Chapter 4
Fighting Racism Must Be Central to Revolutionary Politics
If a revolution isn't led by people of color and immigrants, doesn't have fighting racism at its core, and isn't mobilizing white people toward multiracial solidarity, it's not a revolution. The Bernie campaign learned this lesson the hard way when Black Lives Matter protesters interrupted a Netroots Nation town hall in July 2015. Bernie's initial response-"I spent fifty years fighting for civil rights"-fell short of putting race at the center of his message.
The statistics make clear why racial justice must be central: Black people are ten times more likely than whites to be jailed for drug use despite similar usage rates. At current rates, it would take the average Black family 228 years to achieve parity with today's white family wealth. The richest 400 Americans have the same wealth as all Black Americans plus one-third of all Latinos combined.
As Alicia Garza, a founder of Black Lives Matter, argued, our political revolution must "authentically engage and be led by people of color and immigrants." While Bernie's campaign had inspiring immigrant and working-class people of color leading local efforts, the national leadership-including Bond and Exley-failed to fully rise to this call.
Scholars Ian Haney-Lopez and Heather McGhee have explained how racism functions as "a political weapon wielded by elites against the 99 percent." While racism helped create the white middle class in the post-war era, since Reagan it has helped destroy it, as elites use white supremacy to keep struggling whites aligned with plutocratic interests rather than forming multiracial coalitions that could challenge economic inequality.
The problem isn't just that not enough white people believe Black lives matter-it's that not enough who say it are taking action to dismantle racist structures. Without true multiracial solidarity, we can't build a political revolution big enough to win real change in America. White people have a special responsibility to ensure white working and middle-class voters choose multiracial solidarity as the only true path to addressing inequality.
Chapter 5
The Revolution Will Not Be Staffed
There will never be enough money to hire all the organizers a revolution needs. Fortunately, there are more than enough volunteer leaders among the people-three or four talented volunteers working part-time can often match a full-time staffer's output. This reality has been demonstrated repeatedly in successful grassroots movements, from civil rights campaigns to modern political organizing.
The Bernie Sanders campaign discovered this truth out of necessity during the 2016 primary season. With limited resources to hire staff in all fifty states, they needed to develop what Exley calls a "snowmaking machine" - a systematic approach to rapidly produce thousands of volunteer teams without relying on paid staff. By July 2015, the movement had reached fever pitch, with volunteers in unstaffed states desperately seeking ways to contribute. This organic enthusiasm created a unique opportunity to experiment with distributed organizing at an unprecedented scale.
The campaign built volunteer teams by identifying immediate problems that needed solving. The first major success was the help desk team, led by volunteers Craig Grella and Judie Schumacher, who managed to handle hundreds of thousands of inquiries through a sophisticated ticketing system they developed themselves. When the campaign's official event map crashed under heavy traffic, volunteer developer Rapi Castillo stepped up to build a more robust replacement tool that became essential to the campaign's operations. The campaign's approach to selecting leaders was refreshingly merit-based - they chose people based on their willingness to work and demonstrate results, rather than self-proclaimed leadership abilities or previous experience.
The July 29th, 2015 kickoff became a watershed moment - the largest political distributed event in history with 2,700 simultaneous gatherings and 100,000 RSVPs. Bernie Sanders himself was visibly moved by the ability to speak directly to so many supporters gathered in homes across every state in the nation. This massive showing forced mainstream media to reconsider their dismissive stance toward the campaign and marked a turning point in coverage.
Throughout the campaign, volunteers from diverse backgrounds stepped into roles traditionally held by paid staff. High school students managed social media campaigns, retired steelworkers coordinated local organizing efforts, and professional videographers produced campaign content pro bono. While volunteers couldn't match paid staff's full-time availability, their passion and dedication often resulted in higher quality work during the hours they could contribute. Many volunteers regularly devoted 20-30 hours weekly to the campaign while maintaining their regular jobs.
The principle that "the revolution will not be staffed" isn't merely idealistic thinking - it's a practical reality of how successful movements scale. While some paid staff are necessary for coordination and consistency, their primary role should be to enable and amplify volunteer efforts, never to replace or suppress them. The Bernie campaign demonstrated this by eventually having hundreds of volunteers in management-level positions, many working full-time equivalent hours in critical roles from data analysis to field organizing. This volunteer leadership structure became a model for subsequent progressive campaigns, proving that passionate volunteers, when properly supported and empowered, can form the backbone of a revolutionary movement.
Chapter 6
The Barnstorm: Revolutionizing How Movements Organize
The campaign faced a critical strategic challenge: while thousands of Bernie Sanders supporters were actively volunteering, their efforts were fragmented and often misaligned with the campaign's core objective of winning early primary states. Enthusiastic volunteers were organizing film screenings, debate watch parties, and local rallies, but these activities, while building community, weren't translating into the focused voter contact needed to win elections. Phone banking, their most crucial tool for reaching voters in early states, was severely underutilized, and traditional digital recruitment methods were yielding disappointingly low numbers.
