What I've been reading lately

I have some very exciting things planned for myself and this blog coming up but it's leaving me with scant time to write as I would like to. Still there is so much going on in the world that I'd like to discuss with you and share so I've decided to start a weekly roundup of campaign and election-related material that I've found interesting.

Here is round one:

You Don't Have to Like Bernie Sanders to Like Bernie Sanders on Jezebel
This is possibly the most eloquent expression of my feelings on Bernie Sanders' 2020 candidacy and I didn't even write it. For lefty progressive women who are not comfortable with Bernie or those trying to understand us, this is a great read.
Female Donors Gaining Influence as 2020 Kicks Off on OpenSecrets
I wrote and thought a lot about women donors in grad school so I am always interested in following these trends. Where a candidate's money comes from, including gender breakdown of donors, says a lot about them and the trends show that women are leveraging our economic power to our political advantage like never before.
The Electability Trap from WaPo
Enough with this "but other people won't elect a woman" bullshit. It's a trope and a lie that only perpetuates itself.
The Shutdown Made Sara Nelson America's Most Powerful Flight Attendant from the New York Times
Trust me, you're going to love this woman.
Ranch Lady on the Hill and elsewhere
This is the most quintessential Iowa Caucus moment ever to ranch on ranch dressing. The intimate setting. The entitlement. The ranch. If I had to summarize the caucus experience in nutshell, this would be it.
Bernie Sanders Asks Surrogates to Engage Respectfully With Democratic Rivals
It's been really interesting to watch the dialectic in Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign of trying to do better and old habits dying hard.
Dollars on the Margins from New York Times Magazine
To quote straight from the piece "A living wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep aid. A diet. A stress reliever. It is a contraceptive, preventing teenage pregnancy.It prevents premature death. It shields children from neglect."
Campaign Culture Must Change by Brice Barnes on Medium "Campaigns are the last species of business to adapt to change. It is the ultimate workplace where there are no rules, no boundaries, no employment handbook, and typically no formal Human Resources department. Everything goes and it truly is the survival of the fittest and strongest. As a professional in the land of no rules, especially as a woman, and even more so as a mom, I find myself working within an industry lacking a handbook for people like me." I am feeling this so hard as I think about my next steps in my career path, my desire to be in the same place as my husband and to eventually start a family. Weird how you guys started crying.
Elizabeth Warren is Not Doing Call Time or Fundraisers on CNN and elsewhere
It should be noted that Bernie Sanders had this same policy in 2016. And it makes sense...if you're in a crowded primary and running against special interests. That said, an I cannot stress this enough, Democratic donors large and small know who Sanders and Warren are and where to find them. Candidates: unless you are a national name you still have to do call time. Sorry.

What are you reading? What else should I read? Let me know if you liked this round up and you'd like to see more.



Campaign Love and Mine,

Nancy

Presidential Campaign Resume Banks

Hello Campaignsickles! I miss you and I'm so sorry I haven't been up to blogging lately. Like many of you, I am unemployed post-2018 elections and trying to figure out what comes next. That means that my writing time, and much of my emotional energy, is going into cover letters and networking emails instead of my beloved blog.

In the meantime, I have gotten tons of questions about working on Presidential campaigns, both whether and how to. If you have never done a Presidential primary, I highly recommend it. I hope to write more on that in the near future. For now, here are the Presidential job banks, that I know of. I will update as I learn more. So please if you are involved with a Democratic campaign I haven't listed, send me a note and I'll gladly put it on the list. Happy hunting!

Nancy

Kamala Harris: resumes@kamalaharris.org

Elizabeth Warren

Kirsten Gillbrand

Julian Castro

Cory Booker

Pete Buttigieg

Amy Klobuchar: resume@amyklobuchar.com

Andrew Yang: apply@yang2020.com

Beto O'Rourke

Bernie Sanders

Joe Biden

President Obama Reacts to Excuses Not To Vote

Hits the nail on the head.

Get Those GOTV Shifts

If you leave a GOTV training not daunted by your recruitment goals-you're doing it wrong. GOTV recruitment goals are always intimidating and yet they always (or almost always) get met with the right combination of preparation and determination. In order to meet those goals we have to be hungry for every shift. To help you meet your goals I've listed some things to think through in order to make sure no stone is left unturned. For the purposes of this blog (and any field program I oversee) a "shift" counts if your volunteer has committed to a specific date and time (and ideally location) for at least a 3 hour block of voter contact and it is recorded in whatever database you use. "I will drop by" "I will see if I can make it" and/or driving people to polls do not count as shifts. These happen best with a specific ask that includes a sense of urgency and details of the activity in question. For more on what makes a good vol recruitment script click here.


