The Gruntwork of Electoral Politics: An Interview With Leaders at Every Vote Matters
Campaign volunteers dedicate significant amounts of time to mobilizing voters in the run up to elections. Photo courtesy of Flickr, via rawpixel.
Every one of us has, at some point, gotten a phone call, text message, or even had our door knocked on by a volunteer from a campaign. And, while some people may not always treat them kindly, these are humans giving their time—in many cases without pay—to advocate for a candidate that they believe in.
Below is the story of Joe Iacoponi and Marion Williams-Bennett, founding members of Every Vote Matters, a group dedicated to supporting the direct voter contact efforts of progressive candidates around the country. The group had previously been a collective of experienced volunteers leading Kamala Harris’ digital canvassing efforts when she ran for the Presidency in 2024. Despite Democratic losses in the 2024 General Election, Every Vote Matters have continued working behind the scenes to mobilize support in key elections for their chosen candidates. Their work played a large role in the elections of Governors Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia last year, and will no doubt continue to be a factor in various races during this year’s Midterm elections. Keep reading to learn more about the effects of direct voter contact, and how Joe, Marion and colleagues turn their interactions with everyday folks into meaningful change.
Rohan Sarma (RS): Field organizers and volunteers are campaign staffers that don’t typically draw attention in national media, but they do such important work in mobilizing voters and can be a really significant force in winning elections. So I’m hoping you both can start by telling us your story. How did you get into this field, and what was it that drew you to this work?
Joe Iacoponi (JI): My first moment of real activism was back in 2008, when both Barack Obama and marriage equality were on the ballot in California. A group of friends and I joined up with a local organizing group to do door-to-door canvassing around our neighborhoods, and then set up safe booths around key voter sites for people that were interested in information about both of these particular campaigns. It was really inspirational for me. I will say that I relaxed in my activism until 2024, which brought a ton of emotion back to the fore. All I could think [in 2024] was: Oh my God, this can’t really be happening again, can it? A lot of our team members felt the same thing and, frankly, since November of 2024, every day has been just another five-alarm-fire. All the organizing we’re currently doing with Every Vote Matters (EVM) really remains a passion project, not only for myself, but for everybody on the team. And from that, we have formed a really powerful team with a common bond and a common, bold goal of saving democracy.
Marion Williams-Bennett (MWB): I love what Joe just said, and I echo so much of it. Our pasts are very similar: I got involved in the 2008 election by working with Barack Obama’s campaign doing phone-banking and letter writing, and I did the same thing in 2016 for Hillary. After that, I retreated a little bit from politics, and then in 2024 I came back. [I had the] same feelings that Joe was describing: Can this be happening again? I was willing to really put everything I had into it, and that was where the other campaigns were just very supportive. I was doing what I could and I was supporting those campaigns because this felt different. It felt like we needed to be involved and doing everything we could. I didn’t want to be, after the elections, thinking was there something left to do? The good news was I did feel that we had done all that we could. The bad news was that we lost, and we’re still trying to save democracy. So it’s a hard road, but what I love is that we don’t get deterred. That’s the thing about this EVM group that I admire so much, and that’s why I’m a part of it.
RS: Can you recall that tough moment when you found out that Kamala Harris had lost? Having been her phonebank captains in her 2024 candidacy for President; that’s an easy point at which to claim defeat and to just give in, and you both not only did not claim defeat, but managed to actually turn it into something bigger than it had ever been. In politics and in general, I’m hoping you can tell me about that transition from disappointment to the work you do.
JI: I’m sure that everybody had this experience, but it was so disheartening in the moment. But the most amazing thing was that a large contingent of Kamala’s phone-bank captains, which we were part of, pretty quickly got together and said we need to channel all this frustration and negative energy into something more powerful and better directed to save democracy. That was the mindset of all of us at the time. We immediately turned it into campaigning and phone-banking for a couple of Virginia State House and Senate seats, which were successful. We then migrated that into working with Abigail Spanberger’s Virginia campaign for Governor, which then segued into us working with Mikie Sherrill’s New Jersey Governor’s campaign, and then also California’s redistricting proposition, all of which were resoundingly successful. I will say that all of that involvement with each of these campaigns directly stemmed from our work with Harris-Walz and the reputation we had built as captains running those phone-banks within the political community. That has kept us running and inspired since November 2024.
