[T]his week Bernie Sanders announced 15 staff members on his national campaign team. Ten of the top staffers are women, including deputy campaign manager Rene Spellman, a veteran of Sanders’ 2016 run.
The organization includes women in every branch of the campaign. It also includes many people of color. Increasing diversity was a priority, said campaign manager Faiz Shakir.
“That is the aim and intention of this campaign, to reflect America,” Shakir said.
Sanders has said publicly that his campaign was “too white” and “too male” in 2016.
“I think it’s fair to say that he wanted to do things differently this time,” Shakir said.
Issues of sexism and gender discrimination were also raised by former campaign staffers last year. Sanders apologized early this year in the wake of the reports.
Following the announcement of Sanders’ new team, controversy emerged over David Sirota, who previously worked as a journalist for Capital & Main and a columnist for the Guardian. The Atlantic reported Sirota was advising the campaign — and attacking other candidates on Twitter — before he officially came on board as a speechwriter and senior communications adviser.
Shakir said the campaign feels Sirota was “above board” in the transition, noting he was transparent with his previous employers.
“We feel confident in the way in which he conducted himself during the course of those conversations,” Shakir said. “It feels like there’s an effort to try to make that a much bigger deal than it actually is.”
Shakir was untroubled by the movement of several Sanders 2016 veterans to Beto O’Rourke’s campaign, as Seven Days reported this week.
“The fluctuation of staffing is normal for the course of business in these campaigns,” Shakir said.
Here are the members of Sanders’ campaign team:
• Faiz Shakir, Campaign Manager
Shakir previously worked as the ACLU’s national political director, overseeing the organization’s Washington office and state advocacy and policy departments. Shakir has a reputation for being well-connected in liberal circles. He has limited campaign experience, but has worked as a senior adviser to former Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Shakir also founded the blog ThinkProgress.org, a news site from the progressive Center for American Progress Action Fund. He is the first Muslim campaign manager for a major presidential campaign.
• Rene Spellman, Deputy Campaign Manager
Spellman is returning to Sanders’ presidential campaign team — in 2016, she was the Sanders’ team’s national director of traveling press and media logistics, where she was said to “run a tight ship.” She got her start in politics as a youth vote director on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, and then as a senior adviser in Florida during his 2012 re-election campaign. She was the campaign manager on Georgia businessman Jim Barksdale’s failed 2016 U.S. Senate campaign. Most recently, Spellman worked for the Creative Artists Agency, an L.A.-based talent agency, where she connected clients with advocacy and philanthropic work.
• Ari Rabin-Havt, Chief of Staff
Rabin-Havt is an in-house hire for the Sanders’ campaign; he was deputy chief of staff in Sanders’ Senate office. Rabin-Havt has a background in media: He worked for The Agenda on SiriusXM and at Media Matters for America. He also served as an adviser to former Vice President Al Gore and former U.S. Sen. Harry Reid.
• Analilia Mejia, Political Director
Mejia comes to the campaign from the New Jersey Working Families Alliance, where she served as executive director, defecting from home state loyalties to Sen. Cory Booker. Her background is largely grassroots and labor organizing in New Jersey and the Midwest, and she’s worked on issues like $15 minimum wage and automatic voter registration. She has worked for organizations like the Service Employees International Union, Unite Here, Workers United and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, among others.
• Sarah Badawi, Deputy Political Director
Badawi worked as a senior adviser on Sanders’ 2018 Senate campaign. Previously, she served as legislative affairs director for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.
• Claire Sandberg, National Organizing Director
Sandberg worked as distributed organizing director on Sanders’ 2016 campaign, and has a background in a Michigan gubernatorial race and in health care reform. Recently, she has repeatedly defended Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., on Twitter, saying Omar was “unfairly vilified” for the calling-out of AIPAC, a controversial move that some said was anti-Semitic.
• Josh Orton, Policy Director
Orton is another transfer from Sanders’ Senate office, where he worked as a senior adviser. Orton previously worked for Sens. Russ Feingold and Harry Reid, as well as for the nonprofit NARAL Pro-Choice America.
• Heather Gautney, Senior Policy Adviser
A sociology professor at Fordham University, Gautney served as a senior policy adviser on the Senate Budget Committee when Sanders was the committee’s ranking member. She worked as a senior researcher for Bernie 2016, and as a legislative fellow in Sanders’ office from 2012-13.
• Arianna Jones, Communications Director
Jones is a veteran on Sanders’ communication team. She served as deputy communications director on the 2016 campaign, and as the senior communications adviser for Friends of Bernie Sanders, Sanders’ Senate campaign committee. She has also worked as a senior vice president at Revolution Messaging, a progressive public relations agency, and as a producer for MSNBC.
• Sarah Ford, Deputy Communications Director
Since working as national deputy press secretary on Bernie 2016, Ford worked on Cynthia Nixon’s unsuccessful New York gubernatorial bid, did public relations for labor unions, and was a communications adviser for Friends of Bernie Sanders.
• Briahna Joy Gray, National Press Secretary
Coming to the campaign from The Intercept, where she worked as a columnist and senior politics editor, Gray is one of the bigger names on Sanders’ team. A recent New York Magazine article called Gray out for left-wing factionalism, noting that she dismissed reports of Russia hacking Democratic emails in 2016, to the dismay of Sanders supporters who said it distracted from the content of the emails. A strong supporter of ranked-choice voting, she ultimately cast her ballot for Jill Stein. Previously, Gray worked as a lawyer at a boutique New York litigation firm.
• David Sirota, Senior Communications Adviser & Speechwriter
Sirota comes from a career in journalism, as an investigative reporter at Newsweek/IBT and Capital & Main, a columnist at The Guardian, and a radio host in Denver. He has also had a few political gigs, including working as Sanders’ House press secretary in the early 2000s. Sirota came under fire for allegedly presenting as an independent journalist while already advising Sanders.
• Georgia Parke, Senior Social Media Strategist
Parke has served in Sanders’ Senate office since 2016 as digital director, managing the senator’s social media pages.
• Tim Tagaris, Senior Adviser
Tagaris worked as digital fundraising director during Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Tagaris has led small-dollar fundraising for organizations like Giffords: Courage to Fight Gun Violence, VoteVets, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy and Stacey Abrams’ Georgia gubernatorial campaign.
• Robin Curran, Digital Fundraising Director
Curran did fundraising work during the 2018 election cycle as email director for the Democratic National Committee. She has also worked on several progressive campaigns, including Bernie 2016. She faces high expectations in the role after the 2020 campaign’s $6 million first day, a figure that far outpaced that of the competition.
