On the evening of June 27, after the presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Aaron Regunberg began texting friends and colleagues asking, “What are we going to do?” While Biden had already been polling behind Trump, the debate revealed an unsteady incumbent unlikely to rally Democratic voters ahead of the November election. In the following days, as President Biden reiterated his commitment to running, Regunberg and others hopped on the phone and began thinking through their options: Was there a role for grassroots organizing? And can we cobble together the capacity to do it? The following Friday, just over a week after the debate, Pass the Torch went public.
Helmed by a steering committee that includes Regunberg, Tiara Mack and Wendy Lawton, Pass the Torch is an all volunteer organization that mobilized Democratic voters to urge Biden to step aside. For less than 28 days in the aftermath of the debate, around 50 volunteers participated in near-nightly calls to help mobilize tens of thousands of voters across the U.S. to take action. The day before Biden announced he would be stepping down, Pass the Torch organized a demonstration outside the White House, driving home the demand from regular voters to see a change in leadership.
Less than a week after Biden stepped down, I spoke with Regunberg — a progressive community and electoral organizer for some 15 years. Both during and following his time as a Rhode Island state legislator, Regunberg was involved in crisis response organizing, particularly after the 2016 election and then in the aftermath of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death and the impending confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett. Regunberg has been a longtime climate organizer and, as a law student, organized efforts to shut down recruitment events by big law firms that represent Exxon Mobil. We discussed rapid response organizing, the impact of positive messaging and the role Pass the Torch played in Biden’s decision.
Given your background, especially with rapid response campaigns — such as after the 2016 election — were there any lessons you took from those experiences and applied to Pass the Torch?
I think one lesson or similarity from the [post-2016 election] experience was just that there are these moments when you can tell there’s a shared experience across billions of people. There’s a shared response. There’s a sort of pent up energy and a need to do something about it. It’s important that, as a movement, we are ready to step up when that happens and fill the vacuum to help channel that pent up energy and those voices into useful, meaningful action.
In this saga, the last few weeks ended up being particularly important because — and this is honestly one of my biggest frustrations from the whole experience — for whatever set of reasons, none of the progressive movement’s organizational infrastructure stepped up. I was surprised that none of the many big progressive, electorally-focused organizations that have a severe stake in stopping fascism in November were willing to step up and get to work on this.
At the same time, one of the biggest talking points was that this push [for Biden to step back] was just coming from elites and donors, which we know is the exact opposite, right? It was regular voters for months or years who have been very clear that they wanted something new. The debate was the shock that finally got some of the party elites to realize what regular voters had been saying all along. So it’s important that we have structures to make the voices of regular Democrats heard.
Was it part of Pass the Torch’s organizing strategy to counter that line of messaging — that elites and donors were behind the push for Biden to step down?
That was a big part of the whole logic of us organizing. In a lot of ways, so much of what was going to impact the resolution of this were the decisions and actions of folks at the very top of the party, behind closed doors. But because of that specious line of attack, we thought it was really important for there to be a component of this that was making sure the voices of regular Democrats were heard in the process. That’s really what we were trying to do.
What were some of the ways Pass the Torch organized to help make sure voices of regular Democrats were heard?
We thought it was really important that we make sure our Democratic leaders in Congress were hearing from voters — the party base. So we set up a call tool, we set up an email tool, and we generated around 10,000 phone calls to members of Congress and another 20,000 online actions. That was a big piece of it, but we also did some in-person actions, like at the Ohio state party convention. We had some folks similarly in Michigan and Wisconsin.
On July 20, we did a big demonstration outside the White House that came together in just a couple of days. It was one of the most positive actions I’ve ever experienced. It was so nice to see the unity of the message — of everyone saying, “We’re here because we love Joe Biden. We are grateful for him, and it’s time for him to pass the torch.” We had a great group of diverse speakers that I think really spoke to the reality of how much this was not being driven by donors or elites. This [message] was from regular people who have so much on the line in this election.
We were doing outreach to delegates. Although it ended up not being necessary, we were working to identify and support delegates who felt similarly to us that Biden needed to pass the torch. Some of our members in Pennsylvania filmed an ad calling for Biden to pass the torch, and it was actually all volunteers who had worked hard in 2020 to elect Biden. We were going to try to get it directly in front of the president. We had an online support team, because any time a Democratic leader came out and publicly joined the call for the president to pass the torch, they were swarmed by some of these big grifter influencer accounts. We put together a Twitter support team of folks to offer online support when Dem leaders stepped up and did the right thing. So, kind of on the fly, we put together a bunch of different teams working on different angles to the issue.
Given the short time frame, how important was it to organize from multiple and different angles?
We were definitely in all-hands-on-deck, break-the-glass emergency mode — so let’s throw everything we can against the wall. There were dozens and dozens of volunteers who were putting in major time every day on this in our various Signal and Slack threads and at in-person and online actions.
It helped that we were in this sort of time-bound moment. We all knew we had a few weeks before the door slammed shut on this. We all knew that if and when Biden was officially nominated we were going to shut up and go back to being good Democratic soldiers, and do what we could to support the ticket and drag it over the finish line. It was this short-term moment when the course of American civilization could be decided. So [we thought] it’s time to just throw down and put everything we have in because we’re not going to have another chance.
