How the DNC exorcised the ghosts of 2016 and helped deliver a Biden victory
By late 2019, top officials at the Democratic National Committee knew they were running out of time and money to build the kind of operation that could take on a sitting president.
Over a series of after-hours meetings in their Washington headquarters, DNC leaders scrutinized budget spreadsheets and debated how many staffers they could afford to place in swing states, trying to free up enough cash at a time when the party’s presidential primary was soaking up most of the fundraising dollars.
They eventually settled on a risky solution: Start to hire key staff in battleground states even if they weren’t certain they could pay them over the duration of a long campaign.
It was a potentially catastrophic move that put the long-beleaguered committee’s credibility on the line — but one its leaders thought was necessary if they wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016 and begin building a general election operation months before Joe Biden would emerge as the party’s nominee.
“We don’t have a congressional appropriation. We don’t have the ability to print money. And I didn’t want to hand over oodles of debt to my successor,” DNC chairman Tom Perez recalled in an interview. “So I was very worried about making sure we were doing this right.”
“We took risks, there’s no doubt about it, in terms of the decisions we made,” he added.
The decision paid off. Fundraising picked up, and the DNC was able to not just retain the hundreds of organizers and staffers it hired in January, but expand their ranks while still making million-dollar investments in voter data that Biden’s campaign would later deem invaluable.
The committee estimates it had about 1,000 staffers in place by the time Biden became the party’s de-facto nominee in the spring, all of whom could begin working on the campaign’s behalf at a critical juncture of the race against President Donald Trump.
In a historic election rocked by a pandemic, civil unrest and an economic recession, even many Democrats overlooked the role the DNC played in helping Biden, particularly as his relatively small-scale campaign during the primary faced the challenge of transforming into a full-fledged general election operation.
But Biden officials say that would be a mistake, saying the committee’s assistance often surprised even them.
“They were tremendous partners,” said Jenn Ridder, national states director for the Biden campaign. “It was completely unexpected in so many ways coming out of [2016]. I worked at committees before, and I was always skeptical of the DNC.”
Ridder and other Biden officials cited a litany of ways they benefited from the DNC, including the recruitment of battleground state staff, the establishment of strong relationships with state parties and a data and fundraising operation they found to be surprisingly strong.
For a national political committee, these would normally be considered modest achievements — the sort of work expected to be completed ahead of a major election.
But for the DNC, the helpful role they played for the Biden campaign represents the culmination of four years of effort to rebuild the committee into a fully functional political entity, after years of neglect during Barack Obama’s tenure had left it penniless, adrift, and a drag on Hillary Clinton during the last presidential campaign.
“By all appearances, the basic infrastructure work had been done, and it saved the Biden campaign a lot of time and a lot of grief,” said Robby Mook, who managed Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
‘April Project’
DNC officials are quick to say that credit for the election victory belongs with the Biden campaign. The committee simply laid the foundation, in their view, for the full-fledged campaign to come that would eventually defeat Trump.
But that commitment to “unsexy” infrastructure building, as DNC deputy CEO Sam Cornale puts it, was the product of a years-long strategy from the DNC, one that began shortly after Perez’s election to the chairman position in 2017.
What started as informal phone calls between Perez and top Democratic officials became more official in early 2019, when the DNC convened a meeting of leading party strategists with a history of working with the committee, including Mook and Marlon Marshall, who was director of state campaigns and political engagement for Clinton.
DNC officials called the effort the “April Project” as they anticipated that the operation they built would be handed over to the party’s nominee around April 2020. It fixated on small and often overlooked elements of a campaign that could nonetheless play a big role in helping their candidate transition to the general election.
“Ultimately, you can do all the flashy things in the world, but if you’re not handing over a well-run chassis on which Joe Biden — or whoever the nominee was going to be — could build their race car, we hadn’t done our jobs,” said Sam Cornale, the DNC’s deputy CEO.
Cornale said one thing he and other DNC officials learned from those conversations was that even something like identifying and leasing office space had been an arduous and time-consuming task for the Clinton campaign. So before the primary finished, the DNC had a team of interns calling locations in battleground states all over the country, compiling a list of potential offices that it could provide to the eventual nominee.
It wasn’t the only seemingly menial task undertaken by the committee: It also negotiated coordinated campaign agreements with individual state parties ahead of time, a move veteran Democrats say saved the Biden campaign plenty of time and effort.
And among the thousand staffers it recruited to work in battleground states, DNC officials made sure to also install human resource officials who could in turn help the Biden campaign quickly hire many more staffers for the general election.
“I can’t overemphasize how much they were partners,” Ridder said. “I couldn’t tell you who was DNC versus who was Biden. Every step of the way, they were part of the campaign, which made it move efficiently.”
The DNC did flashier, though still important, work too: it helped lead the campaign’s text-message fundraising effort, which DNC and Biden officials say collected about 20% of all their small-dollar donations in the final months of the race.
The committee also helped build the beginnings of the website Iwillvote.com, which helped tens of thousands of Democrats figure out how to vote amid a pandemic that pushed many of them to cast their ballots through the mail for the first time. The site attracted nearly 19 million visitors this year, according to a DNC official.
Those efforts were in addition to a years-long voter data overhaul project engineered by the committee, on-the-ground media work in battleground states and an unexpected effort to walk voters through the mail-voting process.
The efforts were hardly revolutionary, veteran Democrats say, but by the standard of recent versions of the committee, count as stand-out contributions.
“Listen, by all accounts we handed over the largest, strongest, most sound infrastructure to a presidential nominee in at least a generation,” Cornale said.
‘The proof was in the pudding’
Not everything the DNC was involved in ran smoothly. Many top operatives on presidential campaigns in the primary continue to hold a grudge about what they see as the committee’s arbitrary thresholds for making the debate stage, which included both small-dollar donation and polling metrics.
The Iowa caucuses, marred by extreme delays in reporting the results, were also a blemish on the primary process, Democrats say. And some insist the national committee should have done more to invest in critical state parties, especially if its overall level of fundraising had been higher at a time when many Democratic candidates were raising record-smashing sums.
The coronavirus pandemic also upended the way the campaign conducted itself and how the DNC prepared for 2020. Much of the potential office space its interns had identified, committee officials say, went unused in a race where the Biden campaign kept its physical footprint light in many key battleground states.
And the squadrons of on-the-ground organizers and volunteers arranged by the DNC also by and large avoided the kind of door-to-door canvassing that is normally a hallmark of a presidential race because of the pandemic, switching instead to a field campaign that emphasized text messages and phone calls.
The decision from the Biden campaign to abandon a canvassing operation was a source of controversy that has only grown since the election, with some Democrats blaming it for the party’s congressional candidates falling short of expectations.
DNC officials bristle at the suggestion that an absence of door-knocking made a difference in the ultimate result.
“Following the science and not putting people in harm’s way was absolutely the right decision,” Perez said. “And again, the proof was in the pudding: Joe Biden got more votes than anyone in American history.”
Cornale said the insistence that canvassing plays such an important role “undermines” the larger Democratic Party, which includes rural voters who rarely if ever are met by a canvasser. Democrats, he added, managed to defeat an incumbent president amid record turnout — the kind of achievement that should defang criticism they ran a poor operation.
Even Democrats complimentary of the DNC’s efforts this cycle say they’re not sure if it will build on its success this year. Perez is not returning to as chairman, and the committee will take on a much different role, as it has always done, when a Democrat sits in the White House.
“Politics is a game of leapfrog,” Perez said. “But I always say politics is a game of leapfrog and sustain.”
This story was originally published November 23, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "How the DNC exorcised the ghosts of 2016 and helped deliver a Biden victory."