2016 Clinton vows to rebuild state parties after Obama-era wipeout The Democratic front-runner tells early state activists she’ll work to reverse the party’s sweeping local losses.

CONCORD, N.H. — Hillary Clinton had a message to relay in private meetings with state and local Democrats during her highly-choreographed swings through Iowa and New Hampshire this month: let me help you.

The implication? She’ll fix the party infrastructure that withered under President Barack Obama.


The Democratic front-runner has stressed the importance of bolstering — and in the case of Iowa, rebuilding — the state parties from the ground up, as they received scant national attention since 2008. Some Democrats even pin the blame on the president himself.

Clinton’s pitch is especially resonant in Iowa, where her team is already encouraging rural Democrats to run for their school boards and county commissions. It’s not just a standard exercise in party-building: Team Clinton is betting that the organizing and goodwill generated by this outreach will pay dividends when it comes time to flip the switch on her own caucus and primary machines.

“What typically happens is when a president comes in, the national [party] committee becomes a presidential re-elect, and that hollows out the local parties,” says former Vermont Governor and Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean, who ran for president in 2004. The result, as outlined in the party’s February midterm autopsy report, has been sweeping losses for Democrats at every level during the Obama era, from statehouses to the U.S. House and Senate.

Without blaming the president by name, Clinton’s team is telling early state officials and activists that they feel their pain — and that they’re here to help.

“For the last eight years there were a large number of people who were attracted to be involved in campaigns because of Barack Obama, and that didn’t necessarily translate into those folks being party activists for other candidates, which is what you’ve been seeing in the off-year elections,” said New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Raymond Buckley, who saw Clinton last week. “We really need to be able to build something that is a permanent infrastructure, right from the precinct level.”

Bret Nilles, the chairman of Iowa’s Linn County Democrats who met with Clinton two weeks ago, said she made her focus on local organizing clear. “The thing about 2008 is it was such a diverse group of activists, we recruited a lot of people that weren’t active in the past,” he said. “In 2014 we saw some of that is wearing off, and it’s time to get the local parties reinvigorated.”

While New Hampshire Democrats kept their hold on the governor’s mansion in 2014, they lost the state House, and Iowa Democrats were “decimated” in 2014, in the words of one Clinton aide. The party lost its U.S. Senate seat and a U.S. House seat, leaving Democrats with just one U.S. House member in its congressional delegation. Those losses reflected the national party’s broader erosion since 2008, as outlined by the autopsy: Democrats have lost 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats, and 11 governorships in that time, as well as 30 state legislative chambers.

Clinton’s stated interest in local party investment is an implicit acknowledgment of this devastation. But it’s also self-serving: Clinton will benefit from a strong party infrastructure baring her imprint in Iowa, where next February’s caucuses — a highly structured affair requiring appointed precinct captains and organizers who Clinton has started recruiting — will be the first real test of her electoral strength.

“When she referenced helping rebuilding the party on her first trip to Iowa, it was like manna from heaven,” said Des Moines attorney Jerry Crawford, a Clinton friend who was a Midwest co-chairman of her 2008 campaign.

Since formally-designated precinct captains frequently turn their experience into their own future campaigns, that kind of robust local organizing can represent a long-term investment in the party. While the 2008 caucuses generated unprecedented grassroots excitement as a result of Clinton, Obama, and John Edwards, there was no Democratic competition in 2012 — and now local officials fear that an unchallenged Clinton campaign would mean yet another election cycle that fails to attract new caucus-goers and fresh grassroots talent.

“The caucuses are about party building,” explained Andy McGuire, the Iowa Democratic Party chair.

Aware of those concerns, and careful to avoid the perception of overconfidence, Clinton’s team has reached out to anxious local party officials. Linda Nelson, Iowa’s Pottawattamie County Democratic Party chair, said her recent coffee in Council Bluffs with Clinton involved six people: three county chairs, a county chair’s husband and a prominent local activist.

Still, Clinton’s team is in the early stages of its in-state organization. While the independent super PAC Ready For Hillary was busy signing up voters over the last two years, Matt Paul, the Clinton campaign’s top-ranking official in Iowa, alluded to the difficulty of building a caucus infrastructure in a place where the party has been floundering: “We don’t know what this is going to look like. It’s not as if this is a manual we can pull off the shelf and be able to execute.”

The uphill climb isn’t so steep in New Hampshire. State party officials credit Clinton with helping to hold Gov. Maggie Hassan and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s seats after she headlined a Nashua rally shortly before the midterms, but Buckley also noted that he saw major differences in turnout between towns that had formal Democratic structures and those that didn’t, suggesting there is room for further organization. He said he spoke with DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz about this when she visited New Hampshire recently and added that Clinton has also brought up the state’s uneven volunteer distribution.

Nonetheless, those familiar with Clinton and her operation are under no impression that the focus on early-state party building is one of Clinton’s most urgent priorities.

“If it’s building the party, that’s ancillary, fine, all well and good,” said New Hampshire lawyer Bill Shaheen, a fixture of the state’s Democratic infrastructure and Sen. Shaheen’s husband. “But she has her eye on the prize.”