About once a day, someone would wander into our office seemingly without a purpose. We’d make small talk with them, offer a sign, buttons, or information, and then they would wander back out, often empty handed. It was always unclear whether they were satisfied with their visit. Sometimes we’d get lucky and we might convince them to become a supporter by signing a “commit to caucus” card. It was always a surprise who was persuadable and who wasn’t. In fact, more than once, food delivery drivers signed commit to caucus cards after dropping off our dinner.

Our office mural of completed commit to caucus cards.

While campaign offices are meant to be welcoming places that eschew the character of the candidate, they also have to be conscious of security and privacy. Our office shared a wall with Yang’s campaign, and Biden and Warren had offices just a couple blocks away.

From what I heard, the different campaigns were very friendly with each other in the earlier part of the campaign. Many close friendships formed between staffers. Though as time wore on, social encounters with other organizers became rarer.

But aside from minor shade, the Democratic campaigns were largely friendly. The bigger threat was Republicans.

While knocking doors one day in the empty, snow covered town of Hansell (pop. 98), a beat up truck pulled up behind me and a man in a TRUMP 2020 hat asked very pointedly what I was doing. I kept walking. He kept driving slowly beside me while an unkempt dog yapped at me. After a terse conversation where he made it clear I wasn’t welcome and told me I appeared threatening to people, he drove off, presumably satisfied that he had spread his version of patriotism for the day.

Paid staff are used to encounters like that and it’s why I prefer to send volunteers to safer, more populated areas.

But rogue, self-important Trump goons aren’t the most fickle characters on the Iowa campaign trail. That recognition is reserved for Project Veritas.

Project Veritas is an especially contemptible right wing propaganda group that dispatches its members to pose as sympathetic to a cause in an effort to catch footage of progressive activists or reporters in compromising situations. Footage they share is often heavily and unfairly edited to appear as damning as possible to its subjects.

Iowa, a state swarmed with ambitious young politicos tied to campaigns of national importance, was an enticing target for Project Veritas. As staffers, we were regularly sent reminders of how to behave around volunteers and new supporters so we wouldn’t be caught off guard by an undercover Veritas agent, and there was even some formal training on the topic.

As far as I was aware, the Buttigieg campaign was never successfully targeted by Project Veritas — the Sanders campaign was not so lucky. One of their organizers was caught on tape by a Project Veritas member explaining his radical left views, suggesting that there were many other leftists like him on the campaign.

The smearing of this organizer was a lesson for us — one we got to learn the easy way. While I am confident none of the Buttigieg organizers I knew could have been caught in an identical situation, we weren’t naїve enough to think that we were immune to Project Veritas’s tactics.

It’s the province of every campaign staffer to be open and welcoming but slow to trust. At the end of the day, we’re just a bunch of tired twenty-somethings with truckloads of signs and stickers — and access to more voter data than anyone should be comfortable with. And we’re supposed to turn those materials into votes.

It’s a lot of responsibility. For anyone. When political organizers say they talk for a living, it’s not a joke. That’s what we do. But we don’t just talk, we make friends. We build social networks. We transplant ourselves into communities where we know no one, and then become a hub of political and social interaction.

It’s exhausting and taxing, but the people are what make the thing work. And really, they’re the best part about it.