Ashley Allison is the current CEO of the Turner Conoly Group, which strategizes with campaigns, consults with companies, and provides leadership development and training. Allison served as the National Coalitions Director for the 2020 Biden-Harris presidential campaign. She was the deputy director and senior policy advisor for the Obama White House Office of Public Engagement and ran African American outreach for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. Allison has experience in community building, advocacy, outreach, crisis management, and coalition building. Allison is the Board Chair for the Color of Change PAC Board, a member of the Free Press Action Fund Board, a political commentator for CNN, and former host of the podcast, Pod for Cause.
This interview, conducted by Liana McGhee and Will Imbrie-Moore, was edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: Where did your passion for campaign strategy come from?
Ashley Allison: It honestly came from the desire to do good, fight for justice, racial equity and be a public servant. One of the ways — there are many ways you can do that type of work — but one of the ways that I decided to do it was through campaigning because I wanted to work and elect people who were going to do that work while in public office and in government. I’ve done this type of work in non-profits and just in movement, but I decided to join campaigns.
Really I worked on a lot of local campaigns before, but my first big, paid job was the Obama campaign. Obviously, he was a candidate of hope and change and historical nature, so he was the one who I was like ‘okay I’m going to change my career for.’
HPR: Identity is a dominant facet of the political conversation. Given your work on President Obama’s re-election campaign with African-American outreach and as National Coalitions Director on the Biden-Harris campaign, what do you perceive the role and relationship of identity in politics?
Allison: I think it’s beyond politics. People have to be able to show up as their full transparent selves every day. When they walk into the grocery store, when they walk into their classroom, on the bus, and in their home — and when they’re in politics. If we allow people to show up as their full transparent self in other walks of life, it won’t feel that hard to be themselves when in politics. We have more things in common than we have different, so a lot of times people will say ‘well we’re going to put this bucket of voters in this basket and this bucket of voters in this basket and talk to them about different issues.’ Well, guess what? Everybody cares about student loan debt, everybody cares about having good schools, everybody cares about having safe streets for their kids to play on.
Now, how you communicate with people and how you get them the information — that might have something to do with identity. I think it plays a role, but it’s bigger than just playing a role in politics. As a society, we have to welcome people to show up in their diversity and their uniqueness — and that’s beyond just race, and beyond just gender, it’s every way people want to identify.
HPR: As Deputy Director of the Office of Public Engagement in the Obama administration, your work centered around creating avenues for marginalized voices to impact the President’s work. What do you think of the relationship between highlighting often-forgotten perspectives and asking people to recall and re-vocalize their trauma in order to effect that change?
Allison: People who are proximate to the pain often have the solutions for the problems. We need to make sure that everyone has a seat at the table when we are developing strategies and solutions to impact people’s lives — especially those who are living in the issue. I also think that people have to be comfortable, and we can’t force someone to relive their trauma or relive their story for us to develop the good solution. It has to be in a way that people feel like they want to do this work, share their story, and do it in a comfortable way.
I also think there is a way — and some people do this, and we try to do this — where we don’t get stuck in the trauma and we move to a place of joy and aspiration. A lot of the work that different organizations are doing now is celebrating joy. Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you’re sad. Just because you’re — fill in the blank — doesn’t mean that you have to be stuck in trauma. And so it’s about finding ways so that as you come up with solutions, you can move from this place of pain to aspirational living and a place of joy.
HPR: What do you think Biden’s campaign did best? What was your favorite/proudest moment of the Biden campaign? What was the Biden campaign’s biggest mistake/greatest challenge?
Allison: We won! That was the best thing we did. I sit on the campaign, and I always talk about this, but no one really knew what we were doing because no one ran a presidential campaign in a pandemic, right? We had a lot of, including myself, experienced political strategists, but I’ve never been on a campaign where I’ve never gotten to meet my team in person and strategize and whiteboard it out. So we were doing everything on Zoom.
To that end, I think that sometimes on campaigns, you don’t create space for any of the emotional intelligence work that has to happen sometimes and some of the softer skills of doing work. It’s like, ‘we need to get every vote, we need to do whatever we need to do to get every vote and that’s all we need to focus on,’ but when you’re doing everything on Zoom and you don’t get to go have a beer after a long day at the office, you have to do things to build better team camaraderie and really build community. I think we did that really well. In the absence of being in-person, being able to build trust allowed us to get over a threshold in a quite expedited way to then really get to strategy and also realize ‘we’re in Zoom, but all of the voters are in Zoom for the most part too.’ We needed to think about how we were building community in a team so that we could then build community in virtual events and things like that.
HPR: There’s been more concern over President Biden’s popularity in recent months. Do you think the President will run again and win?
Allison: Sure, yeah. I don’t know. If he were to, it has to be in 2024. I don’t think he’ll sit a cycle out and then come back. If he’s able to run, I think he’s going to run again. Yeah, I do. I don’t think you get to that place — and it takes so long to get there — and you just bow out. In order to want to be the President of the United States, you have to fully believe that you are the best thing for the country. Particularly, if Trump runs, I definitely think Biden will run again.
HPR: And you think he’ll win?
Allison: I don’t know. I don’t know about that one. I don’t know because the rules are being so rigged right now that — we have some of the best organizers in the game and we can register millions and millions of people — but if none of their votes count, then it doesn’t matter so I think that would be an obstacle. If it’s Biden and someone else, I don’t know. I don’t have rose-colored glasses to believe that it will be easy, but I think he definitely could run again and I do think that he could probably beat Trump again.
