Two kinds of people work political campaigns, David Butts told us. There are those hitching a ride on an up-and-coming politician, looking to grab a position as a chief of staff or policy adviser. And then there are the junkies.
“They love to be in campaigns,” Butts said of this second type of operative, his voice glowing like an ember. “That’s what they want to do, is work on campaigns. They love it that you start, you finish, and you know how you did. There’s no question – you either won or you lost. And winning is euphoric. And losing is like having ashes in your mouth.”
Butts has rarely tasted ashes. He’s the granddaddy of political consulting in Central Texas who, over the course of a 50-year career, has run campaigns for generations of Texas progressives, including pathbreakers like Lloyd Doggett, Gonzalo Barrientos, and Ann Richards. Since the 1970s, he’s helped elect most of Austin’s mayors and City Council members. He’s helped make environmentalists dominant players in city politics. He’s mentored operatives like Mark Littlefield (currently consulting on Kirk Watson’s reelection bid), Jim Wick (running four Council member races this cycle), and Joe Cascino (Watson’s 24-year-old campaign manager).
Cascino told us he’d put Butts’ institutional knowledge on a flash drive if he could, though having that knowledge would “further alienate me from civilized society.” His boss, Littlefield, said there’s something different about Cascino, Butts, and himself – that campaigning is really the only thing they can do for a living.
“We’re not qualified to do anything else,” Littlefield said. “David Butts is unemployable in any other capacity in any economy anywhere in the world.” Littlefield illustrated the point by describing his recent experience working in an office as Watson’s adviser. “I never had a real job in my entire life, until I took 18 months off to go work at City Hall. And I was a daily HR nightmare. I was like, ‘I’m gonna go try this.’ And I did and it was great and I’m not going back.”
Laura Hernandez Holmes, who has run races for U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, former Mayor Steve Adler, and County Judge Andy Brown, also prefers the abbreviated shelf life of a campaign: banging a team together months before an election, working 24/7 for the win, breaking everything down, moving on to the next contest. But she stressed that professional campaigners need to find candidates they can believe in. She thought she’d be sitting out the current cycle, but she is now managing the campaign of Ashika Ganguly in District 10.
“For a lot of us, this isn’t just a job,” Hernandez Holmes said. “We’re trying to elect people whose values we’re aligned with and who we feel will do a really good job in government. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m just trying to collect a paycheck.’ You work too hard for that.”
It’s the same idea for Jacob Aronowitz, the founder of Collective Campaigns, which bills itself as the first political consultancy firm in the country organized as a worker cooperative. Collective Campaigns’ handful of member-owners are young and idealistic. They’ve mostly worked races at the lower levels of the officeholder pyramid – positions like county district judge, county commissioner, school board trustee. This fall, they’re running some higher-profile races: Kathie Tovo’s campaign for mayor, Mike Siegel’s for City Council, and Jennifer Lee’s for the Texas House in Bell County, among others.
Aronowitz is something of a provocative presence among Austin’s campaign professionals. He identifies as a Bernie Sanders socialist and speaks in a style befitting the image – in complete sentences, using uncommon words, integrating the formal and informal. He told us the goals of Collective are to empower workers and improve the quality of the candidates who run for office.
“You have to build power among the workers so that they can demand better terms and conditions of employment,” Aronowitz said. “But also, if they have collective power as a workforce, they can demand better of the politicians. They can say we won’t work for you unless you support Medicare for All, we won’t work for you unless you support living wages, we won’t work for you unless you have this broader, better, progressive political vision for the country.
“That’s the long-term way that the people who actually make the political change happen can have the type of direct influence that’s salutary and in their best interests – and not have to work for shitty people to feed themselves.”
Hired Guns at Noon at Sixth and Congress
William “Peck” Young is another legendary campaigner, or, to use his term, “gun.” He met Butts in 1970 at a gathering of the UT Young Democrats, along with a greatest generation of future operatives including Dean Rindy, Dan Boyd, Neal Spelce, and Roy Spence. At that point, there weren’t really any full-time campaign managers in Central Texas, Young told us. If a political boss like Lyndon Johnson or Allan Shivers wanted to get someone elected, they sent in lawyers and public relations people.
