Zoom Is Back in a Big Way—Thanks to Kamala Harris
Reading Time: 7 minutesKamala Harris’ Campaign Single-Handedly Revived a Beleaguered App, Identity groups are organizing massive, successful video calls to support the presidential nominee—but it’s a chaotic effort behind the scenes., Win With Black Women: How Kamala Harris’ cam
A year ago, the famous videoconferencing app Zoom was stuck in post-pandemic doldrums. Having seen ubiquitous use thanks to its unofficial role as an essential piece of work/social/dating/organizing infrastructure for the COVID era, its public standing cratered as the vaccinated ventured back outside and grew suspicious of the platform’s data-protection policy.
But now? Zoom is back, in a big, big way. And it’s all thanks to Kamala Harris.
Doubtless you’ve heard tell of the pro-Harris Zoom calls that have popped up since July 21, when President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid and all but ceded the Democratic presidential nomination to his vice president. That first night alone, more than 44,000 participants joined a Zoom call hosted by Win With Black Women, an organization that had come together in 2020 to push for Harris as candidate Biden’s veep nominee—and pulled up again for her big time, raising $1.6 million for her sudden new presidential campaign.
Immediately after, many more identity and interest groups logged on to Zoom on behalf of Harris: Win With Black Men on July 22; White Women: Answer the Call soon after, with viewers swelling to 164,000, a record-breaking capacity that caused both the conference and the donation platforms to crash multiple times; and the celebrity-packed White Dudes for Harris this past Monday, whose social media account was subsequently, and briefly, suspended from Elon Musk’s X. More calls have occurred—South Asian Women for Harris, Labor for Harris, Deadheads for Kamala—and even more are in the works, including Rural Americans for Harris and Cat Ladies for Kamala. If ‘Zoom fatigue‘ was once a thing, all these newly energized voters don’t seem to be feeling it anymore.
As many publications have noted, this all marks a more-than-welcome jolt for Democrats after an uninspiring Biden candidacy that threatened to undermine the party’s courtship of nonwhite and younger voters. Still, while beholding this inspiring mobilization, a basic question kept nagging at me: How do you even get tens of thousands of people in one Zoom call, let alone 100,000? What sorts of systems are in place to ensure these calls go smoothly?
I spoke with the leaders of both Win With Black Women and White Women: Answer the Call to learn how they made the technical aspects of their respective conferences work, to great success.
Jotaka Eaddy, an equity consultant and Silicon Valley alum who founded Win With Black Women, explained that her group was centered around Harris’ ascendancy from the start. ‘Our first gathering was Aug. 2, 2020,’ she recalled. ‘There was a groundswell of Black women leaders who had been deeply concerned about the narrative, the racism, and the sexism that was elevated as a result of the conversation around who would be [Biden’s] vice presidential nominee.’
Drawing upon her connections in the entertainment and tech industries, Eaddy got regular groups of ‘anywhere from 300 to 1,000 women from all across the country and, frankly, other parts of the world’ to convene on Zoom every Sunday, in a habit that’s kept consistent over the past four years. Standard Zoom ‘meetings,’ for which you can purchase licenses in case you need to hold up to 1,000 attendees, tended to suffice; there was little need to upgrade to a ‘webinar’ that could host even more folks and has more of a one-way, hosts-to-audience structure.
On July 21, the day Biden dropped out of the race, the crew already had a scheduled meeting—but no expectation for what was about to happen. Sure, the Biden-Harris swap marked an important shift, but it didn’t seem like a full-blown event just yet. Then Ohio Rep. Joyce Beatty, who’d already been scheduled to speak at Sunday’s call, declared on MSNBC that there would ‘probably be some 20,000 or 30,000 women trying to get on this call’ that evening. ‘Beatty’s chief of staff called to tell me she’d said that,’ said Eaddy. ‘I was kind of laughing, like, I’m not really worried about it because 1,000 people can’t even get on the call.’
Yet it kept blowing up, with dozens of people steadily joining the waiting room hours before the 8:30 p.m. start time—to the point where Eaddy couldn’t even log on to the meeting because it was already at capacity. Holli Holliday, a strategic consultant who leads the Win With Black Women tech team, immediately had to adjust.
‘We were able to update our meeting to the webinar format, though our subscription plan only allowed for 3,000 people, which we quickly exhausted,’ Holliday told me. ‘We started out calling the Zoom helpline and found out there was a member of our, you know, community that also worked there. So they were able to work with the engineers and engage some of Zoom’s higher-ups to get permission to expand our capacity on the spot.’
That capacity expansion had to happen again and again, in real time, as more and more Black women flooded into the Zoom room. ‘Once it got to 3,000, people weren’t able to join, so we went up to 10,000. Once it got to that, people were not able to join, so we finally ended up with a 50,000-person Zoom and we were able to get 45,000 on,’ said Holliday. Individual participants also got creative about how to tune in without overwhelming the ongoing meeting. ‘We had people who were livestreaming from their devices into StreamYard, which then allowed them to broadcast to several online spaces, including YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch,’ Holliday added. ‘We used to have a pretty strict policy against this, but we wanted to make sure people could participate in this moment.’
