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Vice President Kamala Harris' staffers in Pennsylvania were reportedly alarmed over the campaign's failure to reach out to more Black and Latino voters in Philadelphia, the crucial swing state's largest city, prior to her loss to President-elect Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election last month.
”I was the first one knocking on these doors,” Amelia Pernell, a former Harris campaign organizer, Amelia Pernell, told the New York Times. ”They hadn’t talked to anybody. It was like: ‘Hey, nobody has come to our neighborhood. The campaign doesn’t care about us.”’
Pernell, along with other volunteers, said the campaign leaders ignored Black and Latino voters while instead focusing on attracting white suburban voters, which led to "deep frustration" and "extraordinary acts of insubordination" by Black staffers who eventually ignored the strategy.
“Campaign organizers in Philadelphia said they were told not to engage in the bread-and-butter tasks of getting out the vote in black and Latino neighborhoods, such as attending community events, registering new voters, building relationships with local leaders and calling voters,” the New York Times reported.
Several staffers apparently went rogue and set up separate headquarters to target neighborhoods they were believed to have previously ignored, which Philadelphia City Council member Isaiah Thomas criticized.
”The blitz that happened at the end of the campaign was too little, too late,” Thomas told the New York Times. ”The momentum got down because there was no activity happening.”
”There were no yard signs, there was no visibility, there were no T-shirts,” said Donnel Baird, a Harris campaign volunteer. ”There was nobody handing out literature. There were no bumper stickers. There was no sign that we were in the fight of our lives in the most important city in a presidential campaign.”
Trump became the first Republican candidate to win the popular vote in 20 years during the 2024 presidential election. The former president won 312 electoral college votes, as well as all seven projected swing states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all of which he'd previously lost to President Joe Biden during the 2020 election.