MWB: That is exactly it. I remember that the last phone bank I did for Harris had close to a thousand people on the call, [with great] energy and excitement. I remember working with my favorite group of people to work with: women in their 60s and 70s who didn’t know how to use Zoom, who had never phone-banked before, but said “I’m showing up for this”. Given their dedication and determination, I felt like we had [the election]. And then we didn’t. I so admired the work that my coworkers were doing at EVM, but I had to take a little step back after the election because I was in a bad space and I felt like I couldn’t quite click “Yes. I’m in”. So [instead] I started teaching civics to immigrants, and that experience was really important for me personally. They have to know the answers to ~100 questions to become a citizen, so part of [my job] was teaching them about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, voting and all of these parts that make America so strong. I realized we need free and fair elections if we’re going to preserve this. At that time, EVM had just started working with Abigail Spanberger and I felt like: I’m in, I’m totally in. These groups were small at first, and we were used to working with Kamala’s teams with all of these people, but [these people] were showing up and they were so determined to make a difference. They had that same energy. I felt like this is what it is about.
RS: I have one follow up to that, which is that I do want to talk more about the nitty-gritty of the actual work you do. You’ve spoken about the large crowds volunteering on the Kamala Harris campaign, which you subsequently didn’t have after the election loss. Did you strategically or technically have to change how you conducted your work?
JI: Speaking to something that Marion said, that is really important for us as a team, recognizing that people need to be able to focus on themselves first, because they need to be present with whatever we’re working on. They’re volunteers; everybody here is a volunteer. Life comes first. Focus on life and, when you’re in a good spot, come back and help us out. So re-energizing after the 2024 elections has really been an important aspect, but it has also given leadership time to think about what we want to do differently, or how to make changes, or what we want to focus on for the next coming year.
MWB: That’s a really good point. My experience with this team and also with the voters that we work with is that everyone’s in a different space. Coming into the Abigail Spanberger campaign, for example, voters were also in a different place; we needed time to recuperate, but so did the voters. So we really need to understand that everybody is dealing with some stuff right now, and that affects the work that we do at EVM, it affects the volunteers and it even affects the voters that we talk to.
RS: We’re discussing how everyone’s sort of in a different spot and looking at things differently, which will certainly include political beliefs. As a group, your time and resources are limited, but you also must balance dozens of volunteers with different political motivations. This year, there are dozens of Senate seats, numerous Governor’s seats, all 435 House seats and more being contested. How does EVM prioritize which candidates they support and why?
JI: We’ve already gotten involved in a number of campaigns this year, such as Colorado’s Eighth Congressional District with Manny Rutinel. We singled him out as a candidate that we are interested in working with in a primary, which is not something we have typically done, but the specter of him taking on a much greater role within Democratic politics really drew us to that campaign. We’re also getting involved in some new North Carolina state races because of some prior relationships that we have built over the past year. Most importantly to our heart right now is that we are in a partnership between Every Vote Matters, Swifties for Hope and the DNC, running a series of Know-Your-Rights training sessions that Marion’s going to talk about.
Moving on, the bulk of the decisions will be coming shortly as to what we’re going to get involved in, and we’re going to focus on a couple of key questions. First and foremost, does it align with our mission statement? Our mission statement is really simple: to defend and lift democracy by maximizing volunteer engagement and effectiveness. It’s a really simple statement that can be interpreted differently by everybody. But anytime we get involved with the campaign, we ask if it answers that question in the affirmative.
Once we get past that, we ask if it is going to be a competitive race? We are at the stage where it’s important that we have a great impact on our team. One of our steering committee members actually coined our use of the term “strike force”. We act as a strike force to get involved in the campaigns where we’re going to make the greatest difference. Part of that competitiveness is understanding what it’s going to be like in November, as opposed to what the polls say right now. Another key part is whether we are passionate about the candidate and the campaign, and do we have team members that are willing to step up and lead that project? If any of those answers are no, as much as individuals might be interested, we’re not going to take it on as a team.
