The 2024 Debacle: A View from the Trenches

The generals and historians will in due course write their analyses of the debacle that was the 2024 Harris campaign. This is the view of a foot soldier from the trenches.

I am part of a grassroots group that aims to get South Asian Americans engaged with the political process and to vote Democratic. From voter rolls, we create lists of not just South Asian Americans, but also South Asian Muslims and linguistic groups such as Gujarati speakers. Volunteers from around the country then phonebank to voters in the different groups. While a conversation between a Malayali volunteer and a Malayali voter will likely be in English, the ability to throw in a familiar word or turn of phrase helps to establish rapport, and the idea of calling someone with whom one has a shared linguistic or cultural connection brings in more volunteers. Not only does more volunteers calling fewer voters make for more efficient outreach, but also the pick-up / callback rates are higher – perhaps 12- 15% vs. the more typical 5-8%. Over the many tens of thousands of calls our volunteers made, we could tell in advance that things were not going well, long before November 5.

In 2020, South Asian Muslims were some of the most enthusiastic voters we called –  a volunteer who had a difficult call with a voter from another group might call into the South Asian Muslim list as a pick-me-up. We also had more South Asian Muslim volunteers. In 2024, there was a marked lack of enthusiasm. A common response was that Biden and the Democrats were not just failing to restrain Netanyahu and his cronies, but also that the US was complicit by supplying the bombs used by the IDF to slaughter civilians in Gaza. I estimate that Harris’ failure to put any daylight between her position and that of Biden, meant that she lost thousands of South Asian Muslim votes in Pennsylvania alone, perhaps as much as 10,000 votes. Many of the voters we called said they did not plan to vote, would vote for third party candidates, or even vote for Trump. This was also reflected in the lack of volunteers to make calls.

The hubris of the Harris campaign team in Pennsylvania was astounding. In 2020, we interacted with the Biden campaign like well-oiled gears. We would give them voter lists, they would create phone banks, we would make calls, and they would give us statistics that allowed us to gamify our phone banking to motivate volunteers, e.g., “Gujarati volunteers made so many more calls last weekend than Punjabi volunteers.” The 2024 Harris campaign declined to create phone banks for any list but their list of all Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, a large and diverse group with little in common.. We eventually got access to create phone banks through another arm of the party. As the campaign also declined to give us access to a South Asian specific auto dialer, some of us paid for auto dialer access from our own pockets. Ignorance was evident when a Pennsylvania Harris team staffer, evidently from out of state, wasn't even aware that there were no Pennsylvania School Board races in 2024 and advised us to make sure we told voters to vote for Democrats from the School Board to the Presidency. The campaign staffer responsible for outreach to the AAPI community in Wisconsin not only failed to show up for a scheduled conference call, but also did not even bother to reply to our subsequent e-mail asking whether she cared to schedule a call for another time.

The Harris campaign lost the misinformation campaign with the voters we were contacting. While they were painting with the broad brush strokes of reproductive freedoms, the Trump campaign used targeted WhatsApp misinformation, for example “no Muslims died when Trump was President” to South Asian Muslims, or that Trump had been a better friend to India than Biden was, which is manifestly false, Our volunteers did their best to correct those misperceptions, but we lack the resources of a campaign that raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Appearances with people like Liz Cheyney do not carry weight with people who have traditionally voted Democratic.

I’ll go back to my foxhole now.