The team didn’t have to pay Zoom upfront for all the upgrades that day. Holliday explained that the platform ‘allowed us to create a space for us to make payment. They are working with us to make sure that we can pay it.’
From there came the wild success of Win With Black Men—which registered more than 53,000 participants—and then the megasize virtual rally for White Women: Answer the Call, the result of a viral tweet from gun violence–prevention activist Shannon Watts (‘Time to organize a white women conference call like the Black women and men have to support Vice President Kamala Harris. Who’s in?’), immediate buy-in from well-connected activists, and plenty of advice from the Black Zoom hosts. (‘Every time I talk to Watts or other folks, I’ll be like, do not turn the chat on,’ said Eaddy.)
Watts also teamed up with Erin Gallagher, founder and CEO of the women-in-business network Ella, to figure out just how to handle a Zoom call that would accommodate the overwhelming response to Watts’ tweet, which also traveled across platforms like TikTok and Instagram. At first, the team thought they needed a Zoom that ‘could accommodate up to 100,000’ participants.
‘Lisa Hazen, who helped me with the meeting’s landing page, reached out to Zoom and found that this would cost an exorbitant amount of money,’ Watts said. So she put out yet another Twitter request to see if anyone could help—and eventually caught the attention of Indivisible, the progressive project that started in 2016 as a way to mobilize mass pushback against President Donald Trump’s policies.
‘We immediately started working together on how we could plan a Zoom this large,’ Watts said, adding that: ‘We had some idea that it might be big, given that as soon as we put up the landing page for people to RSVP, it started crashing.’
Gallagher noted that there was also plenty of trepidation on Zoom’s end. ‘You can have an enterprise account, and they are able to serve you up to 100,000 live attendees,’ she said. ‘Ain’t nobody ever did that. Zoom was scared shitless when we said, ‘We have 200,000 people registered for this.’ ‘
She added, ‘We had to have engineers from Zoom working with us in tandem throughout the entire preparation and during the meeting to navigate and troubleshoot as the thing that they had never, ever had to do was actually happening.’ They also turned off emoji reactions because the sheer deluge would look terrible on screen, Gallagher mentioned.
Leah Greenberg, Indivisible’s co-founder and co–executive director, told me that her team had their work cut out for them right when the call started. ‘We got 99,000 people within about 10 minutes, and Zoom began crashing, as it would do multiple times,’ Greenberg said. ‘It would crash and reload, and there wasn’t much we could do once the call was in motion, so we moved some people over to the YouTube livestream so that folks could have a couple of different venues to watch uninterrupted.’ The livestream, Watts noted, was planned ahead of time for just this purpose.
It was a full-blown cross-organization team running things behind the scenes, with Zoom engineers, Indivisible tech experts, and Answer the Call organizers all coordinating through Slack channels and group texts. The Indivisible team kept a line open with Zoom’s operators while also ‘moderating the meeting, bringing speakers up and turning people’s mics on and off,’ said Gallagher. Annie Andrews, a political activist who’s worked with Watts for years, said she ‘organized the donation links on the Notes app on my computer’ to feed into the messaging stream—although, at certain points, ‘the links weren’t working because the system couldn’t keep up with the rate of the donations.’ (Watts estimated it at ‘20,000 donations a minute.’)
People kept coming in, the stream kept crashing, and the whole system kept getting back up. ‘It happened three times in the first 30 minutes of the call,’ said Gallagher. ‘But here’s what’s crazy: Nobody left. Every time that it went down and came back up, it came back up within 5 to 7 seconds. And every time, everyone came back: 50,000, 60,000, 70,000, 100,000.’ Between the livestream and the Zoom itself, about 200,000 women participated and ultimately threw in about $11 million for the Harris campaign when all was tallied up, said Watts.
This kind of unprecedented digital organizing makes for an exhausting experience, but everyone I spoke with continues to help with other pro-Harris Zoom efforts, and is hyped up to do it.
‘We’ve had one call since then which had about 25,000 people on it, and we’re having another call this Sunday, as is our tradition,’ said Holliday, of Win With Black Women.
‘We’re starting something called Women Wednesdays for Harris, which we’re going to host every week, starting Aug. 7 and going through the election,’ said Watts. ‘Each one will teach participants how to organize from the grassroots.’
Greenberg mentioned that Indivisible’s tech team also handled the back end for this week’s AAPI for Kamala Harris call, and has ‘another couple calls in the hopper.’ Andrews is going to be working on a call bringing together health care workers for Harris. And Gallagher thinks that the momentum is only going to keep growing: ‘Zoom is going to have to figure out how to take that 100,000 number up, because this is only going to continue to get bigger.’
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2024/08/kamala-harris-campaign-zoom-calls-fundraising.html
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