I am the Executive Director of the Vermont Democratic Party. I have been working in and around campaign politics for 22 years. I got my start working in the Queens Democratic machine. I worked in a state Senate office for about 6 years. The way political staffing in the state Senate worked, you didn’t get overtime, you got flex time, and because of the schedule during the legislative session, I would finish my hours for the year in August, and I would then get farmed out to campaigns in the fall, and I got a taste for it.
I worked on state Senate races, New York City Council races. The last big race I was involved in was against the Queens machine. I helped a friend, a 25-year old woman who had been a political staffer. She decided to run against the machine, I helped get her onto the ballot. She kicks so much ass, she’s an Assemblywoman in Queens, and she’s outstanding.
You do whatever needs to be done.
My wife and I got married in ‘14, and we decided it was time to start settling down and having a family. My wife had gone to college in Vermont, and taught at a preschool. So we moved. We did an airlock year in Burlington so that I could get used to not living in an enormous city. We bought our house in July of 2016.
I connected with a gubernatorial campaign in the Democratic primary. I ran her field operation and helped with the campaign through the election. We didn’t even register what was going on in the rest of the country because I was so deep in that campaign, but when we emerged from the boiler room, licking our wounds from the loss, and came up for oxygen, we realized what had happened in the rest of the world, and I felt an urge to do something. We were still childless at the time. I took a pay cut to become the House Caucus Director for the state party. I was a one-man DCCC, right? Recruiting, training, supporting 125 candidates around the state. We went +12 in the House. We went from 83 to 95. We got a super majority coalition with our lefty third party, the Progressives. Then, my first kid was born in December, between elections. So it was, you know, it was genuinely time to go spend time with my family.
Heading into the ‘22 elections, I got a call from the state party chair, asking if I’d be interested, so I came back. We sent our first woman to Congress in November of ‘22. We went +13 in the House that year, and got to 104 out of 150 in the House and held strong at 23 in the Senate. We still had the same governor we’ve had for 8 years, but our lieutenant governor turned over. We sent a new person to Congress. We elevated our existing congressman to the US Senate. New secretary of state, new attorney general, new treasurer. Unprecedented level of turnover. Since then, I have been working to build infrastructure in the party heading into this election.
We don’t have churches the way the right does. We don’t have chambers of commerce, really. We have some businesses for social responsibility, but we don’t have social infrastructure baked into our coalition the way that the right does
You do whatever needs to be done. The job of the state party is winning elections. But as the Executive Director, you’re the only 24/7 entity tasked with political maintenance. It’s relationship building. It’s infrastructure development. Our strength is not in our fundraising capacity, our strength is not in our technology, our strength is not even exclusively in our hustle, and we definitely work ourselves very, very hard. But our strength is in our relationships.
We had a covid baby. First kid was born in ‘17. Second kid was born in ‘21. We didn’t really leave the house. They got vaccinated and their vaccines were fully baked on Primary Day 2022. I didn’t go to a lot of big events before that. When I started coming back into large gatherings, one of the things I noticed was that they were like family reunions. People who’d known each other and been friends for 20 years, who were seeing each other again for the first time in 4 years. Even going to DNC meetings or going to the convention in Chicago, there’s an element of that, because it was still the first opportunity for folks to reconnect post-pandemic. We haven’t had stuff like this in a while. That relationship building is the most important thing about being a state party.
We don’t have churches the way the right does. We don’t have chambers of commerce, really. We have some businesses for social responsibility, but we don’t have social infrastructure baked into our coalition the way that the right does, and, you know, every 2 years, we have to reorganize. We have to elect new town committees. Town committees elect new county committees, and then county committees elect a new state committee.
The ground level stuff that feeds up to that is such a great foundation for building change and broader coalitions. I realized when we were doing it last year that it’s such an undervalued tool. We win elections by building the long-term, durable infrastructure that enables a campaign to step up and beat the Republicans.
People were like, “Why were you answering my email at 2:30 in the morning?” And I’m like, “Why aren’t you out knocking on doors right now?”
My first job in politics, I was waiting tables in an Italian restaurant across the street from campus. The owner of the restaurant’s dad was a judge in Queens, he was politically connected. One night, a state rep called and asked them to keep the place open late so that he could have a meeting with unindicted co-conspirator number 3. I was his waiter, and my roommate was sitting at the bar waiting for me to finish. He’s like, “Ask him for an internship!”. So I asked the state rep for an internship. He takes my resume, he gives it to his political consultants, and they placed me on a campaign. You don’t need to go to college to get into campaigns. You will eventually want to get some higher training, especially if you want to move up into management. But to get started, you really just need to want it, and you need to try it, because it’s extremely Not For Everybody.
You have a conversation with a voter, and you talk to them for 15 minutes and flip them to supporting Kamala Harris or supporting your candidate for state Senate, and that mashes the dopamine button in your brain so hard. Everything we do on the campaign side is about volume, right? I have statistics from the ‘18 cycle where we tracked conversations our organizers had, and folks that we talked to at the door were 18% more likely than our baseline expectations to show up and vote. Folks that we talked to on the phones were 9% more likely. Texting was 7%. You think, “Okay, if they’re 18% more likely, and I had 100 conversations at the door, then I moved 18 votes. Other organizers moved another 18 votes with me.” The margin of victory was 170 votes. You think, “Me and my 3 friends got a quarter of the margin of victory, and that person that we got elected went on to become the deciding vote in a veto override for a minimum wage increase.” If you know what you’re looking for, you can trace the door that you knocked to a major policy change.
