This article is a part of Left Out: The Missing Election narratives, a collection of unreported histories by publications inside of the Movement Media Alliance.
PHILADELPHIA — Earl Aguila and Kira Josephson approached doorknocking with a lit sense of urgency, splitting up and turning corners separately to cover more ground in the Olney neighborhood of North Philly. They’d been deployed as volunteers with the Sunrise Movement and Seed the Vote to stump for Vice President Kamala Harris. The election was two days away.
They were first-time canvassers, having come down from Bard College in New York with eight other students, many of whom would be voting for the first time this election. In 2016, when Donald Trump was first elected, they were in fifth grade — a fact that has wholly colored their impression of American politics.
Aguila says politics has never matched the vision of American democracy he learned in school: “It’s all just always been about fighting, it seems, and fearmongering. I’m tired of it, and I want something different, because I know that we deserve better.”
I’d taken the train up from Washington, D.C., to shadow the two. Earlier that morning, the boarding line for the Northeast Regional at Union Station looped around the main corridor— folks of all ages waiting with no luggage, tickets in hand and crisp Harris-Walz T-shirts. That outpouring wasn’t contained to the Democratic Party loyalists working in a city like Washington. Despite a tense election year, many on the Left who felt frustration with the Harris for President campaign still got up to do the work.
The independent Working Families Party (WFP), which often runs candidates as Democrats for progressive electoral causes, launched the largest national voter engagement mobilization program in its 26-year history. According to its deputy national director, Joe Dinkin, volunteers knocked roughly 2 million doors, sent millions of texts and made millions of phone calls.
Maurice Mitchell, WFP’s national director, made a qualified case for Harris in a preelection memo, noting her “strong emphasis on housing affordability and corporate price gouging.”
A number of climate, racial and reproductive justice groups also mobilized, though motivations varied. While some felt optimistic about the Harris campaign platform, others were primarily organizing against Trump.
In his memo, Maurice also noted Harris’s “failure to engage with pro-Palestinian critics or Arab Americans.”
Stevie O’Hanlon, communications director for the Sunrise Movement, hoped Harris would echo her 2019 primary endorsement of the Green New Deal and opposition to fracking, but she walked back those stances. “It definitely made our job harder — to recruit volunteers to have persuasion conversations with voters,” says O’Hanlon. The conversations centered on “why, even though we disagree with Harris on a lot of levels, she is the only person who, at that point, could defeat Donald Trump — and [a Trump presidency] would obviously be catastrophic for our ability to stop the climate crisis.”
In the end, Sunrise, a youth-led climate advocacy group founded in 2017, made upwards of 2.7 million voter contact attempts through nearly 4,000 volunteer shifts that included canvassing, phonebanking and textbanking.
Concern for the fate of the planet under Trump drove Aguila and Josephson — both involved in their campus Sunrise chapter — to Pennsylvania. As the two ticked off their list of registered Democratic households, most folks who opened up said they did plan to vote. A few were enthusiastic — one older woman invited Josephson inside to take a look at the Harris pictures, figurines and candles on her mantle. She said that she prayed every night for a Harris victory.
Overall, the energy wasn’t particularly boisterous. Most of those who did lean into the pitch were interested in the mention of local union work. Seed the Vote’s mobilization effort is often done in partnership with local groups serving working-class communities of color; this day, Aguila and Josephson were also knocking doors for Unite Here Local 274. The local was familiar to folks in the neighborhood, who wanted to hear about its placement program for good union jobs in the hospitality industry.
Harris would win the reliably Democratic Philadelphia precinct, but with a lower share of the vote than either Joe Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Plauged by chronic low approval ratings, historic intra-party dissent on Gaza and concerns about age, President Joe Biden’s re-election bid crumbled in July 2024. He’d be replaced at the top of the ticket by his vice president, whose swift ascent provided a shot of new party energy and, for a renewed left antiwar movement, an opportunity to seek leverage.
The Uncommitted movement amassed 650,000 protest votes against the genocide in Gaza during the Democratic primaries. And while that translated to only 37 delegates at the Democratic National Convention — a fraction of the total 3,932 and too few to wield the bargaining power of Bernie Sanders’ thousand-plus delegates in 2020 — it was enough to get the Democratic Party’s attention. More than 100,000 of those protest votes came out of Michigan, a state Biden won by only 150,000 in 2020.