Zack Exley proposed a radical departure from conventional digital organizing: getting staff to step away from their computers and directly engage with supporters through large-scale in-person meetings across the country. These "barnstorms" would serve as crucial connective tissue in a broader "user flow" strategy, creating a seamless pipeline from online engagement to in-person activation and back to digital organizing. When Becky Bond initially expressed skepticism about the resource-intensive nature of in-person events, the early results silenced all doubts. Even in smaller markets like Johnson City, Tennessee, they drew crowds of 150 passionate supporters, while metropolitan areas like Austin, Texas attracted over 300 people, demonstrating an appetite for direct engagement that far exceeded expectations.
The team methodically reimagined traditional campaign meetings, developing a precise, replicable 90-minute format that could be deployed anywhere with minimal resources. Unlike conventional supporter meetings that often devolved into lengthy discussions and created lists for future follow-up, barnstorms were engineered for immediate action. Through dozens of iterations, they refined every element - from the opening presentation to the closing call-to-action - optimizing for maximum volunteer conversion. The structured format consistently achieved their target of converting at least 10% of attendees into volunteer phone bank hosts, with the remaining participants committing on the spot to attend these phone banking sessions.
The most innovative element was the "altar call" system, borrowed conceptually from religious revivals. After the main presentation, new phone bank hosts would line up at the front of the room, each taking 30 seconds to announce their event's time and location. Attendees would then physically move around the room, finding and signing up with hosts whose schedules and locations matched their availability. This face-to-face recruitment method proved exponentially more effective than digital signups, with conversion rates that dwarfed traditional online organizing techniques. By January, barnstorms had become the primary generator of distributed phone banks, with a single meeting in Arizona producing more phone banking capacity in 90 minutes than the state director had managed to create in three weeks of traditional organizing.
The program reached its full potential when the team began training volunteers to lead these meetings themselves. Of the 1,000 barnstorms ultimately held nationwide, 650 were led by trained volunteers rather than paid staff, creating a self-replicating organizing system. This innovation, while technically supported by digital tools, paradoxically centered on the power of in-person mass gatherings, proving that sometimes the most effective "technology" in modern organizing is simply bringing people together in the same room with a clear purpose and structure.
Chapter 7
Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Big
To achieve the scale needed for revolution, you must sacrifice perfection. On the Bernie campaign, the distributed organizing team built operations that allowed volunteers to scale their own work, accepting that not everything would be flawless.
After launching their phone banking dialer with minimal preparation, they faced numerous technical challenges-disabling pop-up blockers on each computer, navigating confusing interfaces, and running out of phone numbers mid-shift. But despite these imperfections, the results were transformative-volunteers went from reaching 3-4 voters per hour to 20+.
Their experience proved that launching something imperfect but functional in three days was far better than waiting a month for something polished. The dialer eventually engaged over 100,000 Bernie supporters, dramatically increasing volunteer efficiency despite its clunky interface. They shared scripts through Google docs, which unexpectedly allowed volunteers to suggest improvements through comments.
This approach is even more crucial for smaller organizations with limited resources. The fewer people in your organization, the more work you need volunteers to handle. Don't wait for perfection-get started and figure things out as you go.
The campaign's distributed organizing team constantly grew complexity by solving problems as they arose. When their initial team became overwhelmed by the volume of calls needing to be initiated, they formed a dedicated "dialer monitor team." When shift changes left callers stranded, they staggered coordinator shifts. When their spreadsheet tracking system became unmanageable, they found a tech retiree from Louisiana through Coders for Sanders who automated processes that had kept volunteers working until 3 a.m.
Throughout this chaos, volunteer teams remained fanatically dedicated to their missions. They solved problems as they arose without grand blueprints, creating specialized teams like a live chat team to help callers with login issues. The phone-banking operation continuously improved with volunteers fine-tuning the dialer's efficiency and building real-time monitoring dashboards.
Chapter 8
Consumer Software and Peer-to-Peer Organizing
The revolution runs on consumer software. Free and inexpensive tools available to everyone can remove friction and enable teams to work across time and distance toward shared goals, with custom code bridging critical gaps. When Bond joined Bernie's campaign, she was shocked by the limitations of their enterprise CRM platform-it couldn't run automated A/B tests properly, had a broken event tool, and dangerously allowed anyone with event admin access to download contact information for over 500,000 supporters.
Rather than trying to fix the CRM, they added a lightweight layer on top and focused on using consumer software platforms like Slack, Google Apps, free conference calling, and Trello that were already serving hundreds of millions of people, weren't buggy, were designed for ease of use, and that many volunteers were already using daily.
Saikat Chakrabarti, an early employee from Stripe, joined as director of organizing technology. His highest-impact project, Ground Control, provided a snappy interface that allowed volunteer teams to manage events without logging into the campaign CRM. This crucial tool let volunteers review and approve events, create events from barnstorm sign-in sheets, and automate outreach to nearby Bernie supporters.
Text for Bernie exemplified consumer software's power in organizing. The onboarding process was impressively structured-new volunteers entered through Slack channels managed by volunteer "text mentors" who followed a systematic approach to welcome, train and verify readiness through quizzes before granting access to assignment channels. Once approved, volunteers used Google sheets (later replaced by a custom shift scheduler that integrated with Slack) to sign up for shifts. The system was so well-designed that program leader Daniel Souweine noted it could run without him thanks to dedicated volunteers.
