Joe Trippi, the veteran Democratic operative who helped pioneer “netroots” campaign methods while managing Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential bid, will be the lead strategist for Ro Khanna’s second effort to unseat Rep. Mike Honda.
Trippi’s long history in Silicon Valley includes attending San Jose State in the 1970s, as well as working on local campaigns such as Susan Hammer’s and Ron Gonzales’ successful San Jose mayoral races and Jerry Estruth’s unsuccessful 1996 congressional race. But he’s best known for creating online campaign strategies that let Howard Dean organize volunteers and raise money so effectively in 2003 and 2004. Trippi left Dean’s campaign in an early 2004 shakeup, but his online methods and tools have since become standards.
Khanna casts himself as a high-tech, new-ideas alternative to an eight-term incumbent he says is out of step with the district’s needs. The Khanna campaign is not unlike the insurgent one Trippi ran for Democrat Seth Moulton, who unseated nine-term Rep. John Tierney, D-Massachusetts, in 2012.
“A lot of things that attracted me to Seth are similar here,” Trippi said this week. “This is a place I consider home, and I’ve always been someone who thinks we need fresh thinking and new blood in the Democratic Party — and in Washington in particular — considering the challenges we’re facing.”
Khanna, 38, lost to the 73-year-old Honda last year by 3.6 percentage points after a nationally watched and often-acrimonious campaign that pitted young against old and labor against business in the heart of Silicon Valley. The 17th Congressional District is the first district outside Hawaii where Asian-Americans make up a majority of voters.
Khanna, an Indo-American who worked in President Barack Obama’s Commerce Department, started the 2014 race against the Japanese-American Honda with money to burn. A lot of it went to 270 Strategies, a campaign strategy firm headed by Obama’s 2012 national field director Jeremy Bird.
Eager to build name recognition, Khanna spent more than $1.1 million by the end of 2013 and then dropped a considerable sum on television ads before the June 2014 primary — only to run out of cash well before November’s election.
Trippi is a big name but won’t cost nearly as much as Bird’s firm. And although Khanna raised an impressive $801,000 in this year’s first quarter, he’s probably looking to spend as little as possible before the June 2016 primary.
The presidential election year’s higher turnout will bring more of the young, tech-oriented voters who skew toward Khanna, Trippi said, and people who were tired of Honda last year probably haven’t changed their minds.
“It’s not like there’s been some change in a positive sense,” Trippi said.
“It’s not going to be easy,” he acknowledged, but Khanna proved last year that he can appeal to a broad range of voters, “and I have faith he can do that and more this time.”
Trippi said he has known Honda since the congressman was a San Jose planning commissioner in the ’70s. “I’ve got nothing against him, but I know the two of them, and I think Ro offers kind of fresh thinking and new approaches we need looking forward,” Trippi said.
Honda campaign spokesman Adam Alberti, however, said Khanna “continues to raise money from the right while hiring from the left. Different names, same game. Based on his earlier losses, the problem appears to be with the product, not the sales team.”
Khanna’s 2016 team also includes John Shallman — who has helped California House members such as Janice Hahn, Mark Takano and Mark DeSaulnier — as a direct-mail consultant and senior adviser. Paul Maslin, who worked with Trippi on Dean’s campaign as well as for Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate, governor and mayor — will be the lead pollster. Brian Parvizshahi, data director for Khanna’s 2014 bid, is now the acting campaign manager. And Steve Spinner, a tech adviser and angel investor from Menlo Park, once again will chair Khanna’s campaign.
The 2004 Dean campaign Trippi masterminded later morphed into a progressive grass-roots group called Democracy for America, still chaired by Dean’s brother Jim. The group strongly supports Honda.
Khanna last year “ran a disgraceful, Republican-lite campaign that absurdly attacked Mike Honda for standing up for the progressive values of Silicon Valley’s working families,” executive director Charles Chamberlain said in a statement last weekend. “Ro Khanna desperately wants to go to Washington to do the bidding the millionaires and billionaires who bankrolled his last campaign, and we’re confident that California Democratic voters will, once again, reject his efforts to dupe them into thinking otherwise.”
Trippi said he doesn’t mind working opposite a group for which he helped lay the foundation. “We’re all Democrats,” he said, adding that “an aversion to debate in primaries” is “a detriment to the party.”
“Too often everybody rallies behind ‘the one you’re supposed to get behind’ and there’s no debate, no discussion,” he said. “We’ve got to have a real discussion over ideas if we’re going to move the party forward and make a difference for people.”
Democracy for America “vehemently agrees” that primary challenges are good, communications director Neil Sroka said, citing its just-concluded, fruitless effort to draft U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, into the presidential race.
“But we prefer that those discussions occur between people with a steadfast commitment to progressive principles,” Sroka said. “Trippi’s a good guy — this is just the wrong guy for him to be supporting.”
Josh Richman covers politics. Follow him at Twitter.com/Josh_Richman. Read the Political Blotter at IBAbuzz.com/politics.
