Top officials with Hillary Clinton’s campaign have started assessing the strength of local Democratic parties and ordering up investments to correct organizational deficiencies and financial shortfalls in the battleground states she will need in her column to win the White House.

The calls and visits from senior members of Clinton’s team, who have zeroed in on local party efforts to build political muscle, have left state officials in a “holding pattern” as they wait for guidance from Brooklyn on everything from finance to strategy to hiring, said two dozen Democratic leaders in New York, Washington, Virginia, Florida, Ohio, and Colorado.


High-level Clinton aides’ interest in the Ohio Democratic Party’s growing field program as a tool for the lead-up to November 2016 “encourages us, our volunteers and our donors, to put more resources into this effort,” said state party executive director Greg Beswick.

But, added another senior Democratic Party official based in a swing state, when it comes to setting the national party’s agenda, “the entire building has been waiting for the Clinton team to take over.”

The health of state parties has been an obsession for both Bill and Hillary Clinton for years, and the candidate has been closely watching some of them since 2013, knowing that a strong ground game and finance operation in Florida and Ohio in particular could make the difference between a Democrat and a Republican in the White House. So she made revitalizing the decimated state infrastructures a focus of her 2016 effort shortly after launching her bid in April.

Eager to avoid looking like it's taking past the primary for granted — a perception that helped doom Clinton in 2008 — her team says the check-ins with state parties are a routine part of her campaign and that she is focused on competing for the nomination. Indeed many of the visits and calls have occurred in likely swing states that vote in the primary in February or March — like Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia. And the campaign has brought on paid staffers in safe Democratic states that vote in March too, such as Massachusetts.

“Our campaign remains focused on outreach to Democrats in these primary states – including the March primary contests and helping our state parties as they hold the Republican candidates accountable for their out-of-touch and out-of-date agenda,” said campaign spokesman Jesse Ferguson.

The attention it’s paying to the field organizations in state parties that could help sway the general election — a particular focus of campaign manager Robby Mook — underscores the advance planning her team is already undertaking for a contest against the Republican nominee.

The campaign has had access to information about the state parties’ funding and spending practices since it negotiated joint fundraising agreements with most of them over the summer and fall, and it sent $24,000 each to the potential battlegrounds of Florida, Virginia, and Pennsylvania — not an early-voting state at all — shortly after the agreement was formalized.

Since then, local officials say, Clinton’s own increased travel to states like Florida, Virginia, and Colorado has been joined by ramped-up staff meetings across the country — beyond the regular check-ins between the local and Brooklyn-based communications staffs.

Mook and director of states and political engagement Marlon Marshall have been talking with the Ohio Democratic Party for months, keeping a close eye on the field operation being built out of the Columbus headquarters.

Deputy national political director Brynne Craig — who, like Mook, spent time working in Ohio in 2008 — has been on some of the calls, held once or twice a month, where state leaders outline their field and fundraising progress, according to locals. And Mook has visited Ohio multiple times for meetings and fundraisers — including a campaign cash event in Cleveland later this week.

Just last month Marshall held meetings with Florida leaders during their state party convention. That’s a state where, according to Democrats in the region, Mook has kept in close contact with high-ranking members of the party about local political developments.

Both Mook and Marshall have visited the New Hampshire Democratic Party, too — Marshall earlier this month — while looking for organizing and fundraising strategies they could pass onto other states. And political director Amanda Renteria joined Clinton on her most recent Colorado trip, sitting for local meetings of her own.

Not all local parties in swing states have gotten this much attention, particularly in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin where Democrats have won the last few presidential elections, high-ranking officials there told POLITICO. Some Clinton-allied outside strategists have been talking with Michigan leaders, said state Democratic Party chair Brandon Dillon. But the campaign’s discussion with Lansing leaders has not “gotten into many specifics yet,” despite the in-state expectation that it will in the coming months.

Instead, Brooklyn’s interest is most intense in the states that regularly swing between red and blue on Election Day. And nowhere is the campaign’s general-election outreach on display more than in Virginia, where the state party has been closely tied to the Democratic front-runner since long before she became a candidate due to the de facto leadership of Gov. Terry McAuliffe, one of the Clintons’ closest confidants and the former boss of top Clinton staffers like Mook and Craig.

That pair remains in regular contact with Virginia leadership, according to people familiar with those relationships, and beyond looking to Brooklyn for strategic guidance during the 2015 state senate election that recently ended, the party has now been in communication with the campaign about how to fill its open positions, like on the communications side.

Sanders, still running second in this relatively small Democratic field, has also tried to maintain communication with some of the state parties: one of his strategists was at the Florida convention that Marshall attended in November. Like Clinton, Sanders has met with Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper. And former Ohio party official Nina Turner, who recently switched allegiances from Clinton to Sanders, has kept his campaign apprised of developments in Columbus.

But local officials, who expect Clinton to secure the nomination by spring, are taking her team’s close watch as an indication that her campaign’s political unit will be ready to connect directly with the state-level field organizations within months.

“The candidate usually picks their own chair and brings in folks, there’s an integration with the campaign,” explained one of the nation’s top-ranking swing state Democrats — who is neutral in the primary — detailing the state parties’ expectations for the timing of the Clinton team’s outreach.

“We’re right before that happens."