1) Every sign in from every event list you have- This is a no brainer. Of course you've been calling these lists all cycle but you've also probably ramped up your events over the past month. As soon as a GOTV event is over get it entered and get it called. People are most likely to be a yes while they're still excited.
2) Get specific shifts AT events. Why add an extra step to the process? Depending on the size of the event my absolute best practice is to have your event speaker announce to attendees that we need their help knocking doors and making calls during the next few days and instruct them to approach a staff member with a clipboard. Then have staff spread throughout the event hold up a clipboard filled with sheets like this one. Then THEY keep the sheet they filled out as a reminder and your staff member gets a record by taking a picture on their phone.
3) Ask people to bring a friend. So you're on the phone and you've locked in a shift for election day. Excellent! Next step "Awesome! Phone calls are always more fun with a friend. Is there anyone you think you can bring with you?" Boom. Additional shift.
4) Get remote phonebankers. The next few tips involve calling in the cavalry. If this is not your first time at the campaign rodeo chances are you have some people in your life who want to help but don't physically live near by. Now is the time to create a remote calling program- and make an ask of your family and friends. It's a great way for friends and family who don't have time to travel outside their safe districts to get involved. I recommend having one staff member or intern whose job it is to manage this and your out of state vol program so it doesn't turn into a throw away but a really program with accountability that augments your in-district operation.
5) Bring in out of state volunteers. You've got your out of state phone bankers but they want to do MORE, MORE, MORE! Identify some supporter housing and set to work. Again this works best when one person is dedicated to managing and following up with your OOS vol program. Places to look for possible out of state (or district) vols are Young Dems or College Dems in adjacent states/districts without a competitive race, out of state friends of staff or the candidate, and Presidential campaign alumni groups.
6) Talk to endorsing organizations. Your candidate has endorsements. Those endorsements are from groups. Sometimes those groups have local members. Identify their group leaders and set to work. Do you best to get names and contact information for specific volunteers with times and locations that they can help out. Depending on the group it might work better to have a "Planned Parenthood canvass for Katie" on the Saturday before Election Day rather than trying to slot in individual shifts. Have a conversation with the people who lead the group and find out what they think will work best. Be kind and flexible but also get specifics and let them know you are counting on them for what they commit to. Some is not a number and soon is not a time.
7) Invite endorsing candidates' staff. It's in everyone's interest to flip the house (or chamber, council etc) and let's face it- GOTV is a really fun holiday, especially when you get to parachute in from outside. If your candidate has friends or supporting electeds in a safe seat it may be that their staff is eager to help as well. (Note before someone jumps down my throat, staff volunteering on campaigns is just that, VOLUNTARY, no one is suggesting your endorsers break the law.)
8) Message your Facebook/Twitter likes. I've seen a lot of campaigns that contact people on social media who say they want to volunteer but leave untapped people who post messages like "Rooting for you!" or "You've got my vote!" Just like you'd call all your 1's and ask them to help during crunch time these people are low-hanging fruit who might just need to be asked to get involved. Slide into those DMs!
9)Ask every person who walks in to sign up for GOTV. Again, duh but does EVERYONE in your office know this or just the organizers? Train your whole staff and every rockstar volunteer to ask everyone who walks in the door the magical question "Have you signed up to take off election day with the campaign?" Hang giant post-it notes or other visual aids for people to sign up as soon as they walk in the door.
10)Your campaign staff. This is slight cheating but hey shifts are shifts. What is your call time manager doing on Election Day? Probably not call time. Be realistic (ex: maybe your Comms Director can knock some doors but at someone she'll probably also have to deal with the press) but also make sure your Campaign Manager sets the expectation that GOTV is all hands on deck. Then goes those shifts in your database!


Now go GOTVMFV!

Campaign Love and Mine,

Nancy

Healing Justice and Surviving Elections With Kate Werning

I spend a lot of my time thinking about campaign culture (duh). What makes it magical, what makes it difficult and how can we make it easier to sustain? So I was thrilled when Kate Werning reached out to me about her podcast Healing Justice and specifically her mini-series on Surviving Elections. After listening to earlier episodes, I felt completely intimidated and also a little defensive. After all, the goals and the intentionality behind movement work are just not possible in the same way when you have an impending deadline. Lucky for me that's what this mini-series is about!

