Search Results for ‘campaign staffers’
While Christopher Rants proclaimed that Iowa House Republicans will regain their majority as the party of health care and education, the two leading staffers at the Republican Party of Iowa were fired by new Chairman Stu Iverson. While Iowa Republicans had a mixed record in 2004 and a colossal collapse in 2006, it doesn’t help to be starting from scratch nine months before the election. Rants can talk about how vulnerable Eric Palmer or Elesha Gayman are until he turns blue in the face but if there is no party infrastructure behind their challengers, he’ll still be talking about how Palmer and Gayman are vulnerable incumbents in 2010. The Republicans do not have the necessary campaign infrastructure and if their message is to run against Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton on health care, they’re not going to have much luck with that either.
February 16th, 2008
As Chris Cilizza reports, Joe Biden is staking his entire campaign on a strong performance in Iowa. He has moved almost his entire national staff into Iowa in hopes of a strong performance in the caucuses. Biden seems to hope that this increased focus, combined with support from many Iowa legislators (including his recent endorsement by Iowa House Speaker Pro Tem Polly Bukta). His strategy, as reported by Marc Ambinder seems solid, based on having surrogates hit smaller towns with a particular focus on the blue collar Democratic counties along the Mississippi River. However, there is one inherent flaw. Ambinder notes that Biden has “nine field offices and 23 full-time staffers” which is puny compared to the number of staffers and field offices that Obama, Edwards and Clinton have. In fact, even Chris Dodd has 59 full-time staffers on the ground in Iowa right now.
Not only does Biden have very few staffers, they aren’t very experienced either. According to this roster of Biden field staff. Six out of his 14 field staffers (all of whom are titled Regional Field Directors) have never worked on a campaign before. And of those who have worked on a campaign, most have worked on campaigns for Chicago alderman or Colorado Board of Education, not for major statewide or federal offices. The ground game is crucial in the Iowa Caucuses and with the limited field program that he has, Biden is in trouble. Unless Biden is able to fully tap into the organizations of the legislators to endorse him, he will not do well in Iowa and get one of the proverbial “three tickets out of Iowa” that go to the top three finishers in the caucuses. Unless things change, Biden’s hoped for third place finish will be just like Joe Lieberman’s “third place finish” when he went all out in New Hampshire in 2004. A third place finish that actually means he finished fifth.
September 26th, 2007
After the Edwards campaign released its list of “senior Iowa staff” the other day, I thought it might be prudent to discuss how each campaign’s staff is shaping up. Their differing approaches are interesting, at least, and they could make a difference by the time the caucuses come around next January.
First up, the Obama campaign has been doing quite a bit of hiring over the last month. All of their key positions (regional field director, state field director, state director, and deputy state director) are filled, and they are hiring on new field organizers every week. Some have compared Obama’s staff to Howard Dean’s from four years ago, because it seems to include an unusual number of ideologically motivated young people, many of whom have never worked a caucus before. Their typical field organizer offer, which is the lowest of the candidates reviewed here, is $2,000 per month. Because Senator Obama is so magnetic, they are having no trouble filling positions, but the low salary may not be enough to entice experienced operatives.
Next, the Edwards campaign has staffed all or most of its key positions as well, and has begun hiring field organizers. In contrast to Obama’s staff, most of Edwards’s staff so far have Iowa political experience, and many have also worked with state director Jennifer O’Malley or state field director Jackie Lee before. General impressions from folks seem to be that the Edwards staff has things together, that their hiring process is quicker and perhaps more organized than Obama’s, and that they already have a more specific plan in place. Their typical field organizer offer seems to be $2,500 per month.
And finally, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been a bit slower to announce their hiring decisions here, but those whom they have hired have impressive resumes. Staffers who may not have significant Iowa experience but who have significant experience elsewhere are taking positions on the Clinton campaign that are well below where the staffers might be in most campaign hierarchies. Clinton is paying field organizers about $2,750 per month — the most of any candidate — although from what we know here, many positions have not been filled.
Beyond these “big three” campaigns, none of the others have hired (or begun to hire) a full staff here. Dodd, Richardson, and Biden all have a few folks on the ground here, but not enough to get a general impression yet.
How the staffing differences will affect the caucuses, nobody knows, but past caucuses have proven that staff strength can be a major factor in the final delegate counts. Without a sound field strategy in place, a campaign cannot win Iowa, and that takes a good staff.
