Tim Kaine likes to say he’s never lost an election. Then there’s 2010.

Kaine himself wasn’t on the ballot that year. But as the chairman of the national party, he was at the helm as Democrats were decimated up and down the ballot: Republicans netted six governorships, six Senate seats, 63 House seats and control of the chamber. They also gained 20 state legislative chambers, including Southern statehouses that hadn’t gone Republican in generations.


Meanwhile, Kaine skirted blame for all of it, despite being the Democratic National Committee chair in the worst Democratic blowout in a generation. On the contrary, people inside and outside the DNC building argue that Kaine might actually deserve some credit for the election not going worse, and that the real story of Kaine’s tenure was revealed in 2012, when President Barack Obama held the White House and Democrats clawed back some of their losses.

“He was handed what was destined to be a turd sandwich,” said former Pennsylvania Democratic Party Chairman T.J. Rooney. “If you’re going to assess blame, it’s not fair to pin it on him.”

Instead of a disqualifier, many Democrats say Kaine's tough DNC tenure is a reason to like him more. They view the experience as a window into the traits he’ll bring to the final three months of this presidential campaign, and potentially, to the next four years as vice president: A politician subsumed to his boss — yet doggedly working in a few of his own priorities — who manages to maintain relationships even when there’s more than enough reason to attack him.

"It was a tough cycle for Tim to be leading the party effort," said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). “It didn’t diminish his reputation among members of Congress."

Republicans are shocked that Kaine’s tenure hasn’t received more negative scrutiny and sour grapes. They say he and the other top Democratic tacticians totally misread the electorate and never faced the consequences.

“Of course he was ineffective,” said Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, the triumphant chairman of House Republicans’ campaign arm in 2010. “In the Republican Party, he would have been fired and chastised and literally run out of the party.”

Instead Kaine is remembered for infusing state parties with resources, laying the groundwork for Obama’s successful reelection and integrating the machinery of the president’s campaign with the DNC — that is, to the extent that the White House wanted it integrated -- according to interviews with more than a dozen former members of Congress, gubernatorial candidates and DNC officials.

The Virginia senator wasn’t down in the weeds, but he was often on the road and on the phone, collecting complaints and ideas and trying to synthesize them into guidance for his staff. He was almost always accessible by text messages, and several prominent Democrats said he almost never said “no.”

There’s a reason why so many Democratic players all over the country spent the last eight years chattering about how much they liked Kaine and hoping he’d get the VP nod.

"This is not a guy who was just sitting up there and getting briefed,” said Jen O’Malley Dillon, who was DNC executive director while Kaine was chair. “He was an active chair. He was involved every week in what we were doing and making big decisions, and he was also the one who was first in line to go on TV to defend the president."

“He gets a great deal of credit for building our state party structure nationally to allow our president to be reelected,” said former Iowa Gov. Chet Culver, who was crushed in his reelection race that year. “That’s going to be part of his legacy.”

Ousted Democratic politicians insist that no one from the top on down could have truly predicted how negatively the country would react to two years of Washington rule under Democrats, and a backlash that began brewing almost as soon as Obama took office with unemployment spiking and the economy cratering.

“I could have spent $40 million in my race and it wouldn’t have done any good,” said former Rep. Baron Hill (D-Ind.), a five-term member of the House. “I thought I was still going to win going into Election Day.”

Largely leaving individual congressional races to Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Chris Van Hollen and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Robert Menendez, Kaine dug deep into the governors’ races. While the Democratic Governors Association focused on more traditional swing states, Kaine was advocating for the DGA to put more money behind South Carolina’s Vincent Sheheen, a rare bright spot in 2010 who barely fell short against Nikki Haley in a solidly Republican state.

“We were late on the radar screen of the national Democrats in 2010 ... he was advocating for those of us in the South,” Sheheen recalled. “Much of the rest of the party was ignoring the South.”

While Kaine shied away from specific Democratic House races — one former House member couldn’t even recall who the DNC chairman was in 2010 — he was deeply involved in the broad tactics and huddled repeatedly with Van Hollen.