While "bottom up" was a major applause line in Bernie's stump speech, "peer-to-peer" more accurately describes how their distributed organizing program actually worked. The term originated in distributed file-sharing networks, perfectly describing how volunteers and staff worked in a network rather than a hierarchy. Most importantly, staff saw volunteer leaders as true peers. This approach enabled them to scale organizing nationwide, with volunteers leading 650 of their 1,000 barnstorms with outcomes virtually identical to those led by paid staff.
Chapter 9
People New to Politics Make the Best Revolutionaries
In growing movements, most participants are typically new to politics-a pattern clearly demonstrated at Bernie's volunteer meetings, where up to three-quarters raised hands when asked who was new to political activism. These newcomers bring distinct advantages: they lack the cynicism and defeatist attitudes from past failed movements, approach challenges with fresh optimism, and importantly, bring valuable leadership skills developed in their professional and community lives. Their inexperience with traditional political organizing often proves to be an asset rather than a liability.
The real challenge emerges when established political institutions and veteran activists, shaped by past movements, create unnecessary barriers for these enthusiastic newcomers. These barriers might include complex procedural requirements, insider jargon, or rigid hierarchical structures that discourage innovation. The most successful approach combines the energy of newcomers with the experience of seasoned professionals who maintain their idealistic drive-as exemplified by Bernie's distributed organizing team, which created a dynamic blend of experienced campaign staff working as equals with first-time volunteers.
Stories of newcomer success abound. Debra Mayes, facing significant economic hardship, traveled across multiple states to volunteer, consistently challenging campaign orthodoxy with penetrating questions about strategy and voter outreach. Issy Allison, with no prior political experience, built and coordinated volunteer networks across state lines, developing systems that veteran organizers later adopted. In Miami, first-time activists transformed empty storefronts into thriving campaign offices, handling everything from facility maintenance to sophisticated voter outreach programs-all without professional supervision. They created efficient systems for phone banking, volunteer scheduling, and voter data management that sometimes outperformed traditional campaign offices.
This pattern of newcomer innovation repeats consistently across major social movements, each representing a fresh opportunity for transformational change. These moments of mass participation create windows for dramatic social progress. However, most movements eventually face decline without achieving their revolutionary potential, leaving behind institutional structures where the most passionate activists move on, while those more comfortable with bureaucracy remain. These "institutional fossils" often become obstacles when new movements emerge, resisting fresh approaches and enthusiasm despite newcomers frequently possessing superior leadership qualities developed through their diverse life experiences.
The key lesson is that successful movements must actively protect and nurture their new participants, creating structures that empower rather than constrain their natural leadership abilities. This means designing systems that value practical experience as much as political expertise, and maintaining an organizational culture that remains open to innovation and fresh perspectives.
Chapter 10
This Is How We Win
Revolutions alternate between elation and heartbreak, rarely succeeding immediately. When they do achieve their goals, it's usually after years of building confidence, developing tactics, and gaining momentum through setbacks that train an expanding base of believers. Historical movements like civil rights and women's suffrage demonstrate this pattern - years of organizing, setbacks, and persistent rebuilding before achieving transformational change.
While Bernie's campaign fell short of the nomination, it demonstrated that political revolution is possible in modern America. Starting with just 3% name recognition and no money, Bernie ultimately won 22 states and 46% of pledged delegates against one of the most established political machines in recent history. The campaign built a massive volunteer operation that made over 75 million calls, sent 8 million texts, and held over 100,000 events. Volunteers created their own phonebanking tools, organized debate watch parties, and coordinated massive rallies - often with minimal direction from paid staff. Yet this was just scratching the surface of what could have been achieved with full trust in volunteer-led organizing.
Several key strategic failures limited the campaign's potential. Most critically, they failed to secure resources to deploy the voter database to all fifty states early and empower volunteers to organize their own states before paid staff arrived. This meant losing precious months of organizing in later primary states. The campaign also spent too heavily on television ads rather than investing in organizing infrastructure, despite mounting research showing person-to-person conversations are 3-4 times more effective than ads for changing minds and mobilizing voters. By some estimates, shifting just 20% of ad spending to organizing could have doubled the campaign's ground game.
Despite the loss, the campaign forged new rules for mass organizing that can propel movements beyond incrementalism. Key innovations included distributed organizing teams, peer-to-peer texting at scale, and volunteer-built tech tools. These approaches enabled ordinary people to take meaningful ownership of the campaign rather than just following orders from paid staff. The big vision of Medicare for All and free public college, combined with big goals for volunteer involvement and big organizing enabled by these revolutionary approaches, provides a blueprint for how movements can win in the digital age.
As Bond and Exley write in their conclusion: "The revolution will not be staffed, but it will be organized. The revolution will not be funded by millionaires, but it will be funded by millions of people. The revolution will not be won through incremental change, but it will be won by making big demands and taking big action. This is how we win." This framework has already influenced subsequent movements, from the Fight for $15 to the Green New Deal, showing how distributed organizing can build power for transformational change.
