Kinfolk
I was featured in Kinfolk this month. It’s a magazine I’d never heard of but my wife told me it was very hip and she was surprised someone as corny as me was being featured. Photos by Emma Trim.
“I’m not used to having my photo taken,” admits Waleed Shahid. As a seasoned political strategist for the Democratic Party, Shahid feels more comfortable behind the scenes, exerting his influence through the candidates he has helped usher into power. His approach, however, is far from politics as usual.
Having cut his teeth working on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2016, Shahid joined Justice Democrats, a group formed in 2017 that aimed to recruit more progressive—and representative—people into politics. The first candidate he worked with was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the highest-profile member of what later became known as “the Squad”—an informal group of Democratic members of the House of Representatives that includes Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
Shahid worked with the newly elected Squad to push the Democrats to the left from within Congress, most notably on the Green New Deal. More recently, he has also advised newer Squad members Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Summer Lee and Greg Casar, helping them to develop their media strategies.
Now, ahead of the election this November, the specter of a second Trump presidency has led Shahid into the spotlight himself. With the Vote Uncommitted campaign, Shahid’s aim is to put pressure on President Biden to acknowledge and address the fractures within the Democratic Party—before it’s too late.
ELLE HUNT: How did you first become interested in politics?
WALEED SHAHID: I grew up in the D.C. suburbs. After 9/11, there were a lot of issues of discrimination and surveillance. My parents were immigrants, from Pakistan, and they told me to never talk about politics in school, because we could get in trouble. But as a 12-year-old kid, I was really into punk music, which is all about rebellion. In my sixth-grade social studies class every Friday, we’d debate whether or not the US should invade Iraq; I used to go home and read up so that I could argue against it. My parents would have been horrified if they’d known, but this was my way of rebelling. Later in high school, I got involved in the immigrant rights movement. That became my main thing.
EH: How did you find yourself part of the political system?
WS: After college, I was part of a community of activists and organizers, working on issues from labor to climate to racial justice to immigration. I slowly got integrated into electoral politics through Bernie Sanders’ campaign in 2016. My thinking was: Maybe we should elect people who are more sympathetic to our causes and communities. You can build so much more influence by aligning yourself with a candidate. I don’t think Sanders was fully aligned with everything that social movements wanted at the time, but he was 90% aligned. I thought that was good enough.
EH: What lessons did you take from the Sanders campaign?
WS: I’ve always been a kind of boring Social Democrat—like, health care should be free; we should tax the rich more—which makes you a bit of a radical in the US. I really thought Bernie represented the floor of what was politically possible, not the ceiling. He didn’t demographically represent my generation, the most diverse in US history: He was an old white man, from one of the whitest states in the country. I thought that if we could have candidates essentially run on Bernie’s platform, but speak in ways that are relevant to more people, we might be able to do more.
EH: This led you to join Justice Democrats, the organization that recruited and helped elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of “the Squad.”
WS: Bernie’s campaign taught me that there is an appetite in the Democratic Party for more progressive voices but people don’t have the resources or skills to run. Some of it comes down to money, but for me, it’s about that punk rock, DIY thing: Can you just try yourself? Most of the campaigns I’ve worked on have been pretty low-budget affairs, but they’ve all challenged the Democratic Party establishment in some way. It’s grassroots—the people versus the machine.
EH: How much does that disadvantage you? Is it harder to win with an unconventional campaign or candidate?
WS: We don’t take corporate or lobbyist money, which is a severe disadvantage. Often Democratic establishment candidates will host a fundraiser at a law firm or bank, then email the entire staff asking them all to contribute $2,000—so you’ll get 500 donors with one email. But most of our funding comes from teachers, nurses, small donations online. We’re usually outspent in our races, 10 or even 20 to one.
EH: How can you find an advantage in that situation?
WS: We have to find creative ways to get the public’s attention—AOC is probably the best example of that. So much of campaigning in the US is about increasing your name recognition. If you’re just a bartender or a nurse, running for Congress, you have to work really hard. If you’re a grassroots candidate, you have to pursue high-risk, high-reward strategies.
EH: How do you approach putting together a campaign? Is it about reflecting the candidate’s personal visions and views, or winning at any cost?
WS: Elections are 50% art and 50% science. The science part looks at the person we’re running, and who they’re up against: Are they so popular we can’t beat them? Are there votes here, demographically? With a candidate, we’d look at what networks they have and their fundraising potential. But ultimately, we’re trying to bring working-class representation to the Democratic Party. Fifty percent of Congress are millionaires; the candidates we’ve worked for are just ordinary people, and so a lot of the campaign is about them, how their story intersects with the larger story of their community, and how they’re better suited to represent it than their opponent.
EH: How do you prepare a grassroots candidate for establishment politics?
WS: Some candidates have to sit through my 90-minute PowerPoint presentation, titled “Race, class and why we don’t have nice things.” Most people already get intuitively why things are fucked up in the US, but this training helps give them some historical context and put it into words. The media and political class are very elitist, especially to working-class people—journalists are always trying to show candidates that they’re smarter than them, for example. But a lot of the people I work for are not super-polished; they speak their minds. It’s always been difficult for me in the Malcolm Tucker role: People like these candidates because they’re not like typical politicians, with talking points, but as a communications professional, I don’t want them to mess up. It’s a balance between presenting authenticity and communicating that you can do the job.
EH: You’re obviously influential behind the scenes, but increasingly so as a commentator in your own right. How conscious are you of your own influence—and how do you wield it?
WS: Our political and media landscape is so focused on red versus blue, Democrat versus Republican. So much of our politics is determined by how much the other side sucks. I see my role as holding my party accountable to issues and to communities: Instead of telling me what Republicans aren’t doing on X, I want to know what our party is doing on X. It does get me in trouble—people say I’m a Russian agent out to tank the Democratic Party. But I just think that there’s more to politics than saying the other side is bad.
EH: You’ve said that the Uncommitted campaign was the most low-budget you’ve ever worked on. What has your experience been with that?
WS: By December [2023], journalists were less interested in the war in Gaza; protests were dwindling in size. I was told that media coverage was going to be moving toward Election 2024. The Uncommitted campaign was to show that there are Democratic voters who are saying they’re uncommitted to Joe Biden unless he changes his stance on the war.3 That’s a way to show influence: You’ve got to intervene on what the media is already going to be covering, and bring those movements and protests to the party’s doorstep. Biden has been moving his messaging: He called for a temporary cease-fire; he said invading Rafah [in southern Gaza] was his red line. It’s no coincidence that he did that after these Uncommitted votes started coming in.
EH: Are Democrats complacent about the threat posed by Trump, and that voters might actually choose him again?
WS: In 2016, the problem was less that people voted for Trump, and more that they didn’t vote for Hillary; they just stayed home. The Democrats think that voters will get in line when the election gets closer: “The other guy’s so bad—how could you sit this one out?” I’m like, “Don’t you remember? We’ve lost before!” Many of these people are in a bubble; they don’t spend a lot of time with Muslim and Arab communities, or with young people. They spend a lot of time on the phones or on Wall Street, fundraising. That’s what they point to: “We’ve broken fundraising records! How could we have a problem?” But Hillary Clinton also broke fundraising records.
EH: Do you think a Trump win is likely?
WS: Yes, and I think it will be worse than the first term—a disaster for Americans and the world. It will be bad. And no one will suffer more than the Democrats who were trying to warn President Biden that his actions in Gaza were causing him to lose.
EH: That’s what Biden needs to address, before November?
WS: I mean, yeah. The time is always right to do what’s right. But time is running out.’
And, to close, an email I got from a colleague.