Leaning on the power of those votes, Uncommitted convinced the party to include a panel on Palestinian human rights and allow Elianne Farhat, a leader in the movement, to testify to the party platform committee.
“Is a panel enough? No,” Farhat says. “Are we saved? Is that saving lives? No. But the fact that that conversation happened in that official arena cracked open more space.”
Uncommitted’s most visible flashpoint would come when Democratic officials rejected the request for a Palestinian American to speak from the convention stage — a swing-state elected Democrat who would’ve offered a scripted endorsement of Harris. The request had been co-signed by allied groups including United Auto Workers, Black Lives Matter, Sunrise and more; its rejection led to an hours-long, overnight sit-in joined by Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Summer Lee.
Lily Greenberg Call, a former Biden administration official who resigned in protest of Biden’s handling of the genocide, says the sit-in felt “incredibly surreal,” seeing former colleagues walk by, make eye contact and ignore it. “It felt like the party leadership telling people very, very clearly: You are not the ones that we are going to listen to … and we don’t even really care about what that means.”
For the young congressional staffers who represent the left flank of the Democratic establishment, the refusal to agree to a Palestinian American speaker was a turning point. It “affirmed who we know or believe that the Democrats have been — and it’s not who we want them to be,” says a moderator for @Dear_White_Staffers, a popular Instagram page serving as an anonymous outlet for Democratic staff. The moderator spoke to In These Times on the condition of maintaining that anonymity. “It’s not who they should be if they care— and then also if they like winning.”
Harris’ acceptance speech would be the first convention speech by a Democratic nominee to affirm Palestinian rights. And while the nod to the antiwar faction of the party met with applause from many in the convention hall, it came shortly after a promise to see the United States boast the “most lethal fighting force in the world.”
In the aftermath of the convention, Uncommitted organizers waged a last-ditch effort for the Harris campaign to meet with Michigan families who had lost loved ones in Gaza. “We said, ‘We want to mobilize votes for you, but you have to give us something to take back to our community,’ ” Uncommitted co-chair Layla Elabed says. “What would an arms embargo look like? What does even following American law and international law look like?”
But Uncommitted’s September 15 deadline for Harris came and went. “What we were told was, ‘Vice President Harris has gone as far as she can go,’” Elabed says. “Which was nowhere.”
In its closing days, the campaign would pivot toward bringing right-leaning voters into the Democratic coalition and away from left issues, disappointing some progressive leaders, like Farhat.
“I was so sad and angry when the Harris campaign flipped,” Farhat says. “It was a sharp turn away from a joyful, people-centered economic message to courting Republicans. … At that moment, I went from being hopeful that we would beat Donald Trump — and be in a position to keep fighting forward at the federal level — to being pretty clear that we were gonna lose.”
For all the volunteers that movement groups like Sunrise and WFP mustered, it’s hard to say how much more energy would have been unleashed with decisive action on Palestine. But had the party acted, Uncommitted had been prepared to offer its Michigan infrastructure to earn votes for Harris.
In the end, Harris lost Michigan by roughly 80,000 votes.
As the dust settles on Harris’ blowout loss, Democratic leaders have been embroiled in debates assigning blame — pointing to everything from identity politics to global post-pandemic trends as reasons why the campaign may have lost. However, through the clamor, one thing is clear: This bruising election cycle was one like no other.
This election marked a rare instance in American politics in which a non-incumbent received the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination with no primary fight at all. In looking ahead to 2026 and 2028, when primaries for local, statewide and national elections will be unavoidable, Farhat and O’Hanlon see opportunity. Farhat credits Justice Democrats — a grassroots-funded PAC that emerged in 2017 from the Bernie Sanders campaign, aimed at electing working-class leaders — for building the Left’s capacity to engage in primaries, rather than “getting captured and trapped” by general elections. Justice Democrats recruited and backed the left-wing contingent of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and others that came to be known as the Squad.
