"People Like Us Do Things Like This"
Why #WhiteDudesforHarris and all the other subgroups mobilizing now are so valuable. Plus, what Seth Godin's seminal work on the cultural roots of change explains about the power of not being "weird."
“Something very extraordinary—transformative--has happened in American politics in just the last week. The conversation has absolutely changed with the arrival of Kamala Harris’ candidacy. It’s changed in a kind of joyful way--a way of optimism and positive forward thinking. We have to make that work, because we can’t allow the alternative to happen: This hollow man without a single noble quality, trying to drag this country toward authoritarianism. That cannot happen.”
--Salman Rushdie, speaking on a South Asian Men for Harris Zoom mass meeting this past Saturday night.
Watching the Wave Rise
One week ago Sunday night: Win With Black Women, a political collective that has been meeting weekly since August 2020, mobilized 44,000 Black women to get on a Zoom together in support of Vice President Kamala Harris, who had just been anointed by President Joe Biden as his chosen successor. During the Zoom, they raised $1.6 million for the campaign. More importantly, they set an example, challenged their peers, and set a massive wave in motion.
The next night, 54,000 Black men got on a Win With Black Men Zoom, expressing solidarity with their sisters. During the call, they raised $1.3 million. At the same time, Shannon Watts, the founder and former president of Moms Demand Action, started organizing a “White Women: Answer the Call” mass Zoom, aiming to hold it three days later.
Wednesday night, Latinas for Harris held two separate Zooms (because the first got filled to capacity) drawing 7,000 in all. More than $110K was raised. That same night, South Asian Women for Harris got 10,000 attendees on a Zoom and raised about $300K. They now have a new website: DesiPresident.com.
Thursday, a whopping 164,000 joined in the White Women’s call for Harris. Donations from that call alone topped $11 million by this past Sunday. Also that night, Black Gay and Queer Men for Harris had a Zoom call featuring Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff while queer advocacy groups led by the Human Rights Campaign attracted 20,000 to an “Out for Kamala Harris LGBTQ+ Unity” Zoom, working with Equality California, the National LGBTQ Task Force Action Fund, and other groups.
Saturday night, the South Asian Men for Harris where Rushdie spoke held their meeting. Sunday night, Native Women + Two Spirit for Harris held a call that raised $35,000. And Monday night, Women for Harris had over 250,000 attendees on a unified Zoom that featured feminist icon Gloria Steinem on a sofa surrounded by multiple generations of younger women activists.
About Those White Dudes for Harris
Also Monday night, White Dudes For Harris held their inaugural Zoom, with appearances from The Dude himself, actor Jeff Bridges as well as a “rainbow of beige” speakers, as actor Bradley Whitford jokingly put it. Close to 200,000 people viewed at least part of the 3.5 hour online telethon, with more than 60,000 watching on its main YouTube channel for at least two hours. A money thermometer showing how much attendees were donating kept rising over the course of the evening, eventually topping $4 million.
I had an inside view of how this event was put together, having received an invitation to a WhatsApp group that functioned as its nerve center last Friday morning. White Dudes for Harris (WDFH) literally started with nothing more than a few hundred men, but it was a highly networked group from the start, with many of them veterans of years of digital organizing. Back in 2017, Ross Morales Rocketto, one of the main organizers of WDFH along with strategic communications vet Brad Bauman, helped start and build Run for Something, the candidate recruiting group, which ultimately drew tens of thousands of people into running for office. So he knows digital organizing.
With little more than a Google Form signup page, WDFH grew organically, with people inviting their friends, colleagues, and relatives. I used a simple script a friend of mine had suggested, texting people saying “Are you a white guy who believes in science, human rights, and democracy? If so, are you around on Monday? Some friends and I are joining a national call to support Kamala Harris for President. RSVP here.”
