The role of manager is taking on nuances it never had.
Several managers who spoke with C&E over the past several months described how staff today are, simply put, a little burned out. They’re also used to remote work, but keeping them on task can be more challenging.
And when it comes to remote work: while many said it was essential to keep a campaign organization growing in this day and age, they also lamented the loss of an in-person feel that many of today’s campaigns have less of.
“I am guardedly optimistic about the future,” said Mark Campbell, who served as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s manager in 2021. “A lot of the fakers have sort of self-identified and dropped out, so I don’t view this current environment as a problem. I have found that people who love this and enjoy it and are in it for something other than strictly financial gain, those folks are still out there,” he said, adding: “They might be harder to find.”
Finding good staff is just one aspect of the top campaign job that’s gotten harder for managers. They also need to be on the frontline, at least on the left, of the diversity conversation.
On both sides, meanwhile, they’re the ones who will make calls on whether to throw money at a new startup or service entering the campaign industry. And while managers fought their share of close contests in the past, today they’re having to manage campaigns decided by even tighter margins amidst voting windows that open long before Election Day with possible recounts stretching long after.
The managers who spoke with C&E were candid about the challenges they faced. In almost all cases, these had nothing to do with high-level strategy or deploying complex outreach tools or targeting. It boiled down to people: Finding and managing the right ones.
“I’ve noticed it’s a lot harder to pool a lot of staff resumes for people,” said Brendan McPhillips, a partner at Philadelphia-based Hilltop Public Solutions who managed Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-Pa.) 2022 race.
McPhillips pointed to an increase in the number of active primaries as well as staff landing roles in the Biden administration or on the president’s reelect — or just feeling burned out. That scarcity, more than anything, is what’s forcing managers into hiring remote staff.
“There’s a lot to be said for needing a campaign team to be on the ground in the place where the campaign is being run and running into voters at the convenience store, and talking to real people in person. But at the same time there are jobs that can be done virtually,” he said. “Being flexible with in-person work is a way to recruit broader, more diverse networks.”
But managing a remote team comes with its own set of challenges “People are split into two camps between folks who want to do more remote work and folks who want to do less right now,” he said, adding that there are ”legitimate reasons for preferring virtual or in-person … The reality is you just have to kind of blend both right now.”
For all that’s been lost in interpersonal interaction, the newly remote world made up for with data measurement — and managers are embracing it.
“Management by objectives, measurable goals, is critically important,” said Campbell, who managed Youngkin’s 2021 campaign through some of the darkest days of the pandemic. Adapting to Zoom-based management was a bit rough at first, but he grew to like how much data he could analyze. Summing up his approach, Campbell said: “If you can’t measure. It didn’t happen.”
How To Make Diversity a Strategic Priority
Another way that numbers don’t always tell the whole story is in things like representation, according to Maya Rupert, who managed Julian Castro’s 2020 presidential through the Democratic White House primary contest. Rupert, who was only the third black woman to have held such a management role, believes that campaigns need to think about what “true diversity” means.
“One thing that I have seen happen, that’s really frustrating to watch, is people saying, ‘Oh, we need to have diverse campaign management or senior people, and so they hire a racially diverse senior team and then stack the team with a bunch of consultants that have no diversity and really rely on just the consultants to help really kind of [run things],” said Rupert, who also managed Maya Wiley’s New York City mayoral in 2021.
“So it’s a very superficial desire to have diversity at the highest ranks. It’s got to be a real and deep commitment, and a genuine willingness to bring in identities and perspectives and experiences that are different from your own.”
She put the need for diversity in these terms: “If you’re going to run a campaign that is supposed to be centering poor and working people, but just have Ivy Leaguers on staff, you’re not going to have the perspective you need to really inform what you’re doing.”
And it’s that perspective that is going to separate the winning from losing campaigns as the electorate continues to diversify and campaigns fight over fewer swing voters.
“The idea that we need to diversify, it’s been a newer demand, and that means that if you just look at the traditional pool, a lot of it is not going to be very diverse,” she said. “Candidates have to be willing to think about what it is they’re looking for and if there are skills that are more outside whatever pool they’re looking at.”
This article was excerpted from a larger report about the state of campaign management. Look for the report’s full release next month.
