“Who the hell are you?!”: Reflecting on a Sudden Run for Office
Swapping Out Presidential Candidates Is A Huge Gamble. Let’s Make Sure it Pays Off.
President Biden has just announced that he is stepping away from his re-election bid. He has endorsed Vice President Harris to take his place at the top of the ticket. This new ticket gave me flashbacks to my experience running for local office with almost no notice.
In 2019, I sketched out a plan to run for office in 2024. Four years was plenty of time to sharpen my plan, meet the people I needed to meet, and ramp up to a full-blown campaign. Out of the blue, I got a phone call in early January 2020 that there was a serious possibility of an opening for the seat I had my eyes on.
I recall having less than a week to decide whether I was going to run in the race or not. That meant talking to my family, notifying my business partners, re-prioritizing or de-prioritizing current goals and projects, and even thinking about every task or to-do, down to modifying the dog-walking schedule. I filed on January 18th for an election four months later, on May 19th. I quickly had to turn that initial sketch into a full-blown, sharpened plan and then immediately execute it. I needed to create an office, find advisors and volunteers, learn about my opponents, develop a website, take photos, build collateral, start meeting with voters, figure out how to fundraise, bone up on the issues, decide my views on new issues, and seek out potential endorsements.
I thought I had worked a miracle in getting everything ramped up by the time of my kickoff party six weeks later, on March 4th.
That’s just a teeny scintilla of what Ms. Harris and her new VP pick will need to do with deadlines looming in Ohio and Michigan in the coming weeks. I can’t even imagine trying to ramp up on a national level, which isn’t really “national.” A national candidate has to be set up on a county-by-county and district-by-district level to have a meaningful winning strategy for the electoral college.
Relationships require time
While she can piggyback onto Mr. Biden’s efforts, Ms. Harris has been like the co-pilot on an airplane. When I fly, I’m always grateful there is one, but other than that I don’t think much about them. She will now have to build her own relationships with donors, delegates, endorsers, volunteers, and voters. If her VP pick does not have a national brand, they’ll need to do their part in building those relationships too.
I recall calling up my first person seeking an endorsement for my race. She was supposed to be easy to speak to, the “nice” one. Her reaction when I phoned was a spontaneous: “Who the hell are you?!” That stopped me in my tracks. We ended up meeting for coffee, but yeah, I didn’t get her endorsement. And I’d have to imagine that there will be plenty of voters in the upcoming election who might have a similar reaction to this new ticket.
I lost my race. I cannot explain to you how much it sucked to lose, even if there were consoling factors like being a first-time candidate, a short run time, being a complete unknown in local political circles, and being unable to meet voters in person due to the COVID lockdowns. These consolations were not soothing in the least. Yet, even in my misery, I did not lose any sleep over the competence of the winning candidate and her ability to achieve good results for my community if she chose to work hard at it.
If this ticket were to lose, we would not have the balm of knowing the Republican candidate is competent. Folks have told us of his incompetence for almost a decade; there are an “Unprecedented’ and ‘stunning' number” of former members of his administration who have declared former President Trump as unfit for reelection.
Swapping out presidential candidates two months before voters get their ballots is a huge gamble. Umair Haque describes this moment of in-fighting as a panic. Panicking is probably the worst thing we can do in a time of an existential threat to our democracy.
Republicans want to build a public relations wall of inevitability around their success to persuade their likely voters that their extremism is mainstream so that their cruelty is more palatable. They also wish to feed the Big Lie, which led to the January 6th insurrection. And, if they can demoralize the Democratic base into not voting, it is a bonus advantage for them. They tried building an inevitability narrative around the red wave for the 2022 mid-term elections that never materialized because the Democratic base was energized.
What can we do now?
Now that President Biden has made his decision, what can we do?
Be energized.
Like the coach in the Moneyball movie (or the nonfiction book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game), we play with the players we’ve got, and do everything within our power to support them in their success — write thoughtfully and with fact-checking on the issues we care about, register to vote AND vote, tell friends to register and vote, donate dollars, and volunteer for local, state, or national campaigns.
In sum, we must wholeheartedly and fervently support the candidate endorsed by our President, who has also served as his Vice President and running mate. We must do this with a level of commitment like never before.
Once the election season concludes, there will be ample time for postmortems, recriminations, and re-evaluations to ensure this situation never happens again within the Democratic Party. Until then, our sole focus should be on preserving our democracy because, without democracy in 2025, any argument we might make today becomes meaningless.
Karen Spencer
July 2024
