35 Days: Part 3
An Ode to Election Days and Election Nights
This is Part 3 of my recollections from my 35 Days on the Harris Campaign running GOTV in South Philly. You can read the previous parts at the links below:
Part 1: October 2nd, Campaigns at the Macro and Micro Level, and The PA GOTV Team
Part 2: The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Married to Philadelphia, and South Philly.
Today, November 5th is the anniversary of the 2024 election. I think I expected it to be a more melancholy moment, a reminder of loss that still feels like a fresh wound. As a senior leader on the Pennsylvania campaign told me the other day when I saw them, “I still think about that election every single fucking day.” Here in DC, with the National Guard in our streets and masked ICE agents leaping out of unmarked vehicles, there are constant reminders of the consequences of losing the 2024 election.
But yesterday, November 4th, was Election Day 2025. And Democrats had a great night across the country. All day yesterday, friends texted me their “I Voted” stickers or from various victory parties.1 It was not just the vibes, but the votes, that were very good.
So today, as I thought back to last year, to my 35 days on the campaign, to Election Day 2024, to the highs of GOTV and the lows of Election Night, those memories brought more smiles to my face than tears to my eyes.
Because the thing about Election Day is, whether you win or lose, E-Day itself is often a great day.
Election Day is a day of possibility, where the future hasn’t been written yet, and victory could still be out there. I remember writing in my journal the night before my first E-Day back in 2004 that I wished I could bottle up this intoxicating feeling of anxiety, hope, and the unknown that only exists before the polls close.
If you’ve only experienced elections by watching cable news at the end of the night as results roll in, I could understand the disbelief that these days could carry positive memories. But you are actually thinking about Election Night, which is either the best or worst moment of a campaign. Every Election Day is a new hope even if every Election Night may end up being the Revenge of the Sith.
The best Election Day experience of my life was GOTV in Columbus, Ohio in 2016.2 It was a beautiful fall day, every door we hit was incredible, Nate and I crushed like a dozen packets, and we GOTVed the entire time in a convertible while blasting OMC’s 1996 hit “How Bizarre.” Then Election Night came and we got blown out of the water by Trump that night. But I look back on that day as the platonic Election Day GOTV experience.
I did not start out in campaigns doing field. I was a researcher and then did online communications and digital organizing. But one of the reasons that I ended up doing field in is that I spent my first two E-Days in a Boiler Room at HQ and realized I never wanted to be stuck in a poorly ventilated room3 receiving information about what was going on out there without being able to do much about it. I felt so helpless.
The combination of my desire to never feel as helpless and FOMO as possibly missing out on the generational experience that was the Obama campaign led me to my first GOTV “job.” And the thing about doing GOTV during an election is that it is an on the ground view of what democracy looks like in execution not abstraction.
If you’ve never volunteered for a campaign on election day, you should give it a try,4 because it’s the absolute best way to experience our democracy after the actual act of voting. Everything done before E-Day is pushing voters to get ready to take an action5 but Election Day is the day you can put your energy into the action that can result in an actual change. You’re doing something where you can impact the outcome for something you care about. And when you’re out there you have the feeling that every door matters because every voter behind that door could be the vote that shifts the election. To volunteer on Election Day is the opposite of feeling helpless.
But to put any part of you into a campaign is to run the risk of heartbreak on Election Night.
I wrote earlier that I went to PA in 2024 because, “I like to win. And even more than I like winning, I fucking hate to lose.” And that’s true. But here’s the thing about Election Days and Election Nights, there are always winners and losers.6 Winning feels great and losing fucking sucks. But those are the table stakes of the game, if you want to truly care about something, you’ve got to be willing to risk heartbreak. But win or lose, I have never ever met someone on a campaign, be they staff, volunteer, or candidate, who regretted trying.
Losing can also teach you far more about yourself than winning. Are you the kind of person who wants to come back again when you’ve been knocked down? Does losing fuel you far more than winning does? For me, the answer turned out to be yes.
Since we have elections regularly (for now), you can volunteer on campaigns for a few weeks or few days every couple of years,7 and learn that each time you come back for Election Day, it can suck you back in and renew you, even if Election Night then shatters you.
Yesterday was one of those Election Days and Election Nights that didn’t shatter but renewed me and many others, even though I wasn’t out in the field yesterday. Great work out there to all the campaigns who crushed it big last night in VA, NJ, NYC, CA, GA, and PA. We needed that. And I’ll see you all back out in the field soon.
Next: 35 Days: Part 4, What is it you say you do here?
In a symbol of the people-powered race he ran, Mamdani had his FIELD DIRECTOR speak to the victory party before he did! Micah Sifry has a good article on the tech that powered the field campaign and there’s a great City & State New York article on the primary’s field campaign.
Franklin County versus the world.
This is the time to admit that in my youth I brought Long John Silvers into the boiler room in 2006 and got promptly and correctly yelled at by everyone for how bad it made it smell and they were right, I was wrong.
I recognize it would have been more useful timing for the campaigns to have posted this on Monday or even Tuesday morning.
Early voting and vote by mail has changed this some, so you are chasing some votes earlier, but most voters still vote in person on Election Day, especially now that the COVID crisis has receded.
Unless you are the world’s biggest baby and lie about election fraud, send your lawyer to Four Seasons Total Landscaping, then get people to storm the Capitol to hang your Vice President, and try and pressure the DOJ to investigate your loss years later after actually winning another subsequent election. Huge loser behavior.
You can even do this thing called Late Help that we formalized and scaled up to a level never seen in 2024 in PA, it’ll be back.