Professionalizing political operations work
Joey Pacific on how campaigns can make their machines run more smoothly
Welcome to Campaigner, a weekly newsletter exploring the tactics that drive winning political campaigns and highlighting the players pushing the buttons. Produced by Arena & FWIW Media.
From recruiting and staffing to HR and IT, campaigns rely on mostly behind-the-scenes “operations” teams to keep their machines running smoothly. For this week’s issue of Campaigner, we spoke with one operations expert, Joey Pacific, who co-founded Optimize and previously held prominent roles with the DNC and Pete for America.
Q&A with Joey Pacific, Co-founder, Optimize
Campaigner: How’d you get your start in politics?
Joey Pacific: I see a lot of my early career as a series of people taking a chance on me. After college, way back in 2013, I decided to apply for the White House internship. I thought, “There’s no way I’m going to get this - you have to know someone and I don’t know anyone important.” But, I figured I might as well try, and I actually ended up getting an interview and landing the internship. To this day I have no idea why I was chosen. (laughs) From there, I took the advice that was often given to us on day one of the internship: meet as many people as possible and have as many conversations as possible. I did that and someone that I met during the internship had passed my resume over to the Clinton campaign in Brooklyn.
I was in the right place, at the right time, with the right skill set. During my internship, I had done some pre-vet reports for the Presidential Personnel Office, and the Hillary for America team needed people who knew how to do vetting, but I was also junior enough and not a lawyer so they didn't have to pay me a lot. (laughs) On the Hillary campaign, my role doing vetting fell under the operations team, and that started my exposure to both campaigns generally as well as the role of “operations” on campaigns.
Campaigner: It seems like there are a hundred different things that fall under the “operations” team on campaigns - from payroll and budgeting to IT, to recruiting and HR. Can you give us a quick overview of what operations folks do, and what a day-to-day looks like?
Joey Pacific: Great question. Obviously, it varies by campaign and type of organization, but the aspect of operations that I like most is that every single day, I am asked to do something I don't know how to do. Every day is different. But every day I have my eye on one thing, which I call the “ops margin”.
The ops margin is the tangible number of votes that a campaign earns (or doesn’t earn) because of the work of an operations team. You often hear the term “field margin”, which is usually easier to quantify, but there is an ops margin, it’s just a few more steps removed and a little harder to see at first glance. But how many more votes can a campaign get if a field office is opened a few weeks ahead of schedule or if the campaign hires its target number of organizers on time? On the flip side, how many votes does a campaign lose if the GOTV literature is delivered late or if there's a problem with payment when placing a tv or radio ad? All of those circumstances combined over the course of a campaign is the ops margin.
To maximize the ops margin on a campaign, there should be four phases to an operations program. First, at the beginning of a campaign, you have a “triage phase.” You come in and things are already moving at full speed. You're never starting a campaign before campaigning begins. You're intaking issues as they come up. Your day-to-day is just responding to a constant stream of emails, texts and phone calls from colleagues who need something from you. It makes sense - people can't do their job without you! The key to early success is to get out of that triage phase as quickly as possible.
Then, you’ll move quickly to a “systems development phase” where you build out processes to intake information, to process the information and get out what needs to be done. You need to build these systems so you can find the time to get your head above water and plan. If you’re stuck in triage, you’re not planning for the future and eventually the volume overtakes you.
Once you have those initial systems built out and running at least somewhat smoothly, you want to very rapidly move again into a “systems scaling” phase. When I lead an operations team, I talk about this part being critical because the number of operations staff tends to stay fairly flat through the campaign. Often you keep the same amount of operations staff, but you need to produce exponentially more output. Ensuring your systems scale in a smart way will allow you to produce more with the same amount of people.
In my opinion, those two middle phases are the most fun. They’re about building things, putting together a puzzle. And you get a birds-eye view of the campaign, which is a unique position to be in.
Once you get both the systems development and the systems scaling phases right, you finally get to the end of the campaign, to the GOTV phase, and it's just purely execution. You’ve built the systems, you’ve built the relationships, and you can focus solely on getting through to the end.
Campaigner: Can you talk a little bit about your time as Chief Operating Officer on the Pete Buttigieg campaign? What were some of your biggest learnings or takeaways?
Joey Pacific: That campaign was probably the hardest job I've ever had, but also one of the most meaningful. The campaign grew faster and larger than most people thought possible and our ops department had to scale our team and our systems rapidly to power that kind of organization. We had an incredible team of true professionals and real experts. As the COO, I saw my role as intaking priorities from other members of campaign leadership and sort of steering the operations ship, but the rest of my team really powered that campaign. We had experts in budgeting, accounting, legal, vetting, recruitment, human resources, people operations, IT, cyber security, and field operations, as well as generalists in campaign systems development and logistics.
On the Buttigieg campaign, every department was focused on maximizing the ops margin through their specific function and then our state operations staff used that support and expertise to build the massive teams in each state. We obviously couldn’t give every state a national-level operations team, so we integrated the state ops team tightly with our national one. When forming my company, Optimize, with Pete Kavanaugh, the Deputy Campaign Manager for President Biden’s campaign, we modeled the structure off of a national presidential operations team. We have our internal team of subject-matter experts - HR, IT, etc - and our account staff take that expertise and work directly with campaigns to create and implement structures designed for success. No campaign other than a well-funded presidential can hire all those experts, so we decided to make those experts available to all levels of campaigns in a flexible and affordable way.
Campaigner: I feel like that's a particularly unique skill set in politics where so many people just start out as like field organizers and work their way up. That sounds a lot more like corporate MBA thinking, as opposed to politics.