The RSVP form had a simple and clear call to action: “Together, we aren’t going to sit around and let the MAGA crowd bully other white guys into voting for a hateful and divisive ideology because we understand that under MAGA everyone loses. We know that as white dudes, we have both a strong, and positive role to play in America’s shared future, and it begins with all of us cutting through the MAGA crap and reminding the folks who have co-opted American symbols what America actually means. We are excited to join together with you in this fight.”
By midday Saturday, WDFH reported 20,000 RSVPs to its upcoming Monday call. A few big-name speakers started to get publicized, like Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Sunday night, Mike Nellis, another one of its organizers, reported RSVPs had hit 60,000. By the time Rocketto appeared on CNN Monday morning to talk about the effort along with gun safety activist David Hogg, WDFH was at 75,000 RSVPs. Getting mainstream media attention undoubtedly fueled a last surge, so that by the time the call started more than 120,000 people had signed up. (Tweets from the likes of Mark Hamill (aka Luke Skywalker), who has more than 5 million followers, helped too.)
By my count, the WDFH zoom itself took off like a rocket. From the start, more than 50,000 people were watching the livestream, and in the first ten minutes $1.5M raised. At the thirty minute mark, 64,000 were watching and $2.3M raised. And while the viewership numbers stayed at that level through the first hour and then began to slowly decline, donations kept pouring in. At the 2:15 mark, 42,000 were still watching live and $3.5 million had been collected in more than 60,000 individual gifts (an average of $58 per donation). As of now, the YouTube video has gotten more than 326,000 individual views.
During the weekend rush to pull WDFH together, Nellis—who now runs Quiller, the AI fundraising tool--tweeted that “Helping to organize and promote this event has been some of the most fun I’ve had in recent memory. It reminds me of 2008.” He noted, “The Obama campaign didn’t have the infrastructure or staff to match the energy and enthusiasm of his candidacy. People start organizing local communities, like Omaha for Obama which I was a founding member of. No matter what, this race is going to be close but there’s something raw, organic, and real happening in this country. Feeling a bit more hopeful, than usual.”
He is 100% right. For the first time since 2017, when millions put themselves in motion to try to block the Trump Administration’s initiatives, and certainly for the first time since 2008, when the Obama campaign built a grassroots organizing machine of more than two million volunteers, Democratic activists are astir. A muscle is being (re)built in real time.
What is Going On Here?
I titled this post “People Like Us Do Things Like This” because I wanted to pay explicit homage to Seth Godin, the author of Permission Marketing and many other brilliant works. Seven years ago, he very kindly gave a series of talks at Civic Hall for our organizing fellows, which were like a master class in marketing, communications and organizing. In fact, though it confounded some of our fellows, Godin insisted that all marketing was organizing, or vice versa. But his insights about the power of social proof explain exactly why all these identity-group mobilization efforts are taking off.
As he wrote back in 2017:
“For most of us, from the first day we are able to remember until the last day we breathe, our actions are primarily driven by one question, ‘Do people like me do things like this?’ People like me don’t cheat on their taxes. People like me own a car, we don’t take the bus. People like me have a full-time job…. Even when we adopt the behavior of an outlier, when we do something the crowd doesn’t often do, we’re still aligning ourselves with the behavior of outliers.”
Getting change to happen is hard, Godin argues, because we’re trying to get people to do something they don’t want to do. “Most of the time,” he says, “what people want to do is take action (or not take action) that reinforces their internal narrative. The real question, then, is where does the internal narrative come from and how does it get changed?” The answer: we base our actions on our perceptions of our cohort. “It’s all built around the simple question, ‘do people like me do things like this?’” he wrote.
So the key to being a successful change agent is in defining an “us,” or better yet, changing the self-definition of that “us.” Want to pass the world’s first national referendum about the right for gay people to marry, which came up in Ireland not long ago? One way would be to appeal to people’s rationality, to their sense of fairness, respect and civil rights, Godin writes. But he points to a more successful approach: “Brighid White and her husband, Paddy, both nearly 80, made a video about their son and about what it meant to them to support the referendum. People like us. It’s easy for many to watch that video and see themselves. As parents. As traditionalists, as Irishmen. The essence of political change is almost always cultural change, and the culture changes horizontally.”
