Two days before the November electionjili90, a rogue team of campaign organizers for Vice President Kamala Harris turned a Dunkin’ Donuts in Philadelphia into their secret headquarters.

Their mission was simple: Knock on the doors of as many Black and Latino voters as they could in neighborhoods that they believed the Harris campaign had neglected in its get-out-the-vote-operation. And they could not let their bosses find out.

They called it Operation Dunkin’kirk, a gallows-humor joke about the desperate World War II mission to save Allied troops trapped by Nazi armies in France.

Fueled by boxes of coffee in their impromptu boiler room, the small team of operatives crunched internal campaign data beneath purloined Harris-Walz signs and directed dozens of volunteers across the city’s core Democratic wards. Many of the thousands of Black and Latino voters they talked to said they had never heard from the campaign, a stunning breakdown so close to Election Day.

“I was the first one knocking on these doors,” said Amelia Pernell, a Harris campaign organizer involved in setting up the clandestine Dunkin’ Donuts field office in North Philadelphia. “They hadn’t talked to anybody. It was like: ‘Hey, nobody has come to our neighborhood. The campaign doesn’t care about us.’”

The Dunkin’ Donuts office and several similar efforts in Philadelphia, often funded independently by Democratic donors through nonprofit voter-education groups, reflected deep frustration within the campaign. Numerous Harris organizers believed it was failing to invest in mobilizing Black and Latino voters in the nation’s sixth-largest city, the biggest prize in the election’s most populous battleground state.

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