Tuesday, November 08, 2016

Grassroots Organizing: The Stealth Hero

Clinton has made a strategic choice to invest significantly in organizing. Finding, onboarding, training, deploying and managing this talent puts any organization under extreme stress, and the Clinton campaign has mastered it flawlessly. The Clinton campaign has deliberately and painstakingly built a grassroots juggernaut that is executing exactly the way it should in these closing days.
Finally, the “Obama Coalition” is quickly evolving into the Clinton coalition. Clinton’s pathway is built on the same foundation of women, young people, African Americans and Latinos but with even stronger support and turnout by those critical groups of voters. I know this coalition well—I ran these programs for President Obama in 2012, and what the Clinton campaign has done to engage these groups is nothing short of breathtaking.
Clinton may very well win women of every age group, ethnicity and educational level—unprecedented in modern campaigns.
When I ran Clinton’s primary in California against Bernie Sanders, I vividly remember the public polling shrinking by the minute as we neared Election Day. However, I knew that if we kept our eye on the prize and deployed the grassroots machine that we developed to turn out our supporters, we would win and we would win big. That’s what we did. Much like then, this campaign is doing everything it needs to in its final days. In the postscript of this election cycle, I hope the analysts and pundits recognize this campaign for what it truly is—a historic achievement of grassroots mobilization in a time of unparalleled political polarization.


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