Major Democratic super PAC hires Clinton, Sanders vets for relaunch
Priorities USA Action, the main super PAC that supported Hillary Clinton’s White House bid, is accelerating its move to reposition itself as a hub of post-2016 Democratic activity.
The group plans to bring on a pair of prominent operatives from both Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns, including Brian Fallon, Clinton’s national press secretary and a frequent presence on television during campaign season, who will join the group as a consultant with the position of senior adviser. While he is expected to start his own public affairs practice, Fallon will spend the bulk of his time working for Priorities. Former Sanders national press secretary Symone Sanders will assume the role of strategist for communications and political outreach, a person familiar with the moves told POLITICO.
Led by chief strategist Guy Cecil, the group is also due to promote Patrick McHugh, its deputy executive director during the campaign cycle, to executive director, while Anne Caprara, who previously had that job, will move into a senior adviser role. Kim Kauffman, who led the group’s financial operations as it became the highest-raising super PAC ever, will keep that job in Priorities’ new incarnation.
The series of moves come as Priorities, which spent months savaging President-elect Donald Trump with television, digitally and radio ads, maneuvers Democrats’ rejiggered post-electoral landscape and builds out its new role — one that includes Every Citizen Counts, a voting rights group with which it merged in December. Planning to work with a series of left-leaning groups like the Human Rights Campaign and Planned Parenthood Action Fund — and to support movements and ballot measures in the states — the super PAC is also expanding its research and digital operations.
One of its primary initiatives will also be a push branded as “The BluePrint Project,” which aims to study and engage both voters who backed President Barack Obama in 2012 and then Trump in 2016, and those who supported Obama before staying home this past November. That campaign has already begun: led by pollsters Geoff Garin and Jef Pollock, Priorities will next week convene focus groups in the Obama-and-Trump-voting states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida, focusing on counties that saw the largest swings from Obama to Trump, and the biggest drop-off in voting rates within African American communities.
“Many organizations will be in the day-to-day fight against Trump and the Republicans, developing war rooms and large communications operations,” said Cecil. “Priorities USA is already partnering with many of these efforts and will deploy our resources at every level to fight back every day. However, we will also take the long view, ensuring that one thousand fights aren’t simply one thousand individual fights.”
Aiming to bring on over 30 people, the group’s leaders have been interviewing potential digital staffers this week after spending much of January meeting with party leaders and organizers. Cecil and other staffers are also due to travel to Michigan and Florida in the coming weeks to hear more from local political workers there ahead of state-focused efforts. Further, Cecil is due to visit Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York next month to meet with donors and tech leaders and firms to seek collaboration opportunities.
With the new hires, the group has also positioned itself to play a potentially important role working with independent groups gearing up for 2018’s Senate races: Cecil himself is a veteran of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and he served as the group’s executive director in 2012, when the current crop of vulnerable senators were last up for election.
Fallon, meanwhile, worked as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s communications director for six years before moving to the Justice Department, McHugh has spent time as the DSCC’s research director and leading its independent expenditures, and Caprara is a former DSCC political director.