It’s really critical that these are democratic decisions among the team, and we want to reinforce that if people say “yes”, we’re going to do it. We’re going to wait to find a way to do it. Most importantly is that we’re a team of about 100 members now. We’re always looking to grow, but with those limited resources, we can only support a limited number of campaigns. One of the key things we learned from last year, that we want to bring forward, is how we can find ways to work on more campaigns while maximizing our value to those campaigns.
MWB: I do think that one beautiful thing about this organization is the connectedness of the relationships. We’re lucky that many people who have a connection with EVM are the ones who bring campaigns to us. As Joe pointed out, it’s really about the relationship. Are we able to make a difference? Are we able to really move the ball forward with this campaign? So much of that comes from these vital relationships that were established back in the Harris days. We have cultivated that, and that’s a really nice part of how we decide the people we work with.
RS: Regardless of which candidates you choose to back, your work will be conducted in tandem with various other campaign tools such as multimillion dollar advertising campaigns, powerful endorsements and incredibly influential PACs. Where do you see the importance of direct voter contact in these efforts?
MWB: I remember back in the Harris-Walz days where we had thousands of volunteers and these phone-banks were so big that occasionally I’d jump on and make calls myself. Obviously, I was training and facilitating, but one day I got on the phone anyway and I was talking to some voters from Michigan. It was rough because these were swing districts and they were not always the nicest conversations. I had some conversations that blew me away, and I had conversations with two separate voters that said that Kamala Harris was paying for sex-change operations for immigrants; it’s not my place as a caller to say it, but I just was thinking: “How did you come to believe this? Where is this coming from?” It was coming from an ad campaign. It was coming from Elon Musk and his group spending millions of dollars on direct mail campaigns with that message. It did feel like after the election when we were licking our wounds, [we were like]: “How do you compete with that?” But one thing that I’ve seen over the last year and that is heartening to me, and I’ve especially seen this with the Spanberger campaign, is that they specifically did messaging training that was all about listening.
It was all about getting to the heart of what the voter cared about. It was frustrating, I think some people felt like: “What are we learning here? I just want to get on the call and say, vote for Abigail Spanberger.” But those days are done. It was about meeting the voter where they were. When I led some of these sessions, I would talk about meeting the volunteers who were going to make the calls where they were. Some of them were from Northern Virginia and had just gotten laid off from the government. There were a lot of different perspectives, so if we could take the time to actually say: “How are you doing, what’s your biggest concern in this election?”, cutting through the social media noise, the direct mail, those millions of dollars of ad spend and connecting one on one with the voters, an impact can really happen. I think that the DNC, through their listeners program, has made a great beginning of that. So we’re collaborating with Swifties for Hope, the DNC, and EVM, and we’re creating two sessions called “Know Your Rights”.
It’s fun: the presentation is about Taylor Swift, it’s about democracy, it’s about the Constitution—who wouldn’t want that? My favorite part of the presentation is about the words that begin the Constitution, which is “we the people, in order to perform a more perfect union”. It was always we the people, even the framers knew it was the people. And so our activism really has to be “we the people” coming together, listening to each other and helping lift each other up to change the outcome of the next election.
If we can try and look for the good in what we’re living through right now, it is the very fact that maybe it will bring us back together to having these kinds of conversations that say: “How’s it going for you? Are you able to pay your bills? Are your schools what you hope them to be? Are your kids growing up in a society that you want them to be thriving in?” When you break it down like that, then it is so clear that there are candidates who can support that. And that’s what I am passionate about: ensuring that people can have those conversations and really make a clear decision about what’s right for them, not what social media is telling them to believe.
JI: The reality is that people are looking for deeper conversation[s]. We can have them, but it’s incumbent upon us to be thoughtful and honest on our side of the discussion, and most importantly, listen and recognize the concerns that every single individual presents because we learn something from every one of these conversations as well.