“And in the Seventies we started changing that,” Young said. “A bunch of us at UT formed a student voting bloc group that registered students and voted them for a slate. That was me and David Butts and a bunch of people that are gone now.”
Young and Butts walked door to door registering students to vote and manned a voter registration substation at the Texas Union that Young had finagled into existence. Within a year of their meeting, the voting age nationwide dropped from 21 to 18. At the time, UT had 50,000 students – one-fifth of Austin’s population. Young and Butts registered 25,000 of them, enough to change city politics.
“You had to learn, really, how to begin,” Butts said. “How do you mobilize voters? There’s always a certain set of voters that’re going to turn out regardless. You don’t have to lift a finger, they’re going to vote. But if you want to get beyond that, you’ve got to go to those marginal voters. You’ve got to motivate them. There’s got to be an issue.
“And in the Seventies, it wasn’t hard to find an issue. Vietnam was still going on. The environmental movement was going on. The beginnings of the women’s movement was going on. There was even a nascent gay rights movement.”
The city at that point was controlled, of course, by its wealthy white businessmen. Butts, Young, and the rest assembled a coalition of students, liberals, African Americans, and Mexican Americans, and began electing progressives, including Jeff Friedman, a Jewish, anti-war protester from New York City who, in 1975, became known as Austin’s “hippie mayor.” They also helped elect five of the seven City Council members that year, among them Council’s first Mexican American member (John Treviño) and its second African American elected member (Jimmy Snell). They elected Lloyd Doggett, Gonzalo Barrientos, Sarah Weddington, and others to state offices. In ’76, Butts convinced Ann Richards to make her first run.
“We wanted someone for county commissioner,” Butts remembered. “Dave Richards, her husband at the time, suggested that we talk to her. I gave her the statistics that showed how she could win that race. I told her, you can beat the incumbent. And she studied it and decided to run, and won handily.”
By the end of the Seventies, Young and Butts were getting paid to run campaigns. “As somebody once said, it was hired guns at noon at Sixth and Congress,” Young remembered. “People like me became real professionals and ran people in other parts of the state. It became an industry.”
Butts ran several state races in the Eighties but mostly stayed local. In the Nineties, he was at the center of another upheaval in city politics: the environmental struggle known as Save Our Springs. A mining company called Freeport-McMoRan had proposed a massive housing development over the aquifer in the Barton Creek Watershed, a development scientists warned would permanently pollute Barton Springs. Austinites learned of the development in large part from a Chronicle cover story – “If You Don’t Read This, We’ll Poison Barton Springs.” Hundreds testified at an all-night City Council meeting in June of 1990, forcing Council to reject the proposal.
After the rejection, Mark Yznaga, an aide to Council Member Gus Garcia, brought the city’s fractured environmental community together in a series of meetings at the home of Shudde Fath, one of Austin’s great civic leaders, helping to create the Save Our Springs Alliance. SOS launched a petition drive to put a citizen-written watershed protection ordinance on the 1992 ballot that would limit development over the sensitive aquifers in the southwestern part of the county.
SOS brought thousands of new voters to the polls, many of them young people who would go on to stay active in politics, passing one of the strictest watershed ordinances in the nation by a landslide. “We connected with those voters, so we were able to figure out who they were and we kept trying to get them to the polls,” said Yznaga, the campaign manager for the effort. “That went on for years and years, and in 1998 there was the so-called Green Council was elected. And that caused shudders across the development community. I had one developer tell me, ‘I thought you were going to be erecting guillotines.’”
For the next 20 years, Austin politicians had to be environmentalists to get elected. Yznaga and Butts put lots of them in office: Brigid Shea, Daryl Slusher, Bruce Todd, and Watson. The SOS coalition re-fragmented in the 2000s, but environmentalists and neighborhood groups continued to win battles against developers.