Since Kate interviewed me, I figured turnabout is fair play and wanted to share more about her and her extraordinary project below. To listen to the mini-series (not just because of me but it's SO GOOD) click here.

Who are you? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I’m a Midwesterner, a community organizer and trainer, and a yoga and healing practitioner. I’ve got 10 years in the game working with social movements, raised by the brilliance of the Dreamer & immigrant rights movement, the Wisconsin Uprising, get out the vote efforts to defeat Paul Ryan, and learnings from holding trainings for leaders working on climate justice, Movement for Black Lives, student organizing, worker rights, and more. I co-founded a collective house in Brooklyn called Hoop House, and am a total grandma about hot epsom salt baths. They cure everything.

What is Healing Justice Podcast?

I started Healing Justice Podcast because on November 9, 2016, the accumulated overwhelm of what we’re facing as a nation hit me with a weight that seemed to both speed up time and also freeze me in place. I am so grateful to have access to peers and teachers who help me find the emotional capacity and strategic options to move forward in times like these -- but so many of us don’t have access to mentors like that. So, I decided to share those conversations.

Healing Justice Podcast is democratizing access to perspectives and practices to integrate longer term vision, healing, and sustainability into our organizing work. It’s supporting us to stay the course to win, and also not lose love for our own lives in the process. We’ve shared the voices of over 80 guests with 70+ episodes in our first year, and the numbers show a deep hunger for this conversation right now: we’ve hit 500,000 downloads and landed in the top 7% of podcasts. Our people need this work.

What inspired you to do the “Surviving Elections” mini-series?

My relationship to elections is a fraught one. 2008 was the first presidential election I could cast my vote in, believing wholeheartedly in the change Obama promised. Under Obama we won DACA and other important advances, and also saw more deportations than ever before in US history. During the Wisconsin Uprising in my home state in 2011, our energized mass resistance movement get channeled into a recall election strategy that ultimately squeezed out some of the oxygen of our momentum and failed. Failed so hard that Scott Walker has now been elected, re-elected in the recall election, and re-elected again. I worked on a national campaign to mobilize wellness practitioners to vote in 2016, and again we came up short.

I just finished up working on the Organizing Team of the Cynthia Nixon campaign here in New York, and there is so much I experienced there about that campaign in particular, and electoral politics in this country in general, that was vibrantly hopeful as well as deeply discouraging. I wanted to dive deeper into those paradoxes and knew my peeps need that conversation, too.

The questions posed in our trailer for the series are exactly it: how do we grapple with the inherent compromises and contradictions elections require? Is there a way for people working on campaigns to move at a pace that is anything close to sustainable? Is there anyone who knows how to use the VAN and be a kind person? (OK, that last one is pretty unfair, but I’m not the one who said it!)

What can we expect from the series?

Through the “Surviving Elections” podcast miniseries, we’re talking to social movement organizers like Sunrise Movement about how elections can play into a movement building strategy, campaign managers (including you! yay!) about cultivating healthy campaign culture that leaves strong infrastructure behind after election day, and candidates about their experience running for office. The Campaign Workers Guild joins us to talk about the movement they’re building to organize for workers’ rights in politics, and I share a little bit about our unionization process on the Cynthia Nixon campaign.

Our final episode will be released the day after the election so we can process the results and what’s next––with young leaders of color who are shaping the current progressive wave like Alexandra Rojas of Justice Democrats, and lifelong activists like Professor Barbara Dudley who help us understand ourselves in a longer-term movement arc.

What is one thing you think “campaign people” can learn from movement work?

A longer perspective. The short time frame and pop-up nature of electoral campaigns can create a “churn and burn” culture that can leave us and our volunteers broken at the end of it. We have to be careful with each other. The campaign will end, but hopefully our relationships do not. The volunteer infrastructure, fundraising capacity, strategic alignment, and relational networks built during campaigns is such a massive precious resource -- and movements are thinking long term about how to mobilize those resources into huge collective shifts, turning tides that cannot be reversed. Campaign staff needs to be asking local leadership how the campaign can feed into their longer strategy, exercise patience and listening, and join with the local progressive vision in service of those who will remain doing the work after E-day comes and goes.

