Exit Interview: I was Bernie Sanders Chief Advance Man

Last edited Tue Aug 16, 2016, 10:10 AM - Edit history (1)

Atlas Obscura

Presidential campaigns don’t plan themselves. For the months in which a candidate is on the road, wheeling from state to state, event to event, there’s an entire team of people whose job it is to get there first and make sure everything goes smoothly.

They find the places where the rallies happen and the hotel rooms where the candidate stays; they need to know which entrances the car will pull up to and who will be standing behind the candidate when the cameras close in tight. In this world, a perfect day is when no one notices that team has done their job—everything runs smoothly.

Marc Levitt was Director of Scheduling and Advance for Bernie 2016, which meant that if anything did go wrong, he would hear about it, quickly. This wasn't his first time out: he worked advance on presidential campaigns for John Kerry and Barack Obama, too. Now back in civilian life, he told us about the inner workings of getting political people where they need to be.

Why don’t you start by explaining: what is advance work, exactly?

At every place that a presidential candidate goes and every event that he appears at, I think there’s a perception that these things just happen magically. When, in fact, they are the most planned and coordinated aspect of the campaign. I remember being blown away when in 2004 I joined the Kerry campaign, that, wow, every 10 seconds of John Kerry’s day was planned, really down to the minute.