Harris for President

The Beginning

In June 2024, I joined the Biden for President campaign in Wilmington, DE as a Design Lead. At the time, I had never worked in electoral politics. And since there were only two creatives on the design team at that point, I had to get up to speed…fast. With a small team on board, I ended up working a little in a lot of areas: social media, paid digital, mobilization, event materials, collateral, and web, among others. I made templates and toolkits knowing the workload and pace to come and was part of the task force assigned to refreshing the Biden/Harris brand.

A mosaic of examples of Biden/Harris campaign design elements from placards, t-shirts, billboards, and social media posts.

The Transition

After President Biden’s underwhelming performance at the June debate, momentum grew for the effort to name a new candidate for the Democratic ticket. That was the substance of conversation the morning on July 21 when my parents took me to brunch. Upon returning to my apartment and seeing that news of Biden’s stepping aside had broken, I politely hustled my parents into the car, knowing the sh*tstorm that was about to break.

And what broke was the fastest campaign roll out in presidential history.

The Announcement

With a new candidate and a second interim brand in the bag, what better way to get your footing than to develop a third brand! While work commenced on the brand, I was brought in to begin developing the interim website. The catch: the running mate had not been chosen and probably wouldn't be known to us till right before the announcement. So while the external firm chosen to develop the brand, Wide Eye, created the logos for the six running mates on the VPs short list, I designed the corresponding six different sites. The choice of Governor Tim Walz came to us less than two days before his official announcement on August 6.

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Team Perf and Merch

After a couple of months of the team working as generalists, responding to incoming requests based on whomever was available and capable, and eventually staffing up to a team of 30, we coalesced into verticals specialized for specific areas of the campaign. Enter Team Perf(ormance Media) and Merch(andise) with my stellar team of designers—Noah Whitford, Harrison Mitchell, and Margherita Urbani. Our mandate: to raise money. And, boy, did we.

Crowd at a Harris/Walz rally wearing various campaign merch

Performance Media

Urgent data to show election polling virtually tied. Gwen Walz's cookie recipe. Headline warning of Donald Trump's threats to democracy. Kamala Harris' birthday celebration. Our digital fundraising program took a comprehensive and fearless approach to reaching potential donors and fueling the largest campaign machine to date. Working with the team of strategists on the Fundraising team, we devised creative from highly sophisticated, tightly branded to completely off-the-wall, pursuing every possible angle to gain eyeballs and generate conversions.

When the digital fundraising team expressed concern that the design team couldn't keep up with the pace required, my singular focus became to meet—if not exceed—expectations for responsiveness and speed. We served large sets of variable ads, multiple sets a day at times, with each set analyzed to measure which were most effective. Each successive ad push capitalized on those best-in-class versions to constantly maximize performance.

At the conclusion of the campaign, our static ads program had generated over $58 million and 1 million donors, including 50 thousand monthly donors.

Harris/Walz digital ad example: words stating restore reproductive freedom

Harris/Walz digital ad example: Picture of Taylor Swift with a quote on why she's supporting Kamala

Harris/Walz digital ad example: Kamala looking happy

Harris/Walz digital ad example: looks like a phone alert

Harris/Walz digital ad example: looks like a phone screen receiving a call from Kamala

Harris/Walz digital ad example: Donald Trump with the campaign's red implying negativity

Harris/Walz digital ad example: ringing alarm clock

Harris/Walz digital ad example: football theme, looks like a football field

Harris/Walz digital ad example: old photo of Coach Walz with football related language

Harris/Walz digital ad example: graph showing how close the polling is

Lore among the performance team is that we created the first fundraising ad to make it on a late night show (fact check: unknown). Regardless of the earned media results, this singular ad generated more than $1 million.

Screenshot of Tim Walz' appearance on the Jimmy Kimmel late night show

Screen shot of Tim Walz on Jimmy Kimmel with caption of his saying the campaign is making money off his hot dish ad.

Merch

The other avenue to generate revenue for the campaign came in the form of merchandise sales. The keys to successful merch were authentic expressions of the candidates that votes identified with and quick capitalization of high visibility moments.

The Hat

The morning the announcement of Tim Walz had been made to the media, ideas were floating in the merch chat of getting something special made for official event that evening in Philadelphia. Between watching Governor Walz receive the call from Vice President Harris asking him to run with her while wearing a camouflage hat and having a dad whose wardrobe is largely comprised of the 3 Cs—Carrhart, camo, and conspicuity—I knew camo was the perfect symbol for this midwest dad. (Apologies to her and her fans: The intersection with Chappel Roan was a mere coincidence. But a fortuitous one.)

Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz wearing the Harris Walz camo campaign hat.

So I quickly mocked up a camo hat for the quickest approval in history, while the merch team worked on sourcing a Union-made blank somewhere in the vicinity of the event. When they asked what color thread the embroidery should be, I called my mom, who once had a side hustle doing custom embroidery, to text me spools, looking for the right fluoro orange, that I could look at without telling her what it was for.

When the merch store closed at the end of October, the hat had raised $3 million.

Press for The Hat

Harris-Walz Camo Hats Garner Nearly $2 Million in Sales | People
Is the Harris-Walz campaign making political merch great again? | MSNBC
Why the Harris Walz Camo Hat Is Becoming a Status Symbol for Liberals | Teen Vogue
Tim Walz's camo hat a big hit with Harris-Walz supporters | USA Today
Tim Walz and Chappell Roan and the Camo Hat, Explained | Glamour
Tim Walz loves camo. Now Democrats do, too | Fast Company
How the Harris-Walz Camo Hats Became a Viral Hit | Time
D.C. Dems' new status symbol: The camo Harris-Walz hat | Axios
Harris-Walz Campaign Camo Hat May Be Stroke of Gen Z Marketing Genius | Business Insider
Harris-Walz Camo hat is having a moment. Could it be bigger than MAGA red? | USA Today