Bernie supporters made common cause with the Clinton organization to stop Donald Trump. I know this was not a universally hailed decision. During that time, Bernie, I, and others campaigned with the Clinton folks, got to know many of them, and got a look at how their operation worked. The reader may see the portrayal of some of our opponents in the primary process become more positive as we worked to defeat the rise of Donald Trump. Our assessment of many of them on a personal level did improve when we were in a more cooperative posture.
The Clinton campaign’s relationship to Bernie and the larger movement changed, for tactical reasons, in that moment, and the narrative reflects that. This is not to say that we will or will not be in common cause with everyone going forward. The point is not to Monday-morning-quarterback the Clinton campaign’s strategy. I am open to as much hindsight criticism for my role in Bernie’s campaign as is anyone on any other campaign.
I am confident that all the people who worked for Hillary Clinton engage in the same self-criticism I do, and mentally play out what-if scenarios. Given Donald Trump’s victory, it weighs on me greatly that we did not win the primary. There has been a lot of finger-pointing in the wake of Clinton’s defeat. To the extent our campaign bears any responsibility for Trump’s victory it is that we did not defeat Hillary Clinton.
Speaking only for myself, I had doubts throughout the spring that the Clinton campaign was the best opponent against Trump. In many media appearances, I expressed that concern. Understandably, given that we were in the midst of a campaign, those comments were dismissed as self-serving. Like everyone else I believed that Hillary Clinton would ultimately win the general election, but I also believed that Trump could win.
If we are to defeat the forces of reaction and corporatism, it is critical to understand what lessons should be drawn from the 2016 race. The personal difficulty of reflection and self-reflection should not stand in the way of remedying the very serious problems that need to be addressed to create a winning progressive majority.
Organizing and executing a presidential primary campaign—particularly the type of insurgent campaign Bernie was mounting—is a formidable challenge, as I have learned both from my own experience and from my many discussions with people who have been involved in other efforts. I have worked in many types of organizations, big and small, public and private. I drew on my experiences from all of them, but primarily from military models of organization. A presidential campaign requires a large organization to move quickly and decisively, at times on a minute-by-minute basis, to parry, and to advance its goals. A political campaign requires effectively deploying large numbers of people in an ever-changing environment and, in the case of a presidential primary campaign, an ever-changing geographic environment, as we moved from state to state. In our case, it required a plan for how a much smaller force, with fewer resources and less infrastructure, would be able to defeat a much larger one.
I know a number of people will reject the comparison of a political campaign to a military one for a host of reasons, including its inherent authoritarian nature. But as people with military experience will tell you, this type of structure only really functions well when there is an ongoing and real back-and-forth between the various levels of the organization. In that regard, I believed then, and I believe now, that devolution of appropriate authority to “local commanders,” if you will—such as state directors “on the ground”—was a critically important organizational feature of our campaign.
Having an organizational concept and implementing it in the real world is not necessarily the same thing. The speed with which we created and grew Bernie 2016 necessarily meant that many middle-management structures that one would expect to find in a 1,200-person organization were never implemented. We had a very small national staff, vastly outnumbered by our state-based organizing efforts, with very little structure in the middle. It certainly allowed us to be nimbler, but it put a lot of strain on the campaign and on individuals who worked in it. State directors and constituency department managers picked up much of that responsibility, but it was admittedly imperfect. As with all management issues, whether I was personally involved or not, I take full ownership of the shortcomings.
We also found, particularly in 2015, that there was a reluctance on the part of many experienced people to join our campaign: They felt that it would quickly burn out, or that there would be professional retribution from establishment elements of the Democratic Party, or both. Those fears were not unfounded, but they did make it challenging to build out a staff with extensive experience, particularly at the beginning. That was a benefit to many staffers, who were able to take on responsibilities far above what they would have had on any other presidential campaign. Most rose to the occasion in an impressive way.
Finally, a word about how we talk about politics. All too often we talk about this or that group as if everyone in it is identical to everyone else—millennial voters, black voters, women voters, working-class voters, and so forth. There are some contexts in which it is appropriate to generalize. It is empirically true that people who belong to a certain constituency will have, in many cases, similar outlooks. (The commercial advertising sector would not exist if this were not true.) This is understandable and expected due to shared personal and cultural experiences and values. Talking about groups of voters can be an effective shorthand in political discussions.
However, viewing groups of similar voters as monolithic also creates social pressure on individual members of those constituencies to act in a certain way, or it can be used to drive a false political narrative. It is entirely correct to note that Bernie Sanders was overwhelmingly supported by millennial voters. In fact, age was the primary determinant of whom a voter would support in the 2016 Democratic primary. At the same time, it is also true that there were large numbers of millennials who strongly supported Hillary Clinton.
