Priorities USA, the main super PAC backing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 bid, has since rebranded itself with a dual focus on digital ad buys and voting rights. | Getty Priorities USA training hundreds in digital campaigning

A major Democratic super PAC is training a new army of operatives as the party continues to rebuild its digital infrastructure following Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss, hoping to fill in gaps in training that limit digital operatives’ careers.

Priorities USA was the main super PAC backing Clinton’s bid and has since rebranded itself with a dual focus on digital ad buys and voting rights. The group is planning to spend $50 million backing Democrats with digital ads during the 2018 election. But it has also started training Democratic and progressive groups on how to best plan a digital advertising campaign and get the most for the money.


“Our bench is very shallow,” said Patrick McHugh, Priorities’ executive director. “So much of the talent is locked up in digital agencies. That makes decision-makers hesitant to invest in digital.”

The training program, which launched in November, has trained more than 250 operatives — from campaign managers to digital operatives — on how to put together digital budgets, be strategic with their investments, integrate digital with other parts of a campaign and create engaging content. The program is ramping up to a three-day boot camp in May, when Priorities will train 75 digital and data operatives from 50 different organizations.

The super PAC, led by high-profile Democratic operative Guy Cecil, is also launching a fellowship program to give aspiring operatives experience in digital when they are fresh out of college. While many young operatives are trained in press or field work, digital training is typically limited to writing fundraising emails, and it rarely includes get-out-the-vote or persuasion work.

The hope, McHugh explained, is to train digital operatives outside of the digital consulting shops so campaigns and organizations can use cheaper in-house talent. The program will start in June.

The Democratic Party’s struggles with digital have been well documented. During the 2016 elections, the GOP outspent Democrats by a roughly 2-to-1 margin on digital persuasion ads. Democratic digital operatives continue to sound the alarm that the party isn’t doing enough on the digital front to catch up to Republicans, with one prominent operative, Mothership Strategies’ Greg Berlin, recently telling POLITICO he was “worried for the future of my party.”

Priorities’ help has been welcomed by groups like Planned Parenthood and America Votes, which works to coordinate state- and national-level groups like the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Indivisible and others on independent expenditure and issue campaigns. They said the super PAC provided training at a massive summit of state-level operatives in February.

“There was a void and a huge demand for the work Priorities wanted to do around digital,” said Sara Schreiber, the group’s managing director. “This had been an emerging campaign tool, and there really was no coordinating element specifically around digital, and that takes a lot of both expertise and capacity.”

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