What is one thing you think “movement” people can learn from campaigns?

My movement building community (Momentum) has taught me to focus on moving public opinion to change the political weather and force politicians’ and candidates’ hands. I really believe that is the path to lasting change. Yet as I organized on the Cynthia Nixon gubernatorial campaign here in New York, I experienced the incredible power of an unapologetically progressive campaign to change the conversation, move decision-makers to the left, and energize new imagination in the progressive public. I think movement organizers need to understand electoral campaigns as actions in their own right - they have the power to galvanize and train thousands of new leaders, polarize the public, and dramatize heroes and villains for our issues. What if we related to electoral campaigns not as an ultimate solution, but as campaign cycles that can feed into our longer vision?

What surprised you working on the Cynthia Nixon campaign?

I was pleasantly surprised by the vision for the role I was invited into, which I believe is rare on a campaign. As the Hub Organizer, I worked with specific constituencies. I am most proud of what we accomplished with #DisabilityJustice4Cynthia, a group of disabled activists who gave major input into Cynthia’s disability platform, organized actions, helped fundraise, and did self-directed visibility work on Election Day.

Together we hosted a Virtual Town Hall, which was an hour-long virtual event dedicated to Q&A on Cynthia’s disability platform. We had talented Closed Captioners and ASL interpreters, and practiced the ins and outs of the tech to ensure it was as accessible as possible. Cynthia addressed the intersectional lens required to be an advocate for disability justice, and we had so many comments from people that had never in their lives heard a candidate understand the wildly varying issues faced by different folks in the disability community. People were so happy to be able to join such an accessible space and hear their concerns addressed so directly.

This surprised me because I think it is rare for a campaign as big as ours to invest that deeply in relationship and accountability to specific communities. I was so happy that the leadership saw this as a priority, and I know that through the work we did together we are leaving behind a stronger network of incredible disability justice activists who are now more connected and will undoubtedly continue to move the necessary policies that were included in our platform forward.

If there’s one thing people come away with from Healing Justice what would you want it to be?

We need you. You matter. All of the policies and visions we are fighting for… the things we so deeply believe all people deserve… you deserve them too. And if we can have rigor around remembering and practicing that belief with skill and determination, that power radiates into the work we are able to move in the world.

What’s a practice from the podcast that would be great for campaign people?

Ooh. I’d go with the Compartmentalizing in a Healthy Way practice. Having Je Naé Taylor in your ear helping walk you through overwhelm, anger, emotion, whatever -- is such a clear and practical encouragement, and it’s just 11 minutes long. [Editor's note: I am so glad Kate picked this one because I've adopted it myself since listening to that episode.] This is a great one to put on in your headphones after an infuriating interaction with your supervisor, an unsettling volunteer or canvassing interaction, or if something’s coming up in your personal life but you just really need to focus at work right now.

If you’re really ready to stretch, the Relational Inclusion practice is powerful -- it is an exercise to understand where someone else is coming from when it feels totally impossible. We need this skill deeply on campaigns, where the pace can exacerbate conflict amongst ourselves getting entrenched and feeling insurmountable - I hope we aren’t too far gone to be open to it (ha!).

There are so many great ones for also getting back into our bodies, too -- Somatic Centering, Emotional Freedom Technique, and more… it’s so hard to choose!

What else do you want us to know?

I am so grateful for all the folks working on campaigns right now, on behalf of all our futures. Your labor is such a gift to all of us. Eyes on the prize -- this has been and will continue to be a long game fight. Let’s do all we can this cycle, and be good to ourselves and one another along the way. Because after November 6th, November 7th comes, and if we still have each other, then our movement can keep growing. Onward.


Join the “Surviving Elections” email list to receive a weekly email that isn’t asking you to chip in $3 before the reporting deadline! We’ll send you new podcast episodes when they drop, along with a weekly Election Survival Tip.

You can listen to Healing Justice Podcast on most podcast listening platforms. Our favorites are RadioPublic and Apple Podcasts. Talk with us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Ask Nancy: How to Work Smarter Not Longer

It finally happened. I wrote the same blog post twice.


Occasionally I will post about "working smarter not longer" and sometimes I get questions about what that means. Then I do things like write an entire blog post answering that question before I remember that I already wrote this one in 2014, the inadvertent rehashing of which was not an optimal use of my time. (Bonus time management tip, make sure you haven't already done something before you go to do it.) I'm posting this new version because a) it's already written and b) it contains some new insights gained over the last four years. Enjoy!