On the flip side, Hillary Clinton received broad support in the African American community, although that support waned as the campaign went along. At the same time, Bernie Sanders was supported by millions of African Americans and, in particular, as was the case with voters of all races, by younger African Americans. I know from our experience that there was considerable frustration among Bernie supporters who were members of political constituencies that were viewed as monolithically supporting Hillary Clinton. And I’m sure it was true of Clinton supporters in similar circumstances.
Part of this problem is the result of the fact that to do in-depth polling of smaller segments of the voting population requires a commitment of financial resources to reach out to statistically valid sample sizes. Much of the media does not want to put out that extra expense to truly understand, for instance, how different parts of a minority community view candidates. It is also true that it can be politically expedient for some to pretend that every member of a group either does or should support one or another candidate.
Finally, most people belong to more than one constituency: For example, a college-educated millennial Latina is young, a woman, educated, and of Latino heritage. She might also be straight or LGBTQ, she might be single or married, she might be religious or not religious, she may have kids or not, be employed or not, she may be native-born or an immigrant. How voters synthesize all facets of themselves as political actors and interact with others in the political sphere could fill more than one book.
In this book, readers will find references to different groups of voters. I intend it as a shorthand to indicate what the research and voting results showed was the dominant view within categories of people. At the same time, I do not want anyone to take from that that I believe any such group was monolithic, or that the support any individual gave to one candidate or another was in some way inappropriate because she or he deviated from how most members of the group voted. In fact, I spent a lot of time arguing during the campaign that the media was missing much of what was really happening because they became locked into static notions of how some supposedly monolithic group of voters was going to behave either in a particular contest or in the campaign as a whole.
So enough with caveats, qualifications, and preemptive mea culpas …
* * *
It was late afternoon on February 1, 2016. The Iowa caucus was about to begin. I was driving with Tad Devine, the head of our campaign’s media firm and one of our key strategists, down the Des Moines winter streets to our campaign headquarters to monitor the returns. The offices were in a shopping center. Bernie and Jane would watch the returns from a hotel suite. A winter storm was threatening from the west. We all knew that weather could seriously affect election turnout—and we needed a Yuge turnout to win.
Our success relied heavily on voters who did not regularly participate in the Iowa caucus. Would those people come out if the weather was bad? On the other hand, the Clinton campaign’s supporters were statistically older. Would they be more likely to stay home in bad weather even if they were more likely to be consistent caucusgoers?
To eat up the time on the ride, Tad and I discussed the weather and turnout. “Do you think this storm is going to keep our people away?” I asked him. “Well, that depends,” he began. Tad has a certain tone of voice when he’s about to opine on the political. “Her voters are more consistent voters, but ours are much more enthusiastic.” It was all speculation and in the end a meaningless conversation, because we could neither control the weather nor at this late hour do anything more to ensure our voters turned out.
Regardless, I felt the storm was a bad omen. But was it a bad omen for the Clinton campaign or ours?
Tad called a contact in the media and got the early entrance poll results. The major media outlets all participated in entrance and exit surveying of voters in key contests so they could have a sense of what was happening before they had to report on it.
“Well,” he said, “we’re down twelve right now in the early entrance polls.”
My astute political observation was limited to, “That’s not good.”
“Don’t worry,” Tad reassured me. “The early arrivals are all party regulars who will be overwhelmingly for Clinton. Our people will show up later.”
I felt crushed. Only days before, the Des Moines Register poll—considered the gold standard of Iowa caucus polling—had us down only three. No one had really expected us to win the Iowa caucus when the campaign began. The polls had had us down 50 points. But we had come a long way since then, and the expectations of the media had been raised substantially. Beating the benchmark set by the Des Moines Register is the measure of success in the Iowa caucus. Beat it and the media will declare you are a winner even if you come up a little short of an outright victory. Underperform and they declare you a loser. No one would care how far we had come since the spring of 2015. Tad’s assessment that Clinton voters were more likely to show up early did help quell my anxiety, but only a bit.
It seemed so long ago that Bernie and I had met in the Thunder Grill at Union Station in Washington, DC, to discuss my coming on to manage the campaign. As Tad and I pulled into the shopping center parking lot, I was filled with dread. Despite all our apparent progress since the meeting at the Thunder Grill, those storm clouds on the horizon could be a sign that Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign was going to be snuffed out in the very first contest.