March 20th, 2007
Last month, Hillary Clinton made a widely publicized visit to Iowa to kick off her Presidential campaign. However, since then, she has not been in Iowa at all and has no announced plans to visit again anytime in the future. She still has only assembled a barebones Iowa staff (though there is speculation she will inherit former Vilsack staffers). It seems very peculiar for such a major candidate to have such a minimal presence in Iowa compared to her competitors. Although the Clinton campaign is clearly focused on fundraising right now, it still seems to unwise to lay low in Iowa when John Edwards and Barack Obama have been visiting the state weekly.
February 25th, 2007
In today’s Des Moines Register, Tom Beaumont officially bestows the mantle of frontrunner in the caucuses on John Edwards. Now that Tom Vilsack has dropped out, there is no native son running and everyone can comfortably call Edwards the frontrunner. Beaumont notes that being the frontrunner gives Edwards’ certain advantages but it also means that he now has even more riding on the caucuses.
However, there are rumors in Des Moines that Edwards may have an ace up his sleeve. There has always been a close relationship between Edwards and Chet Culver. Their staffers are to some extent, interchangeable. Key Culver staffers like Patrick Dillon and Brad Anderson worked for Edwards in 2004 (and in Anderson’s case, on his 1998 Senate race.) In fact, Edwards’ state director, Jennifer O’Malley, is engaged to Culver’s Chief of Staff, Patrick Dillon. These ties are the tip of the iceberg. The Culver and Edwards people are heavily intertwined, and the list of connections goes far deeper. The current rumor is that while Chet Culver will not endorse any candidate (since he has to preserve Iowa’s first in the nation status), Mari Culver will endorse John Edwards at some point. This would follow the precedent set in 2004, where Christie Vilsack served as a surrogate for her husband in endorsing John Kerry.
Mari Culver’s commercial during the campaign where she called her husband “a big lug” was considered a turning point in the campaign. It’s unclear exactly how important an endorsement from Mari Culver would be for the Edwards campaign. But it would definitely help Edwards’ standing as the “frontrunner” and add momentum whenever he decides to make Mari Culver’s endorsement public. ( This is assuming, of course, that this speculation is correct)
While we’re speculating on endorsements, it’s worth noting that Mike Gronstal and Tom Courtney appeared at a Chris Dodd event in Des Moines last week. It’s the first reported public appearance at a Presidential candidate’s event by either man. With Vilsack out of the race, state legislators will have a lot more freedom to endorse and it will be interesting to see if either Gronstal or Courtney take advantage of that freedom. An endorsement by either man would give Dodd a lot more credibility in Iowa.
February 25th, 2007
With Tom Vilsack dropping out, one question is what happens to the large organization of staffers that he built in Iowa? There are a lot of experienced Iowa field operatives who are now unemployed. Hotline hints at a possible answer, noting that many of Vilsack’s top level staffers have strong ties to Hillary Clinton. Clinton still has only hired a barebones Iowa staff and the ties between Vilsack and Clinton are close enough that there was some speculation that Vilsack’s candidacy was merely a Clinton stalking horse. It would seem a good match that many former Vilsack staffers would migrate to Clinton’s campaign. Tom Vilsack had a strong Iowa field operation, Hillary Clinton needs one. As high level ex-Vilsack staffers move over, they’ll bring some lower level field operatives with them. It would give Clinton a head start for building the strong ground game needed to win the caucuses and help her grab a healthy chunk of Tom Vilsack’s 1,159 committed supporters.
February 23rd, 2007
Even though the Iowa Caucuses are over a year away, candidates are already hiring staffers and websites are already chronicling the exploits of these politicos–or at least posting their names. Over on TPM Cafe, there’s a rather long list of everyone ever vaguely mentioned as working for a campaign on Hotline or The Fix, unfortunately this means it is rather inaccurate (for example, Jean Hessburg is most definitely not working for Hillary Clinton, she’s running the Nevada caucuses) and rather consultant heavy.
George Washington University’s Democracy in Action also has a much smaller list as part of its attempt to chronicle the campaign. However, it does have the benefit of accuracy as well as succinct bios for those readers who always wondered what Jesse Harris majored in at college. (History and Political Science). However, judging by GWU’s efforts to chronicle Iowa staffers in the 2004 General and the 2004 Caucuses, it’s sure to become the definitive site for those just dying to know how many field organizers John Edwards has in Ottumwa and whether you need all of them to screw in a light bulb.
December 30th, 2006
Hotline has it confirmed that Evan Bayh, a frequenter of our fine state this past year, will release a statement tomorrow quitting the presidential race.
This comes even after he made some pretty aggressive staffing moves over the past few weeks. He had staffers working field in Iowa during the 2006 campaign, and he has been snatching people up since then to fill key roles. From what we know, he had quite a few positions filled.