1) Plan ahead. Everyone knows that campaigns require planning but not everyone is clear on what planning means. A plan is not “the event is on September 6th and there will be a canvass afterward.” Planning involves specific goals, “we want to turn out 100 people” and specific steps to get to those goals “to get 100 people there we need about 150 RSVPs. So for the next two weeks every night we need to make about 500 phone calls. I will need two interns to do this with me. These are the lists I will call. Here is where I will track the RSVPs. Here is the script for confirmation calls which will begin the Friday before…” You get the picture. Think through every aspect of your project and envision what it will look like. Cut it down into small pieces and start as early as possible. Most late nights in an office are spent there because someone didn’t plan ahead and winds up scrambling to complete a greater amount of work than they’d accounted for. The sooner you start working on a project the more time you have to contemplate little details that might have escaped you if you leave things to the last minute...and then you have stay up all night taking care of them. So plan your work and then work your plan.

2) Take care of your body. Exercising, eating right, drinking water and getting sleep are essentially for your overall productivity. But I’m also talking about in the moment. If you are completely exhausted at 10pm and you’ve been staring at a blank screen because you need to complete a walk script or a press release, go the heck to bed and wake up early to take care of it. If it’s 3pm and you haven’t eaten all day because you’ve been planning a rally with a big surrogate, take half an hour to get a sandwich and come back. I’m not saying to drop everything to take a nap every time you yawn or get a sandwich every time you have a craving but the truth is you don’t do your best work running on empty. It’s better to take a little time to take of yourself rather than taking an hour to complete a task that should take 15 minutes because you’re working depleted.

3) Delegate. We tell organizers to organize their way out of the job but as managers we sometimes neglect to heed our own advice. I’m not suggesting you foist the less desirable aspects of your job on your underlings but I do believe you should empower them to take on more responsibility. Often times the 13 things you “have” to get done don’t have to get done by you. However, if you don’t train and empower your staff early then you wind up being the only one on the campaign who knows how to cut turf, pull a list, or work the email program come crunch time. Or you as the Campaign Manager wind up being the one who activists and volunteers call with questions election day because you never bothered to hand off those relationships. Just like you have to spend money to make money, you have to spend time to save time. Not to mention of course that you are helping your staff become more invested and teaching them skills they will go on to use on future campaigns. Train and empower your staff, or risk some very late nights.

4) Keep a to do list. I keep two kinds of to-do lists on my desk. One is a whiteboard with ongoing projects, emails, ideas and things that need to get followed up on. The other is a daily paper list with three professional and three personal things I need to accomplish before the end of the day. Personal might say something like “Pick up dry-cleaning, pay car loan, call Grandma to thank her for birthday gift.” Professional might be, “Write press release, secure locations for photo shoot, send e-blast.” (I now also keep an ongoing to-do list on a Google doc for each person who works under me so I know what needs checking in on.) When something comes up that's not a priority for the day, rather than get sidetracked, I add it to the whiteboard and carry on with the project at hand. My day doesn’t end until I’ve accomplished all three professional (and usually personal) items on my list and I don’t start in on other projects until I’ve accomplished those three. Sometimes they take all day, sometimes I knock them all out before lunchtime but the lists help me feel productive and ensure that nothing slips through the cracks.

5) Prioritize. Do what is important, not what is most fun. It’s a very human impulse to spend more energy on what we feel like doing than on that which is not enjoyable but needs to get done. Let’s say your boss has asked you to call through county chairs and introduce yourself and you are anxious about this because you’ve heard a couple of the people you are calling are not fans of the campaign. You also have to decorate your office and spend some zen-like time cutting turf on VAN. If you put off calling the county chairs while you complete the other tasks on your plate you’re going to be grumpy all day because you will be dreading the unpleasant task. You are saving the activity that takes the most emotional energy for the point in the day when you will have the least. (By the way Campaign Managers totally know when and why you are procrastinating on the thing you don’t want to do, and we don’t love it.) On the other hand, if you start with making your phone calls and knock that task out before noon, you’ll spend the rest of your day feeling accomplished and get to do what you love about your job emotionally unfettered. If you eat dessert first, you’ll never finish your dinner.