The ground shifted again in 2012, when Austin voters finally updated the way City Council members are elected, going from an at-large system, where Council members are elected by voters citywide, to single-member districts, where they’re elected from different geographic parts of town. The campaign to approve the system – called 10-1 for the 10 new districts, plus the mayor – was led by Peck Young. David Butts supported a variation called 8-2-1. It was Young’s last big win in local politics.
“Because of 10-1, there’s actual representation happening now,” said Jim Wick, one of a new generation of operatives who had begun rising through the ranks during the 10-1 campaign. “The people who are from the communities, who grew up in the communities, are being elected to represent the communities. The Council now is almost a majority people-of-color Council.”
The 10-1 system is credited with laying the foundation for the recent changes to how land can be developed in Austin – allowing homes and apartments to be built more densely in neighborhoods across the city. The changes, called HOME, were approved by Council members elected from neighborhoods with more people of color. Many remain unconvinced that the changes will promote housing affordability, the issue of the age, but Wick supports them. “I think they will actually go a long way toward rectifying the racial and economic segregation that’s been a plague on this city for a century,” he said.
Wick managed Steve Adler’s campaign for mayor in the 2014 election, the first one after the adoption of 10-1. All 11 seats were on the ballot and most of Wick’s colleagues – Mark Littlefield, Laura Hernandez Holmes, Mykle Tomlinson, Jovita Pardo – worked the election too. Littlefield ran nine of the races and won six, helping elect Ora Houston, Delia Garza, Pio Renteria, Greg Casar, Ann Kitchen, and Leslie Pool. He missed out on the mayor’s race, with his candidate, Mike Martinez, losing to Adler. Ten years later, he still frets about Ed Scruggs’ loss.
“Ed Scruggs lost by 57 votes in District 8,” Littlefield remembered wistfully. “So I didn’t do very well. But that year was nuts, it was a fun one. And it’s gotten more and more boring ever since.”
Knocking Doors
The campaigns of the Seventies and Eighties were run in the absence of computers, databases, social media, and cellphones. “When we did Ann Richards’ campaign, we had to make lists for her to walk by hand,” David Butts said. “We literally wrote index cards with name and address and phone number, if we had it. Ann walked door to door in the precincts herself.”
Today, Democratic and progressive campaigns rely on a massive, privately owned database called NGP VAN – the “voter activation network.” NGP VAN has software to organize fundraising and field organizing. It pulls together data sets, the most important being the voting records maintained by counties. The data allow campaigners to create a “contact universe” – the total number of people they want to contact in an election. The contact universe can be narrowed down by information in the database – a person’s voting history, their age, where they live.
“You can decide how to target different portions of this universe in different layers,” Aronowitz said. “So, I’m going to call all these people first. This band of people are the ones most likely to support my candidates. I’m going to give them a warm phone call to try to gin them up to become early donors and volunteers. And then we’re going to have a big text bank where we text a whole bunch of people in a given area ahead of our first volunteer block walk.”
Aronowitz has worked campaigns with as few as two and as many as forty paid staff. Races with more staff usually include a campaign consultant, a top dog like Butts who doesn’t directly manage workers but provides strategies, advice, and connections. They have a campaign manager, who spends their days coordinating the campaign workers, solving day-to-day problems. They have a communications director, in charge of digital ads, mailers, and messaging. They have a financial director, who organizes fundraising and enforces “call time,” the portion of the day when candidates call potential donors to ask for money.
And then there’s the position some say is the most important of all and yet is at the bottom of the pecking order: field director. Field directors are in charge of direct voter contact – talking to voters.
“One key skill of the field director is to train and motivate all of these different human partners in the arts of field organizing,” Aronowitz said. “For example, how to deliver a persuasive rap, or script. They write the script and then they train the workers, when they’re phone banking or text banking or block walking, in how to be persuasive and handle all the different arguments and objections that the voters can present.”
The classic image of the field director is of a person “knocking doors.” Professional campaigners have a mystical connection to it.