MWB: I will say that this happened constantly with the Abigail Spanberger campaign, where we would do the training, and when we would talk about it someone would say: “This is what’s happening in my life, can I bring that to the voter?” The answer is absolutely they can, and you’d be surprised at how many people open up when you say: “This is hard for me. Is it hard for you?” I feel like we lose that compassion as a society when we become so divided, and this is really a chance to just break it down. It’s not about red or blue. It’s about hearing what they’re saying and, ultimately, working out who is going to be the best candidate to solve that problem? My money is on the Democrats, but I’m open. It’s not just about promoting the candidate, although it is largely about helping them to understand how the candidate can help them solve the challenges that they have; it is also about saying: “I care about what’s happening to you, to our state, to our community and to our country.”
RS: We’ve started discussing the 2026 Midterm elections and, from our discussion so far, it feels clear that the coming nine months will be a long journey requiring all hands on deck. Irrespective of who wins or loses in November, what do you hope EVM can gain or learn in the process?
JI: One of the key lessons is that the political landscape is ever changing and it’s changing quicker and quicker, and we need to remain carefully attuned to the current dynamic, which is the dynamic of this day or this week as opposed to this year. If we focus on that, we can create a feedback loop that is much more immediate, where we take these lessons that we’re getting from the campaign, from voters and from volunteers and cycle that back so that the next phone bank session incorporates those changes, the mindsets that we’re learning, and things that matter to people more than others. This constant feedback loop is the way of today’s environment, certainly spurred on by social media—we need to embrace it, move forward, and listen to everybody. We need to make sure that we hear exactly what people are saying and that we recognize them.
MWB: Absolutely. One of the things that I hope is that we are respecting that we are all volunteers and that not everyone is going to be 100% [available] five days a week. People are going to go up, they’re going to go down, but they must feel supported in the process. As we hold on to the idea that we care about people, we care about the people who we work with, we care about the people we’re talking to, through compassion we will end up with a larger organization, a bigger band of people who are working for a common cause. [EVM] doesn’t have to be triple the size it is now, but if it grows, it must grow through care, compassion and listening.
RS: Thank you so much for your time today, Joe and Marion. To finish, I’d like to give you both the floor and ask you for the central message you would like to bring to potential volunteers and—in particular—college students.
JI: When we started EVM in late 2024, it began as Kamala’s family. It was a spin-off from our being Kamala’s captains. As last year progressed, it became clear that we needed a team name that better aligned with our mission statement. We rebranded to Every Vote Matters. Just from those words, everybody says that this is a perfect encapsulation of that message. Having said that, we’re going to continue to fight the good fight because we are passionate about saving our democracy in this country and around the world. The key point for everybody is that the message is simple: find your passion. Whatever you do, everything revolves around the passion that you bring to it because that is going to drive you to achieve beyond your wildest imaginations, whether that’s in politics or business or finance, it doesn’t matter. When you’re passionate, you’re going to bring so much more to the table and just bring it. You can be doing many things at the same time, but bring your passion.
MWB: That’s the best advice. I like that so much. I would say this: it feels like a difficult time because it is a difficult time. This is a different era and we are in a time that we have not lived through before. But when you look back at history and the way in which changes have happened in this country, you see that it always came down to people.
Establishing the Bill of Rights was all about people. It was about people getting the rights they deserve. The end of the Civil War, the end of slavery, giving women the right to vote, the civil rights movement – all of these things happened because the people were willing to find the passion to stand up and do what’s right.
The only way that change can happen in this country is if we all stick together and stand up and do what we believe is right. So follow your passion, but make sure that it is about something greater than yourself, because there’s a lot on the line and we need you now.
If there is one thing to take away from my conversation with Joe and Marion, maybe it’s this: those calls and text messages we all receive do serve a purpose, even if it’s not the function we expect. Direct voter contact is about more than simply tallying votes and persuading undecided constituents; it’s about granting an opportunity for action to those looking to be more politically active, giving a voice to people’s concerns, and ensuring the truly democratic nature of our electoral process.
Rohan Sarma (CC ’29) is a staff correspondent in the Columbia Political Review’s Interviews cohort.