Sam Alleman. (Photo courtesy of Alleman)
Sam Alleman, national LGBTQ+ engagement director for the Harris-Walz 2024 campaign, talked with the Washington Blade last week for an exclusive interview about his work building and strengthening coalitions within the community in hopes of winning in November.
On the Democratic side, organizing LGBTQ+ voters for a presidential campaign goes back at least a decade, he said, to 2012 when Jamie Citron — currently the deputy assistant to the president and principal deputy director of the White House Office of Public Engagement — helped to lead these efforts on behalf of then-President Barack Obama’s reelection bid.
On Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Alleman said, it was Dominic Lowell working in close coordination with Sean Meloy, director of LGBT engagement for the Democratic National Committee, who now serves as vice president of political programs at the LGBTQ Victory Fund and Institute.
“Something that we’re very proud of as the little crew of folks who all are friends,” Alleman said, “is really building off each other’s work to continue scaling this and building out infrastructure to organize within the community.”
He added that in 2020, Reggie Greer, who led LGBTQ+ engagement for the Biden-Harris campaign and is now the State Department’s senior adviser to the U.S. Special Envoy to Advance the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons, “was dealt the very difficult hand of a global pandemic.”
He explained, despite the challenges, Greer and others managed to build “a wonderful program that’s very much virtual, put forward from folks that did this work and were online,” which has shaped efforts through to this day as the Harris-Walz campaign seeks to “really get people back in person” as they focus their push in, especially, the seven battleground states.
The goal, Alleman said, is “not losing the virtual component, but complementing it” to “get people back on board, back to the event, back to the rally, back to the business that is a presidential campaign in 2024.”
“That’s a question and a piece of this work that is not necessarily unique to the LGBTQ+ portfolio,” he said. “But then it’s been something that we’ve worked through, and I think getting that from 2020 and rebuilding and fleshing that out has been a top priority.”
“We have wonderful working relationships with Liam Kahn over at the DNC right now,” Alleman said, referring to the committee’s director of LGBTQ+ coalitions, “and then, of course, my counterpart in finance, James Conlon, we work hand in glove as a team to execute on all of this work,” together with “my deputy, oh my gosh, he just started, I’m so excited, Cesar Toledo — who is like an absolute force and really runs the day to day of the organizing program.”
For his part, Alleman’s career has taken him from organizing work as a college student for then-Texas State Sen. Wendy Davis to campaign work for Clinton to the center of the reproductive rights movement at Planned Parenthood to the White House and, now, the Harris-Walz 2024 race.
“I started on the campaign in April of 2024,” he said, working on behalf of what was then the Biden-Harris ticket, while before that, “I was at the DNC for two and a half years. So I started over there as the LGBTQ coalitions director in October of 2021 and helped to manage all their LGBTQ+ programming through the midterm elections.”
Alleman continued, “I was also the regional coalitions director for the Midwest. We affectionately called it the “snow belt,” but [it was] our Great Lakes and Northeast states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire in 2022 as well, working in that pod in tandem with all of our state programming.”
When transitioning into the new role, Alleman said “it was keenly important” for him to facilitate the continued investment in building “infrastructure for our community at the DNC” which is something the organization has shown is a priority focus.
“At the DNC, the work is very infrastructure focused,” he said, through the vehicle of coordinating with “our state parties” and “making sure that they have the resources to do this work to mobilize voters.”
Alleman added that a few dozen state Democratic parties have LGBTQ caucuses, so at the DNC he was working to “make sure that they were getting organized” in coordination “of course, with the partners, too.”
Asked to compare his experiences working in similar roles for the committee and then the presidential campaign, Alleman said “The party has a bigger responsibility, I should say, to think about the totality of the ticket” which means considering questions like “how are we getting resources to [down-ballot] races, like city council members and state reps and state senators?”
He noted “there are a lot of LGBTQ state reps and state senators with big names [who are doing] amazing work in this moment.”
By contrast, “when we’re here on the presidential [ticket] it’s a lot of the same strategies and tactics, but really homed in on our battleground states, really homed in on [the question of] ‘how are we building out capacity to talk to those voters where we know our pathway to victory is?’”
In between the Clinton campaign and the DNC was a long stint at Planned Parenthood, Alleman said, an opportunity that found him via a friend who reached out after Trump’s victory in 2016.