Joey Pacific: We definitely had staff with MBAs on the team and they were invaluable. We had IT and HR experts with professional certifications. We had lawyers. And each person played a critical role in their specific function. Many of them had worked on campaigns and many of them hadn’t. On the flip side, we had plenty of operations staff who had come up through the field organizer track and found that they were best suited to a role in operations. I think organizing is an incredibly valuable skill set and experience that serves an operations team extremely well. You understand what it’s like to be out in a community, totally reliant on an ops team to provide you with the resources you need to do your job. Others on the team had never done a campaign but had the drive and dedication that made them great assets to the campaign. We had all kinds of skill sets on our team, from MBAs and JDs to those without college degrees. A friend of mine and former Pete operations team member, Samantha Kawabata, said it best: “Operations is for everybody.”
Campaigner: A few weeks ago we spoke with a first-time founder of a political organization who said that the best decision she made after starting her group was hiring an operations person as one of her first hires. I think that resonated with a lot of our readers. Why do you think that’s important?
Joey Pacific: I agree that hiring an operations person early is smart. It goes back to those four phases of an ops program. If you can hire an ops person early, they will have less time in the triage phase and every future employee - and your entire organization - will be better off for it. So, for a well-funded organization, yes, an operations director as one of the first hires makes total sense and I would advocate for that. But we should keep in mind that there are a lot of campaigns and other organizations that will never be able to hire an operations director because of the realities of the finances they’re working with. That’s one of the reasons we started Optimize: to allow campaigns and small organizations access to an operations team that otherwise would never get the opportunity.
Campaigner: Campaigns are often known as being really messy and sometimes it bubbles up into conflict among staff and in the press. How can an effective ops team help prevent that?
Joey Pacific: Campaigns are unique among organizations in that they are massive startups that raise and spend millions of dollars, but while many startups take several years or more to really get going, campaigns begin and end usually within a matter of months. There’s little time to build infrastructure and even less time for teams to get to know each other and understand how to work together. So it makes sense that campaigns are sometimes chaotic.
But just because it makes sense and it is expected that campaigns are messy, it doesn't mean that's how it has to be. Our campaigns are becoming extremely sophisticated, data-driven, and reliant on technology. We need to professionalize our operations to keep up with all of those changes. An operations team should be a proactive logistical hub for this machine that's running around it. It's only going to hurt us more if we don't professionalize and, frankly, if we don’t expect more from our operations teams. Expecting an operations team to exist in that triage phase for the entire campaign is just going to perpetuate this idea that campaigns are messy and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Operations can’t solve every issue with campaigns - some challenges are just structural, like the time frame, funding limits, and more. But many challenges that bubble up in the press can be headed off by an effective operations program. For example, effective budgeting from day one. (Another example of the ops margin!) A campaign that over-hires at the beginning will not have the resources to communicate out of a fundraising rut. Effective operations can give employees ways to report workplace harassment and give the employer the resources to conduct an investigation and act on that report. Other issues that may come up in the press involve just a simple lack of infrastructure. Effective operations can help a campaign do more with less money, open offices and hire staff more quickly, produce and deliver printed material more efficiently and more often. I could go on and on.
Campaigns are known for being chaotic and professionalizing our operations with the rest of our campaigns can help solve a lot of that chaos.
Campaigner: Can you talk a little bit about how that’s changing and how the space is professionalizing?
Joey Pacific: We are starting to see some more professionalization in the space. The DSCC and DNC have staff dedicated to providing operations support for their targeted races and state parties. We have Optimize! (laughs) We just completed our second annual Ops Next conference, which is a free conference for progressive political operations staff and those hoping to learn more about the field. We’re already planning our next conference for the beginning of next year and we’ll be putting all our recorded sessions online soon. It’s a place for operations staff to share their knowledge with others and help people get into the operations space. The vision for Ops Next is to become a place for knowledge retention and one of hopefully many avenues to professionalizing operations. But the number one way for operations to professionalize is for campaign managers and other departments to simply expect more from their operations teams. I have spoken to many of the operations staff working on campaigns and other organizations this year and I know they can rise to the occasion if given the opportunity to properly plan and get out of that triage phase.
Campaigner: That’s great. Last question: What’s your advice for folks interested in breaking into campaign operations or politics in general?
Joey Pacific: I’ll give the advice that I was given when I was first starting out: talk to as many people as you can. Don’t just talk to people to “network” though. Actually learn their stories, tell them yours. Campaigns can be very insular, in part because of the constant speed that they're running. It’s not a good thing, but it makes sense that people would just reach out to their personal networks for a quick hire. That makes it really difficult to break in, and it's not a good way to run an organization. It's not a good way to hire people. But, for now at least, that’s how it can work.
So while campaigns should make themselves more inclusive and should spend more time and resources on active recruitment, people interested in working on them should take the leap and apply everywhere. Reach out to anyone and everyone that you can find contact information for who might be hiring. Find a battleground state you’d be willing to move to and reach out to the campaign. Many campaign and state party websites have resume banks or a general application. Someone will look at your resume - people are pretty eager to hire right now. If you can’t move to a battleground state, there are still plenty of campaigns and political organizations ramping up right now and there are probably some pretty close to you.
For operations jobs specifically, I’d remind people that operations is for everyone. There are a lot of jobs out there, including on the Ops Next job board, for both junior- and senior-level operations opportunities. We need to continue to build a pipeline of talented operations staff - and there’s never been a better time to get into ops. I’m really excited about the future of our industry.
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These interviews are meant to highlight different voices from across the campaign ecosystem. The views expressed therein are not necessarily reflective of the views of Arena or FWIW Media.