BURLINGTON — Howard Dean’s 2004 Democratic presidential nomination rewrote the political playbook.
“I think the real nature of the campaign was to empower ordinary people to make a difference in their own lives,” the former Democratic governor said at his campaign’s 10th anniversary party Sunday at Oakledge Park in Burlington.
At Oakledge Park, Dean “took the country back” to Vermont to celebrate his presidential campaign, which he lost, marking his retirement from political office.
Dean’s campaign has been admired for its innovation in the use of the Internet and fundraising strategy, but there were many other factors that enabled the governor from the small state of Vermont to reach the national stage.
Dean’s staff
During Dean’s speech Sunday, he faced a new generation that embodied his pioneering legacy. He gave his staff credit for enabling him to launch a successful political strategy.
Gray Brooks was an intern on Dean’s Web team. He left his home state of Alabama and drove up to Burlington to work on the campaign after he heard one of Dean’s speeches broadcast on radio.
Brooks is now the senior application programming interface strategist at the General Services Administration, which is part of the White House’s Digital Government Strategy. He said that his task on the campaign was to understand and engage the support groups online, which was part of one of Dean’s most successful Internet campaign strategies.
“That was where the activity was actually taking place, that was where the action was happening,” Brooks said.
Brooks would later work on Obama’s presidential campaigns, which also used technology to engage the electorate.
Ryan Davis was living in New York City and working in theater when decided to rent a van to drive up to Burlington to watch Dean declare his candidacy.
“I rented a car and drove up to Burlington, not even having a place on the campaign,” he said. “I was just going to show up and do stuff.”
On the campaign, he edited video and used the Internet for outreach and blogging.
After the campaign, Davis continued to run digital campaigns for local races in New York.
“I put my skills immediately back to use for progressive candidates in New York City,” he said.
He has recently been working for Blue State Digital, a media firm that concentrates on online fundraising and social networking and was founded by several former staffers on the Dean campaign. The work of this firm was the backbone of the Obama campaign, Davis said. Now, the firm is exporting the same tactics around the world.
Davis said that he worked on the campaign of French President François Hollande, who was elected in May 2012. Soon he may put his professional skills to a personal use. He said he dreams about running for Congress in Brooklyn someday.
Stephanie Schriock was national finance director for the campaign. She also packed up her home and left Washington, D.C., to work on the campaign. She is now president of EMILY’s List, an organization dedicated to electing pro-choice woman.
Dean’s campaign has been recognized for its fundraising strategy that focused on small, online donations.
Schriock said she was inspired by the work of MoveOn.org, which successfully ran campaigns against supporters of the Iraq War. After the Senate voted on the Iraq War in October 2003, MoveOn.org gave former Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone’s re-election campaign more than $600,000 using online fundraising techniques.
This method of fundraising set an example of how to raise money online using small donation amounts, which Schriock brought to Dean’s campaign.
Schriock said the campaign raised $2.7 million in the first quarter. Later, the campaign would raise as much as $15 million during its top two quarters, outmatching even the best financial quarters for all previous Democratic Party campaigns, which at the time was set by former President Bill Clinton’s $10.3 million quarter during his re-election bid.
“On the Democratic side, we had not figured out how to do this until this crazy crew up in Burlington figured it out,” she said.
Volunteers offered more than labor
“The campaign was supposed to lose,” said Garrett Graff, who served on Dean’s media team. “It had no money, it had no staff.”
Graff said the resources that people were willing to volunteer outstripped the campaign’s capacity, even though it was not a conscious decision to rely on volunteers.
“You almost always had people who just showed up and kept working until they actually got a job,” he said. “We didn’t choose the staff so much as the staff ended up choosing us.”
The campaign fizzled but changed the way Democratic candidates approached campaigns.
“If you look around at every major political institution in the Democratic Party today, it is either run by a Dean alumnus or by somebody who has studied and adopted the Dean model,” Graff said. “The Obama campaign was sort of run by the winning people of the campaign.”
