In Retrospect: Three Years Ago Today
Post #2 of #20: I’m reflecting on twenty years of personal and professional insights in Birmingham. Visit www.medium.com/HonestlyEd to read the full series.
Three years ago today I woke up with a stranger on my couch and a dozen people coming in and out of my loft before sunrise.
It was election day.
Coffee, fruit and muffins were delivered at 5 am. Calls were already percolating on cell phones, flashing and buzzing as random and fervent as landing strips at airports.
Massive maps of the city were transported from the Woodfin campaign headquarters and taped throughout the expansive walls of my loft. Desk space was cleared, chairs were moved and my front door was propped open to accomodate the beehive of activity that would ensue until the early hours of the next day.
Our campaign staff was battle-worn from thousands of hours of door-knocking, dog bites, oppressive Alabama sun, rain drizzle and relentless lead-by-example effort from our driven and inspiring candidate. They knew the GOTV (get out the vote) game plan and were in place by 6 am, ready to lead their teams and do whatever necessary to achieve their turnout goals. Everyone had goals. For several of them, this would be their first significant leadership moment in their lives. I’ve developed young people my entire career and knew what ready looked like. They were ready to lead.
Die hard volunteers were excitedly driving to their precinct assignments to do their civic duty for their neighborhood and for their candidate. Most of these people were engaging in local politics for the first time in their lives. I know I was, even as campaign manager. They were the anonymous, unknown working class homeboys and homegirls, a smattering of big mamas and a small army of young people hungry for a cause and person they could believe in. Housing projects, over the mountain, old, young every color and every persuasion fully claiming their part in the Woodfin campaign. This was every generation reclaiming Birmingham for themselves.
Later in the day, my loft was loaded with election protection lawyers — an incredible braintrust of Morehouse men who traveled from throughout the county to Birmingham, locking down every legal maneuver and counter-maneuver that could impact the election. No shenanigans allowed.
By the early evening I was learning that our operation was going well, but there were a few failings where we should have been flawless. I was pretty frustrated at one point. But, the day was so intense and so fast I couldn’t hang on to mistakes long. Election day is like a championship game in sports. Treat every day leading up to the big game like it matters and you will be better positioned to trust your conditioning, trust your instincts and trust your teammates. In the end, I got over it and used the experience to make the next election day execution even better.
Later that night, our teams began to call in poll results directly from the box. This means we had the results in real-time before the media had them. We were winning where we were supposed to win and winning even bigger in places were were not supposed to win. I was so entrenched in the machinations of the day that I didn’t have any awareness of how the results looked to people outside of the room.
Apparently, the order in which the results were being reported mounted a really dramatic sense that we were going to win the election outright. I got a text from a friend, a TV news anchor reporting the results saying, “Dude, are you guys going to win this thing?!” He was utterly flabbergasted by the results. Apparently, many people were. The spectre of Woodfin winning outright that night hung in the air until the results were certified for a run-off with the incumbent on October 3.
By 9 pm we packed up my loft, changed clothes and headed to the election party. The energy of which I cannot even describe. It was pure positive delirium and absent the hedging presence of typical political types that would attend the October 3 run-off election party.
August 22 had a purity that no day henceforth will possess. Nothing like day 1.
“It’s never as good as the first time.” — Sade
Post script
Election day was just another big day for us. Inside the Woodfin campaign, everyday mattered. We had some pretty dramatic moments leading up to election day. We were never comfortable — even when we had data that absolutely proved we were going to kick-ass on August 22. The candidate was never settled, everything was urgent and we had a collective vision we could all own and buy into. It couldn’t be faked and it could not be relaxed and it could not be replicated.
So, that’s where I will leave this post and that’s where you find me right now in this moment. Not relaxed, still pressing…trying to keep up #WithWoodfin ahead of another historic run for 2021.
NOTE: Read this post written in July 2017 (before the August 2017 election) to understand why I got involved with all of this in the first place.