Soon after being elected, in 2018, Ocasio-Cortez joined a Sunrise Movement sit-in for a Green New Deal in soon-to-be Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office— a move that brought direct action tactics into the halls of Congress and started to force climate policy to the center of the party’s agenda. “As late as 2018, Nancy Pelosi was saying climate change was going to be a tertiary issue for the party,” says O’Hanlon. “[But] because there was a fight going on inside of the Democratic Party for who would be the standard-bearer and what would be the message and vision of the party … movements were able to shift the Democratic Party.”
O’Hanlon isn’t naming any potential 2028 presidential primary candidates yet, but she is looking ahead to the race as “a major organizing opportunity.”
Waleed Shahid, who worked for six years at Justice Democrats, sees a more uphill battle ahead. “With the current balance of forces, the terrain is less ripe [than in 2017] for a grassroots working-class progressive movement ascending in the Democratic Party,” he says. “There’s much more of a Democratic elite backlash to progressives than in 2016, [when] there was much more anger with the Democratic Party establishment from the center. Opponents of Biden’s economic policy within the party are now using this electoral loss to discipline the Left, of which they include parts of the Biden administration.”
The progressive primary movement also has to grapple with its federal gains leveling off rather than accelerating. Instead of advancing new candidates, Justice Democrats put much of their 2024 resources into defending Squad incumbents who were vocally critiquing Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. While those sentiments were in step with the majority of Democratic voters — and even the majority of Americans — they drew the ire of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbying group. Reps. Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, two Black Squad members elected in 2020, lost their seats in 2024 to primary bids supported by more than $23 million in AIPAC dollars.
“The losses of Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman are heartbreaking,” Farhat says. “Those were exciting wins … but we failed to build the political organization in those places to back them up and get them re-elected.
“I’m not diminishing the powerful infrastructure that exists,” she adds, “but what they and we are up against is so great. We have to focus our time, energy and resources on reinforcing and building on-the-ground, powerful infrastructure that can win.”
Shahid, too, sees the Bowman and Bush losses as a wake-up call “to get more serious about organizing voters, donors, institutions to be part of a left electoral project.
“The goal of the party elites is to exhaust all of us,” he says. “It’s to exhaust the movement, to exhaust the staffers who are pushing, to exhaust the Squad. They want you to feel tired. They want you to give up because they want their way. And if we give up, and if we walk away, and if we resign ourselves to all of it, then it’s the elites who win. AIPAC wins. All of our enemies win.”
The Working Families Party, founded in 1998, is an elder statesman of that left electoral project. Dinkin says that, for a full-scale transformation of the Democratic Party, the WFP will be thinking at the timescale the Right does — in 20- to 50-year horizons. “The way that we’re going to build power in Congress [is by] winning elections downballot and electing the champions who are going to shape the next generation of politics,” he says. In 2024, downballot WFP candidates won in hundreds of races and unseated Delaware’s speaker of the House.
For WFP, what’s just as important as “organizing working-class people to act politically together” is “understanding what working-class voters are saying,” Dinkin says.
An in-depth series of WFP focus groups and polls in 2023 and 2024 found several takeaways that cut against media truisms about the working-class voter. While working-class respondents were found to lean more conservative on some cultural issues than wealthier people by a thin margin, that gap grew dramatically — in the other direction— when asked about economic issues.
In response to the statement, “Workers in this country generally get the pay and benefits they deserve,” upper-class respondents agreed by a net 21%, while working-class respondents disagreed by 36% — a swing of 57 points. And while working-class voters were excited about rent caps, a jobs guarantee and free tuition — upper-class voters, not so much. Their gaps in support on these issues were 45%, 58% and 50%, respectively.
Shahid believes that big ideas — ideas like those put forward by progressives within the party (Medicare for All, the Green New Deal) — are key to uplifting the whole of the party. “Biden’s economic policies, while they were more progressive than anything in modern presidential history, there was nothing as tangible at the scale of Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security — those are programs that are easily understood,” he says. “We need to put pressure on the Democratic Party establishment to not just do technocratic fixes around the edges, but to really capture the imagination and attention of the average American voter.
“Trump is a master at this, and Joe Biden is not. What are the ways in which we can make the American public pay attention to the billionaire control of our economy and democracy and how that impacts people’s kitchen tables?”
