It didn’t come close to breaking Zoom — like some of the virtual campaign rallies that inspired Colorado Democrats to hold one of their own have — but last week’s local version connected hundreds of in-state Kamala Harris supporters and helped kick off what the party says already looks like a record-breaking fundraising month.

“We get to reach a lot of folks, and people get to build some community,” state Democratic chair Shad Murib told Colorado Politics. “It’s been an excellent volunteer recruitment tool as much as it’s been a great fundraising tool for us.”

Dubbed a virtual grassroots organizing call, the state Democrats’ July 29 gathering drew an estimated 700 participants over the course of the 45-minute meeting on the industry-leading Zoom teleconferencing platform, organizers said.

The event featured appearances by Gov. Jared Polis, U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, U.S. Reps. Joe Neguse and Jason Crow, former U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter and state Rep. Leslie Herod, a Colorado co-chair of Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign, who applauded the number of Harris supporters on the call. “She is not going to win this thing alone,” Herod said. “She’s going to win it with every single one of us behind her.”

Also participating: Riley Jackson, the youngest Colorado delegate to the Democratic National Convention; Nashville-based country music singer-songwriter Jaime Wyatt, who sang her hit “Love is a Place” in between the politicians’ presentations; Denver-based DJ Demigod, spinning tunes to start and finish the event; and, veteran Democratic operative Serena Woods, the Harris campaign’s newly named senior advisor in Colorado, whose appointment to the position was announced on the call.

About an hour after the Colorado rally concluded, a national “White Dudes for Harris” call attracted more than 180,000 people and raised upwards of $4 million, continuing a series of Zoom confabs that launched the night President Joe Biden announced he was withdrawing from the presidential race and endorsing Harris.

After the original, July 20 “Win with Black Women” Zoom spun heads by raising at least $1.6 million from its 44,000 attendees, other groups of Harris supporters promptly organized their own editions, including nearly every permutation imaginable, ranging from Hispanic women, Black men, Asian Americans and Deadheads to tech investors, veterans, comics, the LGBTQ+ community and White women — whose rally reached the app’s 100,000-caller limit, leading Zoom engineers to double its capacity on the fly.

Without warning, 2024 had turned almost overnight into “the Zoom election,” wrote New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose. No one predicted the return to a central political role of the platform that first exploded during the pandemic, but Roose noted in his Aug. 5 “The Shift” column that the app mostly used these days for work-related meetings had improved dramatically since the COVID lockdown, when Zooming became a ubiquitous verb.

The app no longer strains to accommodate even hundreds of callers, and it’s protected from mischievous — or malign — intruders, who invented an often offensive prank known as “Zoombombing,” Roose wrote. All that was missing, until last month, was the demand.

“People were Zooming all day for work — they didn’t want to come together as activists at night,” Shannon Watts, the founder of anti-gun violence group Moms Demand Action and an organizer behind the White women’s Zoom, told Roose. “It’s such a difference now because people are feeling joy about it.”

No one was clamoring to jump on Zoom to rub virtual shoulders with thousands of fellow partisans — until they were, it appears.

“People are excited — people are tuning in, getting plugged into the election,” said Murib, who emceed the Colorado Democrats’ Zoom rally and was among dozens of featured speakers in an Aug. 6 gathering of Harris’ rural supporters.

“The excitement and urgency and attention we’re seeing is unusual,” he added. “It’s something we’ve seen building for a long time — these folks have been ready to vote for Joe Biden, the were ready to be involved this fall, but what I think we’re seeing with Kamala Harris’ candidacy is sort of a lighting of the flame that’s getting people energized much more quickly and enthusiastically. This has given us a big kick of energy and is a testament to the vice president. People have been ready for her candidacy for a long time.”

While Colorado’s Republicans have convened a handful of Zoom meetings in recent months to discuss internal party business, they haven’t yet scheduled anything like the Democrats’ virtual rallies.

“We’ve looked into it, but nothing solid at the moment,” state GOP Chairman Dave Williams told Colorado Politics. “From our perspective, it’s dependent on having a prominent party member participate.”

Four years ago in Colorado, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, both parties embraced the platform. The state’s Republicans, however, ditched it as fast as possible, returning within months to in-person rallies, fundraisers and meetings, while the Democrats incorporated the technology, holding fundraising dinners, candidate visits, a chili cook-off and this year’s state convention on Zoom.

A top GOP campaign technical expert told Roose that Republicans might have developed an aversion to Zoom during the pandemic, when meeting virtually became associated with “Democrats who were afraid to leave their houses” — possibly souring Republicans on the technology regardless of its effectiveness.

Colorado’s Democrats don’t need any convincing.

“This is a really exciting way for us to engage in the campaign,” Woods said on the Colorado call, noting that the fluctuating attendance was hovering above 550, a feat she termed “pretty freaking exciting for only 24 hours notice.”

“We have big plans to expand our team here in Colorado in the coming weeks so that we can get on the doors, get on the phones, and actually make sure we’re getting across the finish line in November,” Woods added as she nearly filled the screen with a QR code that linked to a volunteer sign-up form.

“These Zooms are really quick and easy to organize, and then we can follow up one-on-one,” Murib told Colorado Politics. “It’s a great way to assemble a collection of a huge set of volunteers and people interested in supporting the campaign that we can follow up with. It’s an incredible resource for me and the campaign to reach out and get them knocking on doors.”

Speaking on this week’s Rural Americans for Harris Zoom, Murib said that even if they feel isolated, far from urban and suburban enclaves, it was up to rural Democrats to spread the word to their neighbors.

“Sometimes, I feel like I’m the only rancher in my Democratic circles — and the only Democrat in my rancher circles. But we know that isn’t true,” said Murib, who raises cattle with his wife, former state Sen. Kerry Donovan, at the Copper Bar Ranch in Eagle County.

“Let’s have these tough conversations with our rural friends and neighbors in our communities,” he said. “And as our late, great Congresswoman Pat Schroeder once said, ‘It is hard to wring your hands when you’re rolling up your sleeves.’ So I hope you’ll join me in knocking on doors, making phone calls, sending text messages, or just meeting up with a friend or family member for a beer or coffee and tell them why you’re a Democrat.”

During the Colorado call, Herod said that bringing together everyone on the call underlined a point she wanted to make about the months ahead. Then Herod relayed a conversation she’d had with Harris when the vice president last visited Denver in March.

After asking Harris how she put up with everything that was coming at her, Herod said Harris replied, “‘When you break glass ceilings, you get cut. Do it anyways. It’s worth it.'”

Added Herod: “So I gotta be honest with you all: This is not going to be an easy election. There will be glass flying, right, because we are going to shatter that glass ceiling. But we need each and every one of us to be involved, to take some of those cuts, but also to be armed with a Band-Aid.”

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