Daniel Laurison - Producing Politics: Inside the Exclusive Campaign World Where the Privileged Few Shape Politics for All of Us

For my mom, Jenny Hover,
who couldnt make politics her job but insisted that working
for economic and racial justice was her true career.
And for my partner, Hannah Laurison,
and for everyone who works to make our democracy more
representative and our country more just.

O n November 4, 2008, I was crammed into the Oakland Convention Center alongside other Obama campaign staff, volunteers, and voters, all thrilled to celebrate the election of our nations first Black president, Barack Obama. My partner, Hannah, and our thirteen-month-old baby were there with me, but Hannah wasin retrospect, entirely justifiablyfurious with me. She nearly skipped the victory party altogether.

For months Id been consumed by my role in Obamas campaign. When every action could in theory tip the balance toward our candidate, and with a firm end-date in sight, it had been all too easy to prioritize the election over friends, family, sleep, and nutrition. I remained proud, however, that I made it home for family dinner and my daughters bedtime almost every night (unlike my boss, who also had children). Sure, Id return to the campaign office afterward or stay up into the wee hours generating call sheets and emailing with the other campaign staff, and, yes, Id put out salt instead of sugar for the guests coffee at my daughters first-birthday celebration, but I thought I was keeping an acceptable balance. I wasnt. By election night in 2008, Hannah was sick of handling every other aspect of our lives while I fanatically logged hours in the campaign office.

To top off my consistent absence in late summer and fall, I spent the final four days and nights of the election out of the house and unavailable to my family. Hannah and I both knew I was a low-level volunteer staffer in a noncompetitive statemy job was mostly managing volunteer field organizers, who were mostly organizing other volunteers to make phone calls into one battleground state or another. Still, I was frustrated that Hannah wasnt on the same page as I was. She couldnt understand why I was needed so urgently and totally for a campaign in a notoriously blue state in an election that polls had all but called for the Democrats before the voting began. My family needed me, and I was so tired I couldnt be the spouse and co-parent my partner deserved. And I couldnt understand why she couldnt understand. All I could tell her was, This is such an important election, and I have to do everything I can to make sure Obama wins.

I couldnt have imagined that night eight years earlier, when I was twenty-three and the presidential contest was between George W. Bush and Al Gore. I voted that year, but I wasnt at all sure that the distinctions between the candidates mattered for the issues I cared about. By 2004, however, after 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I understood the contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry as deeply consequential. I was certain the world and the country would be better off if Bush lost his reelection bid. So I wanted to get involved, to do more than vote to help ensure a Kerry victory.

In the early fall of 2004, Id just moved to Berkeley, California, to start graduate school in sociology. With four years experience working at a small nonprofit in Philadelphia, I knew how to raise money, recruit and manage volunteers, and organize and publicize events. I figured I could make a real contribution to the Bay Area portion of the Kerry effort, and so I headed down to the local campaign office in an out-of-the-way office park. Though I told anyone who looked like they were in charge about my relevant experience, I was relegated to phone-banking. Calling my way through pages and pages of potential voters in swing states, my ardor dimmed. Was this really the best use of my time and talents?

That year, I spent Election Day in Nevada, the nearest swing state, with a group of grad students Id recruited to come along to help get out the vote with the group America Coming Together. When we arrived in Reno, there were so many out-of-state volunteers that I found myself stationed outside a polling place with three other volunteers, with nothing to do other than double-check and report voter tallies every few hours. When Kerry lost, I was both deeply disappointed and frustrated. I had the passion, skills, and availability to really help, and I felt I hadnt been able to do so. Thats what first piqued my sociological interest: How did campaigns actually work? Who gets the access and influence to make decisions, implement strategies, and work directly with candidates?

The 2006 midterms provided an opening, I thought. Early in the summer I found a newly competitive House race nearby and showed up at every volunteer opportunity I could. I told campaign staff that I could dedicate an entire day every week to the effort, a time commitment substantial enough, I hoped, to get me really involved in the campaign. Instead, I spent a single afternoon inflating helium balloons and attaching them to a decorative arch for a one-off event. No one called me again until it was time for phone-banking and canvassing, which I showed up for every time I could. Still, that was the extent of my involvement. The next election cycle, in May of 2008, I again attempted to find meaningful work on the same House candidates reelection campaign. This time I got a callback. Excitedly, I outlined my experience and said I could work four half-days a week, after my grad school job ended at noon, and all day on Fridaystwenty-eight hours a week, for free. I was told that if I could work sixty to seventy hours a week, there might be a staff position for me. They couldnt use a part-time volunteer. I couldnt quit my summer grading job, so I passed.

Later in the summer of 2008, Id wrapped up my grading commitment and secured funding through my graduate program that would pay my bills. I set out to work on the Obama campaign full-time. I had begun learning the lay of the land. Clearly, Id been nave in my earlier attempts to contribute meaningfully to a campaign: no one was going to give any substantial responsibilities to an unknown volunteer, no matter their on-paper skills. So this time I started by showing up at each and every volunteer event I could find. I offered to staff the campaigns newly opened Oakland office full-time. Still, I met resistance: I remained a newcomer, and the long-standing volunteers who had been active since the primary were reluctant to hand over any decision-making power or authority. Even at the local level, in a firmly blue state, clout was closely guarded. It took an acquaintance being hired as the Bay Area field director and tapping me as a regional field organizer to find my way in. Finally, I became a real, if unpaid, campaign staffer, on the hierarchys lowest level.

As soon as I had a title, I craved deeper involvement and access to the inner circle meetings. I didnt want to leave the office, though I was already there full-time. And I joined in the campaign staff tradition of complaining about volunteers who unreasonably believed they could walk in, announce competencies and capabilities developed in other fields, and be given responsibility within our campaigns world. We scoffed at their sense of entitlement and assigned the eager walk-ins to data entry and phone-banking, treating them just the way earlier campaign staffers had treated me.

Thats how, on the night Obama won, I ended up in the Convention Center after spending ninety-six hours straight with my campaign coworkers. Id spent the prior three months working well beyond full-time, staffing the local campaign office and managing a team of volunteer leaders who in turn were organizing even more volunteers, who dialed their way through long lists of potential supporters, undecided voters, and people who didnt always make it to the polls on Election Day.