Not everyone was happy about the emergence of White Dudes for Harris. The Trumpers are trying to make fun of it, with Donald Trump Jr. calling its participants “cucks”, one of the terms their tribe has adopted to stigmatize feminist men as weaklings. But for my money, the fact that they’re talking about White Dudes For Harris is a sign that we’re gaining ground. We’ve interrupted their frame about what “white men” supposedly do, with an enormous wave of social proof from lots of validators. The appearance of WDFH and its success raising $4 million in less than four hours was apparently quite threatening to one white man for Trump, Elon Musk—the @dudes4harris Twitter/X account was suspended Monday night and only unblocked Tuesday after a rush of criticism.
To be clear, some people on the Democratic side of the political divide also got upset, like anti-trust activist Matt Stoller, who was briefly in the WhatsApp group organizing the call but who objected vociferously to a group of white men organizing an event explicitly for white men. “Ethnic grievance politics never ends well,” he claimed on Twitter, while he used much harsher language inside the chat. Well, he clearly didn’t understand what WDFH was doing, since none of its organizers or speakers framed anything they were doing in terms of grievances specifically of white men. I think Zaid Jilani, a smart guy who has occasionally shown up here in the Connector’s comments, also misunderstood what WDFH was doing. He’s not wrong that lectures from white progressives about ending “white privilege” turn off lots of average Americans who mainly worry about kitchen table issues, but while some of that may have shown up during the White Women for Harris call, there was none of that on the White Dudes call.
Not Weird At All
There’s a larger point, though, that connects back to Godin’s “people like us do things like this” thesis about political change. If you haven’t noticed, in the past few days the pro-democracy side of the great American debate over the future has come up with a new way of explaining what is so wrong with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and their whole crowd. They’re weird. And they are—what with their obsessions with drag queens, book bans, menstrual schedule checks and Hannibal Lecter, on top of promises to be dictators and end the need for voting.
This line of attack started with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz--who is clearly and very competently auditioning for the VP nomination from Harris. “They’re running for ‘He-Man Women Haters Club’ of something,” he charged, referring to fake wrestler Hulk Hogan’s over-the-top appearance at the Republican Convention. (Indeed, when Walz spoke on the White Dudes call, he repeatedly the slam, calling Trump “a strange, weird dude.) And now everyone seems to be using it. It helps that Vance is relatively new to the national scene and his record is riddled with weirdness, like his claiming that Americans with children should have more political power and that “childless cat ladies” like Harris have been too dominant.
But by framing Trump/Vance and their many acolytes as “weird,” Democrats are very effectively threatening the “us” that holds the Trump cult together. As Monica Hesse writes in the Washington Post, calling their leaders weird plants “a seed of doubt” in the Trump following. She adds, “What if, instead of edgelords, they are actually just the kids in the corner eating glue off their hands?”
What if people like us aren’t weird? This is why having so many visible influencers from particular subgroups of the American population can eat away at the foundations of Trumpism. Of course, I don’t want our side to simply be an amalgamation of identity groups; we need to get back to one shared identity as Democrats—but that brand has taken a battering over decades. If what it takes to win is to start by rallying along various subgroups, that’s fine as long as there is a unifying goal. This is, in fact, what movements are: large numbers of people activating themselves towards a shared goal.
Last night, as I was finishing this post, the Harris campaign held a national organizing meeting online. About ninety thousand people watched live on YouTube, hearing directly from Harris and also getting updates from the campaign’s mobilizing team. In addition to more than $200 million raised, 360,000 new volunteers have signed up, they reported. This post weekend the campaign engaged volunteers in 29,000 shifts, where about 768,000 phone calls were made and 126,000 doors knocked in swing states. These are healthy numbers. In 2020, by this point in the election, Mobilize was reporting 40,000 to 80,000 shifts a day across its whole platform (not just for the Biden campaign).