I certainly didn’t expect a candidate with $10 million in the bank to drop out just like that. Think it was Obama, as some have speculated? Or Vilsack? Or what?
December 15th, 2006
The rumors are going around, and Vilsack is set to appear with Hillary in DC this week at a Democratic Governors Association press conference. Here’s how the Register reports it:
Some pundits as well as Democratic activists have suggested Vilsack would be a good fit on a ticket with Clinton as presidential nominee. Both are active in the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, and both have insisted they will not demand a specific date for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
A few days back, Hotline proposed some theories about the role Hillary could play in the race for the ‘08 Democratic nomination. Theory 1:
…unless she either doesn’t run or appears very vulnerable early on , one theory of the case holds that they will spend their time cozying up to her and tearing into each other. (Grover Norquist endorses that theory, too.) At least in part, they’ll try to use the primaries to audition for the general election.
To be clear: Bayh, Warner, Bill Richardson, Tom Vilsack — they all want to be president, not vice president. But they will almost certainly hedge their bets. They will not run a true-blue, rouse-the-base primary campaign.
Theory 2, however, simply says that Hillary is too polarizing a figure and won’t get anywhere. In that case, though, candidates might still stick to centrist rhetoric in an effort to distinguish themselves from Clinton (if the voters aren’t convinced by Hillary’s current centrist bent).
Frank Luntz’s piece today doesn’t talk much about this, but Luntz does attempt to lay out a strategy for Hillary to get elected. I’m really not sure a short, public essay could possibly prove useful to a presidential campaign, but here’s his first recommendation:
First, she must be herself. Her recent tack to the right - from equivocating on the Iraq war, to supporting a ban on flag burning - is fooling no one and is seriously agitating her liberal base. The reason Hillary became so popular in the first place was her unflinching willingness to tell it like it is. She must say what she means, and mean what she says.
Similarly, recent efforts by Clinton to inject religious references into her speeches to prove she’s a person of faith is like fingernails on a chalkboard to Democrat primary voters. Clinton must win the primary first - then worry about the general election. If Democrats really cared about religion, they’d be Republicans.
Will she? And is she really the vicious liberal that Luntz thinks she is in the first place? Perhaps, but it’s not looking like it right now.
I should also note that our coverage of 2008 contenders has been spotty of late. Our schedules haven’t permitted us to attend the candidates’ appearances across the state (which isn’t to say we don’t like getting the invitations, so thanks to the staffers who have kept us on their mailing lists…), so we’ve been reading Chris’s coverage on PoliticalForecast. We hope to get better as our schedules permit, but we still plan to spend more time analyzing the political issues facing Iowa than we’ll spend on national political celebrity watch.
And check out MyDD’s presidential straw poll, now reinstated. Chris Bowers rightly discontinued it four months ago because of how repetitive the results were, but maybe things will be different now.
July 17th, 2006
When we (and other Iowa Blogs) posted a call to support Boswell in Barbara Boxer’s “Whom should we give money to?” poll, you responded. We were pretty sure Boswell would lose, since he was at second-to-last place, but then he jumped, and this weekend, he was declared the winner with 31% of the votes. I won’t claim that bloggers did it all, but we certainly made a difference, and that’s something we can all be proud of.
In general, Iowa political blogs — in particular, progressive Iowa blogs — seem to have improved significantly since I started watching them closely in January. I think all of us have seen our traffic increase, and that has kept us interested in it. In particular, I’ve seen Iowa Progress’s traffic go from 0 (we were only founded in March) to over 1,000 visits per week. Most surprising, perhaps, is the fact that we get a ton of our hits from outside Iowa. That means that people who are looking for places to send money are listening to us, and we’re filling a niche for them that may not have been filled before us.
It also means that potential presidential campaigns are listening to what we have to say. And that much is clear from the interviews that Drew (Feingold, Warner) and the folks at Political Forecast (Warner) have done with potential candidates. I’ve complained about the quality of the interviews in the past, but I still think that they’re interesting and that they set an important precedent for 2008 that candidates can’t afford to ignore us.
We’re growing, and people in the business are recognizing it. State-wide campaign staffers have said things like “I honestly think any candidate that ignores what is being said in the blogosphere and power of the web is a losing candidate.” The stakes are constantly rising.
But unfortunately, today Drew announced that he won’t be blogging at DrewMiller.net for the next several months. This is a blow to our blogosphere in Iowa, but it won’t be fatal. We have a void to fill, and I know all of us bloggers are going to try our best to fill it.
May 14th, 2006
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