6) Focus. I heard this amazing quote from motivational author Jen Sincero, “Urgency is the opposite of hurrying.” Urgency means you are honed in at the task at hand and you are calm and laser-focused on getting done what needs to get done because you have planned ahead (see #1). Hurrying means you are stressed out and running around like a chicken with your head cut off because you didn’t account for this situation. Work expands to fit the time in which you have to do it. So if you have a task you know will require a lot of time or energy, close the other tabs on your computer and set aside a chunk of time to do that task and that task only. Yes, phones ring and things come up but 90% of interruptions are items you can make a note of and respond to in a couple of hours. If something truly requires your immediate attention, take care of it, and then get right back to the task at hand. Nothing drives me crazy like someone complaining that they’ll be in office until midnight after having spent all day dicking around on Facebook. Do what needs to get done, calmly, completely and well.

How To Be An Ally To Your Woman Campaign Manager

We talk a lot about why it's important to have women in seats of power when it comes to elected officials but it's just now that we're starting to talk about why we need women in roles like Chief of Staff and Campaign Manager--the power behind the power. Hat tip to this Teen Vogue article (can we talk about how Teen Vogue is slaying it these last couple years?) by Erica Sagrans. These women are setting the culture of their operations and influencing policy and priorities often more so than their candidates/elected officials.

I'm going to write more about this too coming up but I genuinely believe that men in our industry need help catching up and really understanding on a fundamental and practical level what it means to support women in our industry and for that matter women need to think critically about supporting each other. Now, I want to put out a disclaimer that by and large I love the men I work with (so much so that I married one). I really struggled with this post because I want to use specific examples and call out some behavior I have seen as a Campaign Manager but I don't want to shame anyone. When you know better you do better and I know that the smart, progressive guys in our community want to do better. So here we go.

1) Notice when there aren't women or people of color in the room. Managing my first campaign back from 3 years in DC I was shocked but not surprised by the level of just obliviousness to soft sexism that still exists on the ground on campaigns. There was one particular incident in which I was not invited to an important meeting about the future of the campaign despite being, you know, the Campaign Manager and that incident really crystalized what had been bothering me since day one. When I pointed out to the rest of the team that not only was I not included but no women from any of the groups attending the meeting had been invited, they simply hadn't noticed. This cut me even closer than the original slight. The fact that it was natural and unremarkable to my colleagues that a group of 10-15 people should be comprised entirely of men underlined a complete lack of appreciation for the challenges I face as a professional woman. So the first thing you can do is just notice. Begin to notice how often women are left out, spoken over and sidelined and you will gain a deeper understanding of why your choices and actions impact our professional relationship in ways you hadn't considered.

2) Bring me with you/Don't be a gatekeeper. Great, so you've noticed that women aren't invited. The next step is to invite them. No one in the progressive community (I hope) puts together any sort of conversation and thinks "let's not have any women/people of color/working class people/LGBTQ+ people etc there." What we do think is, "Who do I know? With whom am I comfortable? With whom do I already have a relationship?" And the problem is that the answer tends to be people who look and think like us. Even if it this weren't a scenario in which I should have already been invited by dint of my position (and I absolutely should have been and eventually was) it would behoove our movement in similar situations to actively seek out appropriate women to include. You may say "if a woman doesn't hold a position of power then why should I just bring one along?" To that I say, "why am I the only woman in a position important enough to (eventually) be included?" Part of the answer is that these are the rooms in which relationships are built and those relationships often put people in positions of power. So if you make an effort to insist on having a woman to the table, the next time we're asking the questions "Who do I know? With whom am I comfortable? With whom do I already have a relationship?" The answer will be "her." (No, not Egg.) Not only does diversity lead to better outcomess but it interupts a self-perpetuating cycle.

This is especially important in an industry where our currency is relationships. Sometimes we want to be the gatekeeper to powerful people or conversations because we think it makes us valuable. I would submit that preserving our privilege isn't the best way to build that currency. Instead being a connector is a wonderful way to build our personal power and improve our community. As I always say, this cycle you might be at a committee and I might be managing one of your races, but next cycle I'll be at that committee and you'll be a consultant wanting me to connect you to my races. So do what's good for you AND our community and make sure you are advocating to have women (and other traditionally marginalized people) at the table.