“Having a face-to-face conversation is the most ‘sticky,’” said Sarah Swallow, a member of Collective Campaigns who’s currently running Kathie Tovo’s race for mayor. “It’s better than them getting a text message. It’s better than them getting a mailer. If someone’s never had their door knocked, and then finally someone does, they might remember that for months. They might remember that for years.”
All campaign people have stories about knocking doors – inspirational ones and scary ones. Swallow remembers a man threatening to shoot her for putting a door hanger on his doorknob. Butts cautions field workers to never stand directly in front of a door: “You never know what might be coming through it,” he says.
And yet, everyone we spoke with claimed to love knocking doors. Everyone except Jim Wick, who estimates that he knocked 30,000 doors in his early years as a field organizer, when he worked 16-hour days for weeks on end. Of course, for most people the idea of knocking on a stranger’s door to talk politics is frightening.
“I was scared of it too at first,” Wick said. “So every time I was approaching my shift with trepidation, I just took a moment and closed my eyes and said to myself, ‘Why are you doing this?’ I would go inside myself and I would think, ‘How badly do I want to see the change that I am campaigning for? What is it that I am willing to do to effectuate that change?’ And I have very strong opinions about the world I want to live in. So the answer was, ‘I would do almost anything.’”
We Would Own This
Jacob Aronowitz started working campaigns in 2015. He and his friends supported Chito Vela and Pio Renteria’ s campaigns for city council, Adler’s campaign for reelection as mayor, and others. But they grew frustrated working for some of the city’s established firms, where they had little or no input into campaign decisions and weren’t always fully sold on the politicians they were pushing. And they knew that the minute the race was over they’d be out of a job, looking for a position as a lobbyist or aide until the next cycle.
Aronowitz imagined a firm that could solve these problems. “It would be a partnership firm organized as a worker cooperative with a membership track and a progressive constitution and bylaws,” he remembered. “And we would own this political consulting firm and democratically choose our clients, based on their ability to pay living wages but also on the group’s political consensus goals. Our clients would be the type of candidates that we want to support and see in office. And then we’d split up the profits democratically among all the members.”
In 2018, Aronowitz and five colleagues created Collective Campaigns, which, in its brief existence, has worked for Mike Siegel, Selena Alvarenga, Heidi Sloan, and others. Today, Collective has six members and several more who work regularly with the group or are on track for membership.
Mars Rodriguez is the firm’s president. Rodriguez started campaigning in 2016, volunteering for Bernie Sanders in the Rio Grande Valley, inspired by Sanders’ call of Medicare for A`ll. Two years later, they met Aronowitz while working Pio Renteria’s City Council race and joined United Professional Organizers. After they returned to the Valley, UPO called, asking them to be the field director on Valinda Bolton’s county commissioner race.
“They said, ‘We’ll train you how to do everything,’” Rodriguez remembered. “’It’s a unionized campaign, and we’ll be behind you.’ I packed my Hyundai Sonata full of all my stuff and moved to Austin for what I thought would only be three months. And I learned everything from the co-op people. That summer, I was sponsored for membership. Then it was three years of falling into and showing up for the work.”
In 2022, Rodriguez became one of 13 out of 400 applicants selected to participate in the Blue Leadership Collaborative, a Washington, D.C., group that trains members from diverse communities to become effective campaigners. They spent two years in California and Illinois, working a series of campaigns for local and national offices. In April, they returned to Texas to join Catina Voellinger, a former(?) member of Collective, at Ground Game Texas, the innovative organizers using ballot initiatives to pass cannabis decriminalization in counties across the state and, in the bargain, drive up voting by young progressives.
Rodriguez said that without Collective they probably never would have found a career in politics. “Without the wages that Collective Campaigns offered when I was an organizer, I don’t think I would have been able to stay in this industry,” they said. “And that’s largely the problem with this industry, outside of Collective – it’s not sustainable for a person with an economic background like mine, or a trans person, or a person of color.”
