Excitement. Hope. Grief. Betrayal. We followed one Black woman political strategist before and after the 2024 Presidential Election.
New York for Harris, a grassroots and civic engagement group founded by Ny Whitaker , was out in full force for Vice President Kamala Harris in the final four days leading up to the 2024 presidential election. Whitaker shared with AmNews her journey in those last moments of campaigning, her heartbreak over the post-election results, and what she plans to do next.
Whitaker's group had been supporting President Joe Biden since 2019, making the pivot to digital advocacy, virtual meetings, textbanking, and phone banking to get the vote out instead of more traditional in-person methods during the COVID-19 lockdowns. She was already avidly campaigning on his behalf when he made the decision to drop out of the presidential race against then-former President Donald Trump and hand the baton off to Harris.
But Whitaker didn't mind having to pivot and steer her campaign efforts toward Harris — this time, with all the raw excitement and momentum at being a part of a historic moment that many other Black-led organizations throughout the city, state, and country also felt.
"As a Black woman, [I'm] ready to go into gladiator mode," Whitaker said at the time. An East Harlem native, Whitaker is a former White House senior advisor, founder of the New York for Biden+Harris presidential campaign group, and founder and chief strategist at
Her group planned rolling weekly phone and text banks, forums about abortion access and women candidates, fun fundraising events, virtual e-banks, and pop-up educational series locally and statewide. They hosted a debate watch party, registered voters, and blasted social media. And most importantly, they recruited hundreds of volunteers to door knock and mobilize voters for Harris in mostly Republican districts and states — a tactic that many other worker unions and Democratic party organizers had committed to in New York City and State.
The weekend before the election was no different. In fact, the tension of the last three and a half months seemingly ratcheted up another impossibly high notch as hundreds of people once again gathered in the wee hours of the morning in Manhattan, or other counties, to get on buses and spend eight hours canvassing in the nearby swing state of Pennsylvania. On Nov. 2, one of Whitaker's volunteer groups met at the Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. State Office Building in Harlem. "Nothing beats direct contact," said Whitaker at the site. "This is what democracy looks like."
From that location alone, four buses were leaving for four different cities in Pennsylvania. Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine spoke a few words of encouragement, before volunteers separated into lines and filed onto their buses. One of the buses was a bilingual cohort, specifically gathered to reach out to Spanish-speaking residents.
Margarita Soto, a bus captain, recalled having deep conversations with Hispanic and Latino communities in Reading and Hazleton, Pennsylvania. In her time canvassing, she also found that Catholic and Evangelical Latinos were very conservative and Republican-leaning. They consider "a vote for Trump a vote for Christianity," while others simply recognized Trump's brand and name, she said.
"They've been there in those communities for, like, 20 to 30 years. They have turned those towns around, these were towns that were dying. These are working people with two or three jobs just trying to get ahead,"she said. "It's all about affordability of life [for them]. So can I afford my home? Can I afford the food? Can my kids be healthy? Can we have healthcare and can we get a good education?"
At that time on Saturday, there was a feeling that Trump had offended Puerto Rican voters at his rally at Madison Square Garden where speakers had made racist and disparaging remarks about the island the week prior and therefore was on rocky footing with the entire Hispanic voter bloc.
In reality, the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections discussed the possibility that Trump would make inroads among Black and Latino voters. Polling data from early in April 2024 had noted a shift in party voting trends among Black and Latino voters , especially along gender lines. A small chunk of both groups identified as Republican, Republican-leaning, or independent, because of issues like LGBTQ rights, abortion, homelessness, and crime.
"There's way more variation — Puerto Ricans being actual American citizens versus Cubans versus Mexicans versus first-, second-, third-generation," Dr. Tasha Philpot, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, told AmNews in a previous interview. "Each of those groups is very different in terms of their outlook toward politics, especially if they're phenotypically white versus phenotypically Black."
In all, Whitaker had 96 buses leave with volunteers that weekend. The work continued with a phone bank marathon she ran from noon to 9 p.m. everyday until the polls closed on Tuesday.
On Nov. 5, Election Day had finally arrived. In the city, voter turnout during early voting had been at an historic high and held promise, but also uncertainty.
There was never an expectation that the presidential race would be called right away for Harris or Trump on election night. Whitaker's group was prepared to begin "ballot chasing," or follow up with people who requested an absentee ballot but didn't vote yet, and "curing" early vote ballots, which means that a ballot had an error that needed correcting. Whitaker, who's on the advisory board of the New York Democratic Lawyers Council, was prepared for a knock down and dragged-out legal fight. What she wasn't prepared for was that the race would be called hours after the polls closed, early on Wednesday, Nov. 6, with Trump declared the winner for the electoral vote and, later, the popular vote.
What she wasn't prepared for was who the polls revealed voted for Trump.
Later on that. morning, when AmNews caught up with Whitaker, she was on her way to the SOMOS conference held annually in Puerto Rico , where city and state electeds as well as political affiliates flock after the election is over. She was on the plane to the island as the official declaration for Trump came in. She felt exhausted, she said, and was already trying to focus on self-care as opposed to the crushing disappointment at the post election results.
"I think that people are in mourning. That's the best term that I could use," said Whitaker over the phone. "People are in mourning and this is a day of reckoning for America. If the polls are correct, 62% of white women voted for him for a third time straight and I think it's important for people to focus on that data point."
According to the Associated Press (AP) VoteCast , a survey of the American electorate conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, 53% of white women voted for Trump in 2024, while 89% of Black women voted for Harris. Latina women were more evenly split with 59% voting for Harris and 39% voting for Trump this year. Meanwhile, Latino and White men voted mostly for Trump as well.
Dr. Nadia E. Brown , a professor of government at Georgetown University, said that based on historical trends, this was not a great year for an incumbent or the incumbent party to win and that people were upset with the state of the nation's leadership, whether that be the increase in asylum seekers or the administration's handling of Gaza. She said that young Latino men and a percentage of Black men felt unheard by the Democratic party, while Black women organizers felt "betrayed" by other women voters who didn't choose Harris.
"What happened in 2016, it doesn't help that it happened again in less than a decade. And this understanding that white women 'had to get their white women together,' that there was no amount of work that Black women could do to make it better. The frustration is that there's this fastidious viewpoint of Black women as magical negroes," said Brown, "who do all this work, show up, and without seeing their kids, must lead from an altruistic place of making America better but get little partnership in return. And have to do it again with a smile. That's the thing. It's the doing it again."
"Race and gender were on the ballot and people chose to vote for Trump and the GOP anyway," said Whitaker.
In the end, Whitaker was satisfied that her grassroots group 'left it all on the line' for Harris. They had a total of 210,000 volunteers doing 2,000 door knocks a minute, which was unprecedented for them. She was proud of New York Democrats winning House seats that were previously Republican and getting the state's Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) ballot measure passed, even though Harris won the state by 12 points when Biden had won by 30 points.
After Harris gave her concession speech on Wednesday afternoon, Whitaker simply said that the "work begins anew."