Given that President Biden largely insisted he would continue to run, were there ever inflection moments when the campaign pivoted or changed organizing tactics to respond to what was being said?
We took on additional tactics and ideas as we went. When it became apparent the DNC was moving forward on this abbreviated timeline for an early virtual nomination, we switched focus onto that for several days until they delayed it. I think, in large part, it was delayed because of a Congressional sign-on letter we worked to draft and circulate. It was this weird time where you’d have one day where it seemed totally, utterly hopeless and the conversation was locked down. Then, the next day, you’d have more public calls, and it’d be like, “Oh, okay, we’ve got a real shot here.” Then, the next day, it would again seem like, “Oh, no, we’re done.” So, there were these big swings between hope and despair. But we all settled on a strategy of: “We can’t know exactly what’s happening, so let’s keep going and do whatever we can regardless of the rumors until it’s either resolved or it’s too late and it’s time to unite.”
You can see that sense of hope in the positive messaging around the Pass the Torch campaign. Did that also play a role in your organizing strategy?
A part of why we were doing this organizing was that we had enough faith in President Biden that he would eventually do the right thing. From the beginning, one of the main lines to try to shut down the conversation and dissuade folks from speaking out was that “Joe’s never going to do this, so all you’re doing is hurting our eventual nominee.” I think we were all coming from a place — in some ways, paradoxically — of having faith in President Biden that he would do what he has so often done throughout his career of public service and put the country first. That was a big part of our framing. In my opinion, and for many of us involved in this, Joe Biden has been the best president in our lifetimes on some of the issues we care about. But he just isn’t the best standard bearer for us in the 2024 election. We did want to have a message and framing for our organizing that acknowledged all of that.
Do you think this kind of positive framing helped re-energize volunteers to get involved with grassroots organizing ahead of an election that has already been somewhat demoralizing?
In any organization, anger and fear can be important motivators for taking constructive action — but they only take you so far, and they leave a gap. You need to have a hopeful vision undergirding your work to keep people involved and engaged, particularly over the last few weeks when it felt like there was a lot of fatalism. I mean, you had quotes from senior House Democrats saying, “We’ve all just resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.” So, part of winning this push had to be saying, “That’s absurd, we can win this. Americans do not like Donald Trump and his radical extreme Project 2025 agenda. Americans are also feeling pretty good about Democrats, right? Democrats have been winning special elections. Our swing state senators are polling great. We’re actually in a strong position to win. We just have a particular problem at the top of the ticket and the good news about that is it’s actually a very solvable issue. So let’s get to work trying to solve it.”
What are some of the strategizing lessons or insights learned from this kind of rapid response organizing?
One important thing for us was being really conscious about our messaging and trying to stick to it. There were always people who would throw out suggestions or there were opportunities to potentially do stuff that would fall outside the frame that we decided was the most useful and impactful. So having discipline on that was important. This was all on the fly, so we left capacity on the table because we didn’t have the best onboarding and plug-in system. We were building the plane as we were flying it, and we knew it was temporary. Planning more carefully from the beginning would have been valuable, but we didn’t really have the luxury of time.
The one lesson from this that I would want folks looking at it to take away is: We didn’t buy into the push to shut this down and say, “It’s never going to happen.” And so we took action. The same goes with everyone else who spoke out on this. It’s a good lesson for every progressive organizer because that is a common tool used to shut down all sorts of important efforts — to say, “Well, that’s never going to happen, so shut up.” I think this was a really good example of that reality. Often things seem impossible right up until the moment that they become inevitable, and I think we saw that in this saga. That’s how a lot of the fights we care about are going to go. They’re going to seem impossible until they suddenly start seeming inevitable. Our job is to ignore the haters on that first leg of the work who are saying it’s impossible.
Now that President Biden has stepped down, what role do you think Pass the Torch played in making it a reality?
It’s really hard to know. So much of the credit for this goes to people like Nancy Pelosi. Thank God she’s someone who understands the need to win and knows how to pull the levers of power within the party. We don’t want to be taking too much credit. There are people in our group with a lot of experience who said, from a causation perspective, that our organizing had 1 or 2 percentage points of impact. Again, just because no one else was doing this. Showing that this was coming from the majority of Democrats was so important. So I think it’s not too hubristic to say that we were a very small, but still solidly appreciable factor.
During the debrief call with our core crew who took on leadership roles in the group, I said something along the lines of: “This is something to remember and take with you for the rest of your lives. To have played a legitimate role in one of the most consequential few weeks leading to this decision, that could be the most impactful thing any of us do as organizers. That’s not to denigrate everything else we’re able to accomplish in our lives, but this was really an important moment and effort that you all were a part of.”
Going forward, will Pass the Torch continue to organize ahead of the election?
We’re still figuring that out. I think we initially thought maybe there could be some use in helping with uniting Democrats around Harris. It turned out that that just happened immediately and organically, which had been one of our talking points. They were saying it would be chaos and disunity, and we were saying, “What are you talking about?” I think there are some members of the group who are interested in thinking through if there are ways to continue contributing with swing state organizing, but for a lot of us, our thoughts are that this was a temporary thing for one particular moment and we’re going to carry these new friendships with us for the rest of our lives. As a group, Pass the Torch has played its role.
Correction 7/30/2024: An earlier version of this story stated that Aaron Regunberg was currently running for Congress in Rhode Island. He ran and lost in 2023.
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