Last night, Filipino-Americans for Harris also had their first Zoom meeting. Tonight, Labor for Harris is launching with a Zoom call for labor leaders and activists. Thursday night Caribbean-Americans for Harris are having their first call. And Friday Disabled Voters for Harris are having their first virtual meeting. VCs for Kamala just popped up this morning. (Click on those links to get the details for each.) And all the groups that launched their organizing Zooms in the last week are continuing to raise money, hold meetings, and funnel volunteers into the growing Harris campaign engine. Hang on, the ride suddenly got fun!
One Last Thing
I originally thought I’d write a big chunk of this post about how Harris is navigating the Israel-Palestine divide inside the Democratic party, as it remains one major crack in an otherwise solidifying coalition. Perhaps I will at some future point. But right now I just want to hail something she said a week ago after her highly-watched meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The war in Gaza is not a binary issue,” she declared. “But too often, the conversation is binary when the reality is anything but.” Activists from both the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine camps have been watching her every word (and non-word), ignoring that basic wisdom. But as someone who wrote about rejecting the Israel-Palestine binary back in January, I couldn’t be more happy seeing Harris adopt this language. We are not going to achieve a solution to the crisis until everyone accepts that the other side also has merit to its fundamental claims. Maybe Harris can help us find our way to that middle ground. Only time will tell.
Also worth reading on that topic, which is starting to boil as Harris edges toward announcing her VP pick and pro-Israel and pro-Palestine activists fret and jockey to influence her choice:
—Yair Rosenberg, “Whose Afraid of Josh Shapiro?” The Atlantic, July 31 (gift link).
—Simone Zimmerman, “Kamala Harris on Gaza: The Campaign Needs to Change Course to Win the White House in November,” Teen Vogue, July 29.
—Emily Tamkin, “How Kamala Harris’ Running Mate Could Undercut the Central Theme of Her Campaign,” Slate, July 30.
End Times
AI music + AI video = Dudes “grilling through the night” for Harris.
This is a very thoughtful post! A lot here to help one get at what’s been going on since Biden stepped aside. The whole marketing thing is very interesting and I am especially interested to see you say the following:
“Of course, I don’t want our side to simply be an amalgamation of identity groups; we need to get back to one shared identity as Democrats—but that brand has taken a battering over decades. If what it takes to win is to start by rallying along various subgroups, that’s fine as long as there is a unifying goal. This is, in fact, what movements are: large numbers of people activating themselves towards a shared goal.”
Yes, exactly! But I think the one piece one might want to add to this to get a more complete picture of this “movement” is the critical role of leadership.
Trump surprised us all with what still seem to be not very well understood qualities that this moment required to bring together disparate identity groups around one idea of goals to embrace and fight for — encapsulated in the slogan: Make America Great Again. He’s leading his movement of people who do (or aspire to do) things like that.
Harris has clearly emerged, again unexpectedly, with what seem to be the perhaps also unexpected qualities that this moment requires to bring together disparate identity groups of “people who do or want to do things like she exemplifies.” Not sure it has quite a clear a theme, but perhaps: a particular idea of Freedom?
As we saw with Biden, you can have all these same interest/identity groups just trudging along with certain leadership. And then a different sort of leader can come along and ignite true excitement and passion. It’s these catalyzing and, I believe clarifying and thus galvanizing leadership qualities that are in many ways more difficult to anticipate and understand.
"We need to get back to one shared identity as Democrats" - why shouldn't citizenship be our "one shared identity"? Are you suggesting that the WFP and other fusionists should pack it in? Independents don't count? Etc. I want to see Trumpism crushed as much as anyone but don't want to become a foot soldier for the liberal wing of corporate America.