Graff is the editor-in-chief for The Washingtonian magazine based in D.C. He began working on Dean’s website as a teenager at Montpelier High School in 1996.
Rich Kolker, former chair of the Loudoun County Democratic Committee in Virginia, a job he gave up to run the 10th congressional district as a volunteer for Dean, said that Dean’s campaign would listen to the volunteers.
He said Dean’s campaign was open to volunteers not just for their labor but their sources of ideas.
Kolker said that many of the publicity materials and ideas composed by volunteers made their way into a campaign strategy.
“A lot of the ideas for the campaign came out of the volunteers,” he said.
Kolker said this is not conventional in many campaigns.
“I’ve worked a lot of campaigns and usually the folks that consider themselves professionals don’t want to listen to the volunteers,” Kolker said.
This responsibility was inspiring, he said.
Kolker said during the 10 days prior to the Iowa Caucus he was doing advance work for the campaign, which included organizing publicity and speeches one day ahead of the tour bus.
“We survived on bottled water and granola bars for those 10 days, but we were given the freedom and the flexibility to do that,” he said.
Thinking ahead
Kolker said the campaign was able to get ahead of the game, taking political strategy to the next step and defining contemporary campaign tactic.
Kolker said he might consider running for office after he leaves his current job, which prevents him from running for office.
He said he would follow the example set by the Dean campaign: “Don’t try to do what they did last time better, try to figure out what the next big thing is going to be and get out in front of everybody,” he said. “And that’s what one of the things the Dean campaign was able to do.”
However, he will not be sharing any other strategic plans for his potential campaign.
“I haven’t thought about it enough, and if I had, I wouldn’t tell you,” Kolker said.
The campaign also used communication tools that had never been used before, Graff said. In fact, he remembers receiving his first text message on the campaign.
“We were working with these very, very early set of tools,” Graff said. “It was coming to understand what the next 10 years would bring and what this revolution would end up bringing much earlier than anyone else did.”
These tools include Friendster and Orkut, two short-lived social networking sites, which were the early social media platforms that have been largely replaced today. However, the method set a new model.
The LGBT community
Schriock said Dean’s early support came from the LGBT community because of his support for civil unions.
“There may not have the foundations of a presidential campaign without their financial support because they were the earliest dollars that came in and we built everything off the support they gave,” she said.
Schriock said that at one event during a tour that passed through San Francisco, thousands from the LGBT community lined up, anxious to see Dean speak.
“This doesn’t happen at other people’s fundraisers,” she said.
In fact, part of Dean general campaign theme stemmed from the Vermont civil unions bill when Dean was Vermont governor in 2000: the right to dignity for all people.
During Dean’s opening remarks at the 10th anniversary celebration, he thanked Democratic Sen. Mark MacDonald for voting in favor of the Vermont civil unions bill.
MacDonald lost his seat in a conservative district as a result, Dean said. But he voted for what he thought was right. MacDonald was returned to the Senate in 2002.
“What impressed me so much about Mark MacDonald is that he didn’t care as much about his re-election as he cared about doing the right thing,” Dean said.
At the time, Dean asked MacDonald to vote against the bill because the Senate had the votes it needed to pass it, but MacDonald voted for the bill anyway. The bill passed the Vermont Senate 19-11.
“That is essentially what this campaign was about,” Dean said. “It was about standing up for what we believe.”
Should we expect Dean for 2016?
“I have absolutely no idea,” Dean said during his speech. “To give the tease line so that the story can keep going: ‘never say never.’”
Later, however, Dean said he would rather see the generation that supported him run for office.
“The country doesn’t often go back a generation,” he said.
Dean said the Obama campaign set a new standard for political campaigns, a standard that was developed by the generation that fueled his campaign.
“I think that there are probably a fair number of young, talented people who I think should be president, and I don’t think that I have to run for any particular reason. The only reason I would do it is if I really thought, for some reason, I was the one that had to help this generation to continue to move forward,” Dean said. “Right now, I don’t think that’s true.”