We had a pretty substantial minimum wage increase in 2019 that passed with a veto override of the governor, and we would not have had the votes to override had we not had those successes in that previous cycle, and we wouldn’t have had those successes in that previous cycle if I hadn’t spent 2 years chasing people down in every corner of the state and recruiting 125 candidates and answering emails at 2:30 in the morning when I was up feeding my kid who who had just been born. People were like, “Why were you answering my email at 2:30 in the morning?” And I’m like, “Why aren’t you out knocking on doors right now?”
You’ve got to find a way to force yourself to balance. Otherwise, you’re going to get absolutely fried.
Something that I’ve been working on and that I know has been a movement, is that like any nonprofit, this gets treated like a cause and not a job. You work extra hard, you work long hours, you don’t get paid enough, you get taken advantage of. This happens in every part of politics, whether it’s government-side staff or campaign-side staff or PACs or state party staff, and, if you’re unable to disconnect at some level, it’s going to fry your brain. Christ, the number of colleagues who are divorced is unsettling for me, as someone who’s not divorced and doesn’t want to be divorced, ever. You’ve got to find a way to force yourself to balance. Otherwise, you’re going to get absolutely fried.
There’s been a union movement in state parties over the last 8 years that has sought to address this. It’s not necessarily about squeezing more money — unless you’re a purple state, every year, your state party is going to struggle for cash. Staff knows that, funders know it. The staff’s not going to try and squeeze unreasonable amounts of money out of a state party. But you have to make sure that vacation time is taken, and make sure that there’s some penalty baked in if you don’t take the time. Our contract has a use-it-or-lose-it provision. If you don’t use your vacation time, it goes away after a year. You get a payout if you leave, and you still have accrued vacation time, but, like, take your time. One of the nice things about having 2 kids is that I don’t really have a choice. I have gotten into a routine of being home in time to clean up the kitchen and cook dinner for everybody.
We just haven’t paid enough attention to the atomic-level units, and party infrastructure. If you strengthen those, then party identity as a whole will follow. Party strength as a whole will follow.
I don’t know how many people have actually internalized this, but the vast majority of local Democratic operations are staffed and run by blue-haired little old ladies who have been doing this for 40 years and are funding it with bake sales, and are keeping the flame alive in a time when parties are as weak as they’ve ever been. If you are under the age of 50 and you show up and act normal for, like, 3 months, they will do whatever you want because they’re so excited to have a young person there. Parties are weak right now because of some factors that are outside of our control, but a lot of factors are within our control and the big one is that we just haven’t paid enough attention to the atomic-level units, and party infrastructure. If you strengthen those, then party identity as a whole will follow. Party strength as a whole will follow.
One of my goals was to show our town and county chairs they have more power than they thought. Our districts are small, it’s not uncommon for 1,000 votes to be enough to win. I would tell candidates to plan to knock on 1,000 doors, make 5,000 phone calls and raise $10,000, and if you do that, you’re going to win. It’s a little bit more expensive now, the state Senate is a different ball game, but that’s mostly true. If you’re a town chair or you’re a member of a town party in a district where the candidate only has to knock on 1,000 doors, make 5,000 phone calls, and raise $10,000, and you can raise $2,500 at a house party, which is not a lot of money, you’ve raised a quarter of their budget, and in the process, you will have spent time with that person, built a relationship with that person, and you will have developed your own political skills to a point where you can do it for anybody, right?
If you know how to target, and you know how to set up a phone bank, and host a party that can raise $2,500, and you don’t like your representation — if your state rep decides to do something that doesn’t represent you — you can get them to come to your meeting and talk about why they made the decision they did. If you don’t like the answer you get, you have the skills and the fundraising capacity to go get them. If you’re the person who can help organize and canvass and knock out 200 of those 1,000 doors, you can make a lot of change.
One of the things that worries me is that people need more time to be involved. People need more time just to be an informed citizen, never mind being an active participant in politics. You need time to find out more about the people you’re voting for, and the issues facing your town. You need more time to understand your town’s budget and why your property taxes are what they are, and we just don’t have it. We have side hustles, and they’re proliferating. We have to give people more time to be better citizens if we want them to be better citizens.
There’s a lot of talk about the crisis of self-radicalizing young men, and I think the isolation and the lack of community people feel in the world is a strong driving factor in some communities getting radicalized, and we need to find a way to take the pressure down on people to be constantly productive, and let them be part of their communities and see their families.
If you’re there and you’re building these relationships, you will see a difference, and it won’t take very long for it to happen.
Get involved in the most local politics you can get involved in. You’ve got to find the smallest political entity that you can, and start building up from there. For anybody who’s reading this: you have no idea the capacity for change that you are able to produce until you actually get in there and start digging into it. The best people in politics are the ones who stay late to fold up chairs. They grab the cheese platter from the grocery store and they stick around to make sure that the chairs get broken down at the end of the event. We need a ton of those people, too. You don’t have to be the person knocking on the doors or the person making the phone calls, or the person raising a shitload of money, but if you’re there and you’re building these relationships, you will see a difference, and it won’t take very long for it to happen.
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE 