No better room

For better or for worse, the experience of a lifetime.

We had plans for every contingency. If this data feed failed, a second one was on standby, and a third. If that dashboard broke, there were two more lined up behind it. If there was an error in the spreadsheets, we had scripts ready to fix them. If the automatic scrapers went down, there was a tool for running them manually; if that stopped working, there was another tool for entering data by hand. There were backups, and backups for backups. Countless hours went into building and testing not just Plan A, but also Plan B, and Plan C, all the way down to the plan if the internet stopped working and the power went out: A fully-charged laptop, preloaded with all of our models, locked in a room by itself.

In the end, we didn't need any of it, not even Plan A. The night—election night, from the Harris campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, where I’ve been working the last few months—was over in a matter of hours. The data team that I was part of was tasked with providing the campaign with minute-by-minute, county-by-county, precinct-by-precinct updates about the state of the race. There was a whole floor of us, monitoring everything from the status of the Associated Press’ data pipelines to the Twitter accounts of political influencers in Nevada. And given our opponent’s loose relationship with the law and the electoral will of the people, our assignment was particularly urgent this year. The better and faster we knew the truth, the better and faster we could counteract efforts to disregard it. 

But that truth quickly became obvious: We lost, and he won. The minutes and decimal places didn’t matter. Nobody needed our careful analysis or our detailed data to see which way the wind was blowing. 

Nor did we need our fallbacks or failovers. The thing that the campaign’s engineers and analysts built—very talented engineers and analysts; brutally hard working; and soon, as this campaign winds down, looking for a job; email me if you want to hire them—worked, with devastating efficiency. As one analyst said, they were flawlessly delivered disastrous news all night. The engineers’ backups sat quietly on the sidelines, as Plan A unrelentingly pressed forward, squeezing the happiness out of a hopeful room, like a ratchet slowly ticking tighter.

Still. Even if they never made it off the shelf, those backups mean something. They represent something. They are the good work of good people, fighting on. The world will never see them, and they will not, in a strict sense, ever matter. Not seeing something, however, is not the same as it not being there. 

—

The first irony of that night, despite our principal job being to document a quickly unfolding catastrophe, is that it was fun. It was a frenzy, an intoxicating cocktail of adrenaline and urgency. So often, professional speed is manufactured. It is mandated by a boss, or self-imposed by our past selves, and by whatever arbitrary due date we once logged in a Jira ticket. They do not make movies about people hitting corporate deadlines, because nobody really cares about corporate deadlines. 

But on Tuesday night, the urgency was real. The engineering infrastructure had to stay up. The analysis had to be done, at a breakneck pace. Hundreds of data pipelines fed into predictive models about millions of voters, feeding data to dozens of analysts within minutes of those results being published on thousands of county precinct websites—and our mandate was to figure out what it’s telling us before anyone else did. Tell the campaign if it’s winning or losing; tell it how to respond. Tell it that its forecasts underestimated rural support, or overestimated how much mail-in ballots cannibalized election day turnout. Find something important, and your discovery could, without hyperbole, be quoted on CNN fifteen minutes later. 

You are supported by every resource that the campaign can muster, are studying a problem that the world is watching, have access to more data on the election and the electorate than everyone from Nate Silver or the New York Times. And your one job is to figure out what is happening, because the President of the United States wants to know. Never before have I been involved in trying to answer a more pressing question for a more important audience—and never before has the answer been worse.

—

The second irony of that night is that, had we won, there was no room I’d rather be in. We would’ve been the center of a national party; we would’ve known, moments before everyone else, that that highest and hardest of glass ceilings had been broken; and I would’ve been surrounded by the people who broke it.

But had we lost, there was also no room I’d rather be in. If we are entering a dark time, the handful of weeks I spent in Wilmington will not have made it any lighter. In many ways, I was a tourist on the campaign—here briefly, working on the edges. Other people worked here for much longer, on much more critical things. But for the short time I was here—and for those few hours on Tuesday night—we were all in the war room together. It was not enough, nor was it, in the long arc of a campaign, critical work. As the veterans say, our most important job is to earn more votes; everything else is a distant second. In that moment, though, we were doing all that we could do. And knowing that will matter to me.

So, if you are worried about what’s coming next—do something. If you are mad—do something. And sure, do something because it might make a difference; because it might make a dent; because a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. It might, if you are better at this than I was. 

But also, do something because it is easier to lose on the field than in the stands. As a spectator to a spiraling election, the despair is hollow; you are helpless to stop everything from unraveling in its final innings. Though we were ultimately just watching election returns like everyone else—this year, the cat was dead, quite dead, and all we did was open the box to find out—from the inside, you see just how furious the fight is to keep it alive. And while that doesn’t change the result, it changes you.

—

The best way to spend four hours in Wilmington, Delaware, the joke goes, is to spend the first thirty minutes driving to Philadelphia. I can’t pretend that there’s not some truth to that. It is bleak here, like an old mall in a shrinking suburb. But for the last eighteen months, on a few floors in a faceless downtown coworking space, there was a bit of magic. There was a growing team of people, putting in more hours than any other job would ask of them, for a fraction of the financial benefits they could make elsewhere, trying—truly, without exaggeration or embellishment—to make the world a better one. 

But they will never be celebrated, because we lost. Their work will remain unknown, because the postmortems about this campaign will be about what we did wrong and not about what they did right. They will not be seen, but that does not mean they haven’t been here. 

They are good people, fighting on. And in three years, they will be hiring again.