The problem, Democrats said, was that no one seemed to fully grasp just how big a loss the party was in for.

“My problem was everybody thought I was a shoo-in. Including me,” recalled former Rep. Walt Minnick (D-Idaho). “I had a 14-point lead five days before my reelection. And Chris [Van Hollen] said: ‘I don’t think we need to spend money there.’”

Minnick ultimately lost to Rep. Raul Labrador by 10 points.

At the time, the ideological churn of the Democratic Party that was articulated by Bernie Sanders’ challenge to Hillary Clinton was beginning to bubble up.

Former Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) nearly lost her primary, then was blown out by Republican John Boozman in the general election.

She wasn’t alone.

“I don’t think it mattered a whole lot, unless there was a DNC chair that would reach down and say to the DCCC folks: ‘Hey, clear that primary for people like Boyd,’” said former Rep. Allen Boyd of Florida, who spent most of his resources to hang on in a primary and then was defeated soundly by Republican Steve Southerland.

As Nancy Pelosi’s majority collapsed around her, Kaine worked the state party chairs as hard as ever. He kibitzed with Democratic candidates. He outraised the RNC by $30 million and outspent the GOP by $15 million during the cycle. He oversaw the beginning of an overhaul in the data operation and made a big push for emphasizing small business within the party, starting a committee to bring in leaders for idea sessions so that he wasn’t just asking them for money. He also had regular lunches with Obama, signing on entirely to the president’s agenda, happily living with the West Wing’s desire for a DNC chair who was more like a top staffer on the re-election effort than a principal.

Kaine saw the early data coming in for the midterms. He knew things were going to be bad, though not as bad as they turned out to be, in House and Senate races. Kaine went on the "Daily Show" in September and, when pressed for the Democratic argument to win, offered Jon Stewart a traffic sign-shaped keychain that said "Don't Give Them The Keys Back." Stewart laughed in his face.

"It was bad soup. I don’t think there was any ingredient we could have put in it that would have made it much better,” said Brad Woodhouse, the communications director at the time.

Kaine’s focus stayed on prepping for the president’s 2012 reelection campaign, which the White House knew was going to be hard due to unemployment numbers, animosity toward Obama and Democratic disappointment all running high. But even politicians swept out of office two years before the president’s reelect are reluctant to blame Kaine, whom they say they always found accessible, upbeat, tireless -- and essentially powerless to thwart a tidal wave.

“There are a lot of reasons that things went bad in 2010, I wouldn't necessarily point it at the DNC,” said former Rep. Ron Klein (D-Fla.), who recalls speaking of strategy with Kaine throughout the cycle. “I didn’t find fault or benefit from the DNC at the time.”

If Kaine was floored by the results, he did a good job hiding it. He kept going even after the election was over, decamping to New Hampshire the next month to hold a town hall style meeting with defeated Democrats at the direction of state Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley.

Buckley remembers the time this way: “I still have blood on my office floor from people that were so despondent.”

After the elections, Kaine was very quickly pushing a new idea in the run-up to the president’s re-election: own “Obamacare,” and turn what Republicans had made a negative back on them.

"We should lean into that term," Woodhouse remembers Kaine saying. "Of course President Obama cares, and of course President Obama wants people to have health care." Eventually, Obama did exactly this—but it was months later.



Even after resigning the chairmanship to launch his Senate campaign, Kaine continued to adhere to some of his party chair duties: After the 2010 election showed former Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) would be vulnerable in 2012, Kaine helped him raise money in Northern Virginia that kept him afloat until he finally was ousted in 2014.

If anything, Democrats argue that Kaine staved off a bigger disaster in 2010, still stinging at the thought of how close they came to losing gubernatorial races in bright blue states like Minnesota.

“We literally thought we could have lost Vermont, we could have lost Connecticut,” said Gov. Jack Markell (D-Del.), the 2010 DGA chair. “In such a difficult year, when you are able to get some wins like that you just never know what made the difference. And I’m more than happy to say that whatever Tim did could have been helpful.”