Campaign chief for others wins race of her own
Buffy Wicks hit the ground running.
Instead of paying the $1,000 fee to put her name on the ballot for June’s primary election, Wicks formally announced her campaign for Assembly District 15, which extends from north of Richmond into Oakland, by choosing the other option available to candidates: submitting 1,000 signatures.
Wicks, a first-time candidate for public office, submitted 1,300.
Gathering the signatures was her way of testing the waters to see if the organization skills she honed while working on presidential campaigns would translate to a local race. Wicks’ “ground game,” which included door-to-door
canvassing and recruiting volunteers and donors through house parties, wasn’t as visible as the onslaught of daily campaign mailers stuffed into mailboxes or as raucous as the heated posts and comments on social media apps such as Nextdoor.
But it was the key to winning the race she entered with less name recognition than the early favorites: Oakland City Councilman Dan Kalb and Richmond City Councilwoman Jovanka Beckles.
“She brought a really sophisticated experience running campaigns,” Ted Lempert, a lecturer on California politics at UC Berkeley, said of Wicks.
Wicks defeated Beckles, a fellow Democrat, 56 percent to 44 percent. Wicks, the field director for President Barack Obama’s successful 2008 campaign to become the first black president in the country, beat Beckles, a member of the Richmond Progressive Alliance, at the alliance’s own game: grassroots organizing.
“I’ve been doing this for other people my whole career,” Wicks told me Friday afternoon. “I just basically applied a lot of the things that I know from organizing. You have to start early, and you have to be consistent every single day.”
I followed Wicks on a Sunday afternoon in early October. She started with a speech in front of a house on McKinley Avenue in Berkeley, her hands clasped in front of her as she spoke. It’s a pose she does so often that her daughter, 1-yearold Josephine, mimicked her as she stood beside her mother.
That weekend Wicks and her volunteers knocked on more than 4,000 doors in the district. Wicks said volunteers knocked on a total of 114,000 during the campaign.
“It actually is you,” one woman said after opening the door to see Wicks.
One man told her he was voting for Beckles.
“Mind if I give you my pitch as well?” Wicks responded.
When nobody answered her knocks, she left flyers that had handwritten Post-it Notes with her phone number stuck on them. She said a few hundred people had called.
“If you give your number out, you gotta return their calls,” she said.
After the door knocking, Wicks went to a house party in Montclair. It was the 209th of the campaign but hardly the last. The total was 239. There were less than a dozen people at the Montclair one. One woman arrived late wearing a “Beto” hat, a reference to Beto O’Rourke, a rising national Democrat who lost his U.S. Senate bid in Texas.
Wicks gave her typical stump speech. She lived in a trailer as she grew up in the foothills of California before attending community college. After college, she moved to the Bay Area to organize rallies against the Iraq War. Her opposition to the war led to politics — and to work on Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004. She later worked for Obama, and she was on the White House team that got the Affordable Care Act passed. In 2015, she returned to California to manage Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the state.
Supporters of Beckles, a committed progressive, argued that Wicks was an interloper who was too moderate to be an effective representative of the left-leaning district. When I brought the argument up to Lempert, a former assemblyman who represented San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties, he laughed.
“Only in that district is Buffy Wicks considered not progressive,” he said. “There’s no question she was viewed as the more moderate candidate in the race, but in the scheme of things her record’s pretty progressive.”
When asked what Wicks should do once she takes office, Lempert said she should go “door-todoor in the Capitol just like you go door-to-door in the district.”
Wicks has already hit the ground running. On Thursday, she attended a lunchtime caucus meeting in Sacramento, and on Friday she was back in the state’s Capitol for new member training.