Lauren Baer: Campaign staff are making the moment. That’s why we need more of them.

by Lauren Baer
The announcement of President Biden’s departure from the 2024 presidential race sent shockwaves through the nation. As the baton was swiftly passed to Vice President Kamala Harris, she had to make a choice – where to visit first as the newly-minted presumptive nominee. With the countdown clock to election day already ticking, she went to campaign headquarters to meet her staff.
While this decision may have surprised casual observers, to those of us who know how victories are made, it was validation of a simple truth: It takes strong campaign teams to win elections.
Indeed, while it takes great candidates to win elections, even the best candidates can’t win on their own. They need professional, well-trained teams, and those teams have to be representative of, and in touch with, the coalition of voters the candidate is trying to win.
The first days of Kamala’s campaign offered undeniable proof of the indispensability of good campaign staff. Here’s just a partial list of the feats her campaign team has pulled off in the first week:
-Her delegate operation took to the phones, ensuring that, less than 48 hours after Biden’s surprise tweet, Kamala had secured enough pledged delegates to be the presumptive nominee.
-Her creative team sprang into action, rebranding the entire Biden/Harris operation overnight in a way that was, at once, familiar and fresh.
-Her digital team asserted its presence with GenZ voters. (If you’re one of the millions of Americans who have googled what “brat” means, you know what I’m talking about.)
-And her fundraising team broke the internet, bringing in more than $80 million in the first 24 hours of the campaign.
In short, all of the history-making, record-shattering, seemed-impossible-until-it-seemed-inevitable features of Kamala’s just-launched-but-soaring campaign happened because of campaign staff. And they made this all happen behind the scenes, working long hours, for modest salaries, with no promise of public recognition.
For Democrats this should be a tipping point: a belated, but essential recognition that it’s time to give campaign staff their due.
The research tells us that we’d be wise to do so. For decades, Republicans have invested more in the recruitment, training, and retention of campaign operatives than Democrats. Research conducted in 2023 by Dalberg Advisors highlighted the extent of this funding gap. Dalberg found that, in 2020, the five largest Republican talent pipeline organizations spent over $120 million on talent development, compared to just $26 million by their Democratic counterparts. And the single largest MAGA recruitment machine – the behemoth Turning Point USA – spent as much as the top 10 Democratic Democratic pipeline organizations combined.
The result is a well-oiled Republican talent machine that pumps out operatives who have won races up and down the ballot, secured victories from school boards to state houses, and locked in a Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court.
We’ve got some catching up to do. As Kamala’s team demonstrates, we have some incredibly talented operatives on our side. But we need more of them – a lot more. Democrats need in excess of 43,000 trained campaign staff to effectively compete up and down the ballot in 2024. And that’s just to engage in “competitive” races. We haven’t recruited, trained or hired nearly this number. And, if we want to expand the battlefield and build power in tough places like Texas and Florida, we’ll need thousands more beyond that baseline.
The good news is that a modest injection of political dollars directed towards the recruitment, training, and retention of campaign staff could level the playing field, positioning Democrats to put Kamala in the White House, flip the House, hold the Senate, and make gains down ballot across the country. All it would take is a 1-2% shift in Democratic political spending to close the gap with Republicans–mere pennies on the dollar. That’s a smart investment, not just for 2024, but for the future. And in a world where Democrats can deliver more than $125M to the Harris campaign in the first week, we know that people want to mobilize their resources towards impactful outcomes now. Putting some of that money into the Democratic infrastructure organizations that recruit, train, and retain campaign staff just makes sense.
The Kamala campaign team just may have set into motion a movement that will save our democracy. The biggest thank you we could give to these tireless behind-the-scenes warriors is to give them more colleagues in the fight.
Lauren Baer is the Managing Partner at Arena, an organization that convenes, trains, and supports the next generation of civic and political leaders. Through their work, Arena has built an inclusive community that makes politics more accessible to more people.