Packed into the Javits Center, where the Clinton team had organized what they — and most Americans — expected to be a victory party, Alleman said “everything changed from that point on” as “things that had felt so certain and so set in terms of what I was planning on doing, just sort of all changed.”
“I feel like it was that way for so many of us, both in terms of work, our personal lives, everything that happened in 2016,” he said. “And so I got a call from a friend — a good friend of mine who’s still one of my best friends, actually, I just officiated her wedding.”
The personal is political
“Everything really just sort of clicked there,” Alleman said, adding, “I worked at Planned Parenthood for five or six years, doing various jobs,” starting with the Metropolitan Washington affiliate where he worked to “plan the logistics and busses for the Women’s March” in 2017 to protest Donald Trump’s election.
Reproductive rights, he said, is “a big part of my story and why I’m in the work.”
Alleman is a Texas native. In college, he worked for the campaign of then-state senator Wendy Davis, who famously held a 13-hour-long filibuster in 2013 to block legislation that would have imposed harsher abortion restrictions.
“I’m originally from Plano,” he said. “By virtue of being from Texas, these things that feel like very big issues now have sort of always been litigated, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, in our state based off just conservative extremists,” adding, “we would call them MAGA Republicans now.”
While he was always supportive of reproductive rights, Alleman said that as a young man who was grappling with his sexuality and on his own coming out journey, he did not fully understand “the totality” of those freedoms and how they intersect with other core American values.
“A very important part of my story, and a big part of why I do this work, is my sister,” Alleman said. Just seven months after getting health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act, he said his sister was “diagnosed with breast cancer at a Planned Parenthood health center via a breast exam.”
While she “is now cancer free and in remission and doing very well,” Alleman said, “I don’t know what my family would have done if we had not been able to access health insurance through the Affordable Care Act.”
“It would have bankrupted my family,” he said, “and I would have dropped out of college. I wouldn’t be sitting here today, right? Like, nothing that happened would have happened, would have been possible. She very well may not be alive, you know?”
Alleman continued, “And so, the importance of healthcare and access to affordable healthcare, and then the ability for us to have bodily autonomy and then control of our own decisions and destinies, has always just been something that has been critically important for me.”
“We talk about all the accomplishments that we’ve seen from the Biden-Harris administration,” he said, like “the Affordable Care Act and what that means, but my story is an example of the impact of that, [of] what this actually means for people to have access to health care and health insurance, what this actually means for people to be able to go to their Planned Parenthood health center and feel safe in accessing reproductive health care in its totality, from abortion to breast exams.”
He described falling “in love” with the work at Planned Parenthood as well as with the movement for reproductive freedom. “I moved up to the national office about six or seven months after starting at the affiliate on their political team,” he said, “and ended as their national political manager before moving over to the DNC.”
From there, Alleman said, “I worked at the DNC for two and a half years managing the LGBTQ coalition work” during which time “we were really proud of the Biden-Harris administration, but it always felt [like] it was so clear where we would probably be in terms of who we were running against, right, where we are today in 2024.”
So the focus remained, he said, on “what was at stake, not only in the work that we needed to get done politically to, you know, get infrastructure done, get the Inflation Reduction Act done, make sure that we help the Senate and House as best we could in the midterms, so that we can continue achieving things like the Respect for Marriage Act — but as well, to put us in as best a position as possible to take on what was the looming threat to our democracy, and what is the looming threat to our democracy, that is Donald Trump.”
Alleman added, “And we see now” from “Project 2025” what “things will look like should he win — though we have, I think, a pretty good plan to keep that from happening.”
Storytelling and organizing go hand-in-hand
“I consider myself first and foremost an organizer, and there’s nothing more powerful for an individual than knowing your story and being able to tell that and stand in its truth and what that means for you and your power,” Alleman said.
He sees this as an important part of not just his work and career but also a focus of the campaign.
“So storytelling is absolutely, to me, one of the most fundamental things we do as organizers — it’s helping people find their voice and how they want to use that to benefit their communities, to turn out voters, and really just participate in our democracy,” he said.
Storytelling is also an important element of communicating about our intersectional identities, Alleman said. “We talk about these communities sometimes in such different lanes, but in reality, we’re all creatures of narrative.”
He added, “We’re all sort of experiencing life in that more qualitative, narrative way. And those stories are where people not only are able to sort of synthesize all the things that they are, but also provide the actual emotion and the human aspect of these issues in life.”
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