Part of Collective’s mission is to encourage more progressive candidates to run for office, candidates who might not do so otherwise. This, combined with the fact that they’re a new group with fewer connections to established candidates, means that Collective has sometimes run underdogs who, even if they overperform, don’t win their races.
The operatives we spoke with were sympathetic to Collective’s situation. “When I started over 20 years ago, it was the same deal,” Mark Littlefield said. “You know, Glen Maxey was already hiring someone else, so I had to get the second or third choice. But the only way you get bigger and better is to find a way to win. And I tell people you always want to be nice, because it’s a young person’s game and the kid who’s stuffing envelopes or doing data entry this year will be running these campaigns down the road. So try not to be an asshole.”
This tension – between working for the progressive candidate versus the one who can win – was a frequent topic in our conversations. Peck Young spoke of the criticism he faced over the years for helping elect less progressive politicians in other areas of the state. “I agreed with the people I took, in terms of their philosophy,” he said. “But Texas is a fucking mini-nation, and what are appropriate progressive positions in South Texas or Deep East Texas are not the same positions you’d take in Austin or San Antonio. I would look for the most progressive candidates. But it’s electability. It doesn’t do you any good to sit around and stay righteous, and not have people in office.”
Jim Wick expressed a similar sentiment. “One of the most difficult things in politics is to put the work in front of one’s own opinions and one’s own philosophy,” he said. “You have to be able to win. And look, I hate to be craven about it, but if you can’t win in politics, then you can’t do anything. Because politics and elections are about winning. If you can’t win, then the things you care about can’t happen. It’s great to have ideals, it’s great to be high-minded, it’s great to be somebody who holds to their values – I am that person as well – but I’m in politics to win.”
Aronowitz admits that Collective has had its share of losses. But he, Rodriguez, and Swallow each said they are proud of the campaigns that didn’t succeed because they ran principled candidates with powerful messages. Swallow is particularly proud of running two successive races to unseat Texas House Rep. Jeff Leach, a Republican from the Dallas suburbs. She has no regrets.
“It’s a passion project to try to unseat some of these Republicans, even if I know we’re not going to do it,” Swallow said. “Because the Republicans in the Texas Lege are doing things that are so bad on issues like abortion and a lot of lesser-known issues, things that, honestly, Republican constituents would not be happy about if they knew.”
The contest Swallow is currently managing – Tovo’s race for mayor – is, at the moment, looking like another of these no-regrets races. Swallow got the gig last winter, before helping Tanisa Jeffers win the Democratic primary for Travis County justice of the peace. At the time, Kirk Watson hadn’t announced his reelection bid. When he did, he brought in endorsements from nine of the 10 sitting Council members and almost every prominent Democrat in Central Texas. It turned Tovo’s bid into a long shot overnight.
Butts has worked for both Watson and Tovo in the past, but this time he’s supporting Watson. We asked him if there is any way Tovo can make the contest more competitive. He seemed to have anticipated the question. “Well, I know in my own mind what it is,” he said slowly, “It just occurred to me last week. And I’m afraid to tell you, because I’m for Watson.” (Mark Littlefield said he thinks he knows what Butts has in mind; he doesn’t believe it would work.)
Regardless of what happens this cycle for Tovo and Collective’s other clients, Butts told us he can easily imagine a successful future for the group. “I was told they’re a bunch of socialists,” he said. “Well, if you’re any kind of Democrat you’ve probably got some socialist notions. I mean, there are 30 million people in Texas and half of them don’t own anything to speak of. I think there’s always going to be room for that kind of messaging from the DSA or Collective.
“So, as far as Jacob Aronowitz and his other partners there, I’d put a reverse on what Simone de Beauvoir, the famous feminist, once said. She said, ‘If you live long enough, you’ll see that every big victory turns into a defeat.’ I would just say, ‘If you live long enough – and you’re persistent – you’ll see that many defeats can be turned into victories.’”
Editor’s Note Thursday, 11:40am: This story has been updated to reflect that Laura Hernandez is now managing the campaign of Ashika Ganguly.
This article appears in September 13 • 2024.