Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician and attorney who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Barack Obama was the first African-American president of the United States. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004.
Harris campaign’s LGBTQ+ engagement director on winning in November
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.