3) Speak respectfully, whether I'm in the room or not. I attended a gathering recently where a high-ranking official light-heartedly called someone "a pussy" then turned to me, the only woman in the room and apologized. There's a lot to unpack in that particular backpack but let's suffice it to say the following.

I have a zero tolerance policy for the word "pussy" on my campaigns and it's a policy I've had to enforce, a lot. Every time a male colleague refers to someone as a "pussy" I calmly and firmly interject, "we don't use that word on this campaign." (BTW I totally recommend adopting this.) My policy is not about cursing or even about off color jokes--I revel in both with great frequency and enthusiasm something I've had to keep an eye on as I've moved up the ranks-- but about the misogynistic root of the word itself. It's the same reason I had to side with Twitter about Samantha Bee calling Ivanka Trump a feckless cunt. I would never defend Ivanka Trump but when you use a gendered word like "cunt" or "pussy" to refer to someone in a derogatory fashion you reinforce the stereotype that women are weak or that our sexuality is dangerous. Whether you realize it or not you are essentially claiming your own power by reducing women to physical form or reproductive function. You are not insulting one woman (or man) in question, you are insulting ALL women. Moreover it is imperative that we never behave as if women's dignity and the moral high ground are at odds in zero sum game.

One joke or slip of the tongue isn't going the crumble empire but it does contribute to a toxic culture. So don't say something when I'm not there that for which you feel you'd have to apologize if I were. I love campaign people because we are smart, funny, and ambitious. Surely we can come up with some more creative curse words.

4) Don't go to strip clubs. I really wrestled over whether to include this one both because it seems so painfully obvious and because I don't want to give any ammunition to anyone who might use my words to defame Democratic campaigns. On the other hand...ayfkm?

Not too long ago, I wanted the phone number for a mid-ranking person in the Democratic infrastructure and I knew a colleague of mine had his number because that colleague had told me a story where he had lent this person money when they were at...a strip club. You know why I didn't have the guy's number? Because I sure as heck wasn't at a strip club. You see my issue here?

I don't want to give the impression that is a regular occurrence or the favored pastime of off duty operatives--if it ever was I think we've moved past that. But it happens enough that I could take my three best straight male friends in this industry and think of three separate unrelated incidents I could have used as the above example.

Look, this is not a point about the morality or feminism of strip clubs. I know there are arguments on both sides. But regardless of what side you fall on surely you can appreciate that this is not appropriate in a professional context. I know, and love, that the line between personal and professional is often blurred as we work long hours together in unfamiliar destinations. If you are at a bachelor party, gross in my opinion, but fine. If you are blowing off some steam with your new coworkers after going out on the road for GOTV...ask yourself who isn't there and why.

5) Validate my frustration. At its best working on campaigns can be absolutely exhilarating. At it's worst it can feel like having your soul slowly chipped away by an ice pick. You know what else is a lot like that? Being a woman. This work is hard. Life is hard. Being a woman is hard, especially in this industry, and especially now. I can't tell you how much means to me when I tell a male colleague a story like the ones above and they respond, without me have to prompt them, "that's not okay." By contrast of course, when male colleagues bend over backwards to deny the gendered aspects of an unpleasant work situation, it only compounds my frustration. There are a thousand little slights (some might call them "microaggressions") that come part and parcel with being a woman in a professional position of power and when we recognize them and call them out, that load gets a little lighter.

6) Understand that I'm doing this backwards in heels. The corollary to point 5 is that I'm asking you not to express your disappointment or displeasure with me when I don't handle an unfair situation the way you would or think that I should have. Please understand I've been socialized to be sensitive to the reactions my actions provoke and that those reactions are often different because I'm a woman. Where you might demand to be included in a meeting and be seen as sticking up for your candidate, I'm seen as egotistic and not being a team player. Where you might flat out reject someone's idea and be seen as decisive, I'm being a bitch. Speaking of socialization, the quiet but constant self-doubt I suffer as I struggle to balance when to push back against these norms versus when to suck it up for the sake of efficiency (even if that "efficiency" means placating egos for an extra 10 minutes in a situation where a man wouldn't have to) and the guilt and impotence I feel regardless of which path I choose is quite enough to drag me down all on their own.. Though your disappointment may be well-intentioned, please give me the benefit of the doubt that I thought of that, and keep it to yourself.

Writing this took it out of me but I have lot more to say on the subject. Shout out to all the badass men and women who make it a pleasure to do this job.

Campaign Love and Mine,

Nancy