Two Florida A&M University graduates working behind the scenes are helping Vice President Kamala Harris navigate a summer of unprecedented political intrigue as she emerges as the Democratic nominee to be president.
In fact, former state Rep. Alan Williams and Vince Evans, executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus, cut their political teeth at Tallahassee City Hall: Williams was an aide to former Mayor John Marks, and Evans worked for City Commissioner Curtis Richardson.
Their paths would later cross when Williams represented Tallahassee and Gadsden County in the Florida House 2008-16 and Evans was an aide to former U.S. Rep. Al Lawson, D-Tallahassee.
And their work can be found in the background of Harris’s ascension. This year they were among the team of politicos who helped work through the Democratic Party’s break from President Joe Biden’s candidacy without fraying their coalition – and laid the groundwork for the party embracing Harris.
As the BBC recently put it, when Harris – who flunked out of her run for the White House in 2019 – “steps onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week as the party’s presidential nominee, she’ll do so knowing that many in the audience cheering her on once counted her out.”
Never has a sitting president with enough delegates to claim the nomination stepped aside. But as Democrats’ convention got underway in Chicago this week, Harris was polling 22 points higher than Biden was when he withdrew from the race June 27, had moved seven battleground states into the toss-up column, and was setting fundraising records.
The turnaround in the Democrats’ fortune, said Nova Southeastern University political scientist Charles Zelden, is evidence of the work Harris’ team did to prepare for this moment: “You can’t underestimate a good staff. Their job is to further the agenda of the principal. There are people here in South Florida talking about the state being in play, and that’s a big change.”
Even FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, the statistician who accurately predicted the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections, this week recalculated the odds of the Democratic candidate defeating former President Donald Trump this year from 27% in favor to 54%.
Williams has the it’s-a-mouthful title of “senior advisor to the vice president for public engagement and government affairs.” He is not associated with the campaign, but his job in the vice president’s office is to line up the elected officials and members of the public who meet with Harris when she travels on official business.
“She’s a connoisseur of information and is able to absorb data, synthesize it and then connect it with people in a way I’ve never seen before. She has a common touch,” Williams said.
In April, he accompanied Harris on an “Economic Opportunity Tour” that included stops in Atlanta, Detroit, and Milwaukee. Analysts and consultants said such meetings can produce a connection between a party activist and politician that later benefits a campaign.
Meanwhile, as pressure mounted for Biden to withdraw, Evans found himself engaged in a kind of backdoor “shuttle diplomacy” on behalf of the Congressional Black Caucus and various factions of voters, donors and elected officials working to persuade Biden to end his campaign.
Publicly the CBC firmly supported Biden remaining in the race.
“But we were very clear: if and when the time came to seek a new nominee there would be only one person that we would get behind and have the full support of the Congressional Black Caucus,” Evans said.
As Biden prepared to announce his withdrawal, Evans deployed the 60 CBC members to make the case publicly for Harris to be at the top of the ticket. The caucus’ members represent 120 million citizens.
“We worked the phones to let it be known where the Congressional Black Caucus stood. I made sure the members had their statements ready to go and that their tweets were in draft form so that there would be no lapse in momentum,” Evans said.
The Thursday before the weekend Biden withdrew, Evans met with Douglas Emhoff at the Vice President’s residency.
“I assured the second gentleman that evening that the mission was to do everything we could to ensure the Vice President’s success, whether that meant she was continuing to run as vice president or she was our party’s nominee,”recalled Evans.
The Harris effect is such that, this past month, both the Harris campaign and the DNC broke fundraising records and a Monmouth poll found that Democratic enthusiasm for their candidate increased from 46% to 85%.
Williams may be the only former elected official on Harris’ staff. In 2016, as a superdelegate to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, he met then-U.S. Senate candidate Harris and introduced her at the Florida delegation’s breakfast.
“Little did I know that eight years later I would be working for her, and she would be the nominee to be President of the United States,” Williams said.
Evans and Williams each bring more than a quarter century of Florida political experience to Harris’ leadership circles, and both say the Vice President’s candidacy has turned deep red Florida a shade of purple.
Williams has reams of contacts in local government and political circles built during a decade in the Florida House. Evans directed statewide efforts for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Andrew Gillum in 2018, and Joe Biden in 2020 and thinks he knows how Harris can win Florida’s 30 electoral votes.
He said the campaign has a long way to go, “but if we do it right….”
Doing it right, he explained, is to build a coalition of Democrats, no-party-affiliated voters and persuadable Republicans in North Florida. Employ the personal touch and go door-to-door in neighborhoods along the I-4 corridor, shore up and run up the numbers in Miami, Dade, Palm Beach, Broward counties, he added.
“The excitement you see around the country has trickled down to Florida. There’s no question about, we have a real chance to take Florida,” Evans said.
On Wednesday, Newsweek reported that the Republican Party of Florida’s fundraising email sounded the alarm that Trump is at risk of losing Florida and that Harris has gained 9 points in polls since July. The party republished a tweet by a conservative Fort Lauderdale mayoral candidate critical of the party’s leadership.
Evan Power, state chair of the Republican Party of Florida, dismissed the story and tweet as a fundraising stunt without commenting on the email.
Thursday night when Harris accepts the Democratic nomination the FDP will host watch parties in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando and Tallahassee.
Former U.S. Rep. Al Lawson, state House Rep. Allison Tant, state House Rep. Gallop Franklin and Tallahassee Mayor John Dailey will be at the Moon at 7:30 p.m.
James Call is a member of the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida Capital Bureau. He can be reached at jcall@tallahassee.com and is on X as @CallTallahassee.