Rosslyn Wuchinich, President of Unite Here Local 274 — the same union that Aguila and Josephson stumped for in Philadelphia — has thoughts on Shahid’s kitchen table question. After vowing in 2016 to never let Trump win again, Wuchinich’s union went to the mat for Biden in 2020 and again in 2024 for Harris. Wuchinich estimates union members and volunteers knocked 1.5 million doors in Philadelphia, Harrisburg and the surrounding counties ahead of Election Day 2024. When their districts’ results came in, Wuchinich felt “incredibly proud” to see a much lower swing toward the GOP in Philadelphia than in other blue cities in blue states, like Los Angeles, Detroit, Miami and New York.
“What I feel really pushed by this election is the need for way more working-class organizations,” Wuchinich says. “What this election showed us is that people are really angry or really helpless. I’ve been an organizer for over 20 years. And organizers — we like people who are angry, but we know that if you’re angry and you don’t direct that anger at the people responsible, [then] that anger will get directed all over the place in very destructive ways.
“To have people actually engage in a real fight against corporate power and have a real victory, that is the only way to actually turn anger into something relatively productive that can create real change. Housing, for example, is a massive issue — communities can fight to win much more control over development. If you do those things, the votes are going to come.
“Unions do that. The reason that we’re able to scale these massive operations is because of the base that we have year-round, that we’re constantly building.”
O’Hanlon agrees. As a Pennsylvania resident, she’s witnessed firsthand the long-standing practice of last-minute investments sweeping in during election season. And those last-minute get-out-thevote efforts, wall-to-wall ad placements, phones ringing nonstop and doorknockers parachuting in from out-of-state — doorknockers like those on my train to Philly from Washington, and like those on Aguila and Josephson’s train down from New York— might be part of the problem longterm.
“Every two or four years, millions of dollars in advertising and in outreach money floods into states like Pennsylvania,” O’Hanlon says. “It’s good that progressives and Democratic groups are talking to so many voters, but at the end of the day, people just get inundated. … If that money was spent over the course of four years to do community organizing to actually focus on shifting public opinion, then we could be at a different place today.”
Wuchinich believes that the labor movement, with its relatively enormous resources (compared with other left infrastructure), is open to investing in community-based efforts. “There’s a sense of an opening and possibility right now,” Wuchinich says. “I’m not pessimistic at all about getting support or resources if people have good, aggressive plans.”
At the same time, with the Right and state and federal legislators devising new ways to stamp down protest and organizing, the danger to leftist and progressive organizations is only increasing.
Shortly following the election, House Republicans passed H.R. 9495, a bill interpreted by many as paving the way for the new Trump administration to shut down groups supporting or organizing protest efforts. This comes as the Heritage Foundation, the same conservative think tank responsible for Project 2025, rolls out its “Project Esther” plan to counter pro-Palestine organizing. The plan includes recommendations such as targeting protesters with RICO charges and deporting international students who participate in pro-Palestine demonstrations.
“Pro-Palestinian organizing will be first on the chopping block, but the point of this isn’t to crack down on pro-Palestinian organizing,” Shahid says. “The point of this is to begin cracking down on the larger center-left civil society infrastructure … organizations that focus on reproductive rights, labor unions, environmental organizations, civil rights organizations.”
These are serious threats to consider. But they’re not insurmountable. Central to the work of left movements is the radical potential of not just imagining inventive and tangible structures in times of need, but of building them — and they are needed today.
“We were never gonna win the world that we wanted to win with only 501c3s and 501c4s,” Farhat says. “All these different entities are really important, they are an essential part of civil society, and it is a total attack on democracy to undermine them. … We will defend that infrastructure because it deserves to exist — and we will find new shapes and forms and ways that probably are not that new, but are actually as old as organizing has ever been.”
Farhat looks toward home for new hope in facing the coming years. “I lived in Minneapolis in 2020, during the uprisings in response to the police murder of George Floyd,” she says. “In the face of systems that were supposed to keep people safe failing us, people held a meeting at Powderhorn Park. They organized into block groups. We created community patrols. We created a community fire response because the fire trucks couldn’t get to fires. We created tools and systems around strategies to keep people safe, and communications infrastructure, overnight. “Overnight, we did that — and I believe we will do it again.”
Henry Hicks IV is a Washington D.C.-based writer and organizer. Originally from Nashville, Tenn., he is a graduate of Oberlin College and is a Harry S. Truman scholar.
