Sheldon Whitehouse for Senate
The Problem:
The Whitehouse for Senate campaign hired the Hildebrand Strategies team to develop and implement an innovative and creative grassroots campaign that would force primary opponent Matt Brown out of the race and go on to defeat Senator Lincoln Chafee in the general election.
The Solution:
We were the architect of a massive voter contact and mobilization program that was run by the Whitehouse campaign and the Rhode Island Democratic Party. The program began in January 2006 with the launch of the Community Dinner Program. The community dinners were an instant success and helped the campaign reach out to voters and recruit volunteers. The dinners received significant media coverage as the type of grassroots, creative campaign that Whitehouse was running and became a part of the brand of the campaign.
As the campaign progressed, the Hildebrand Strategies team worked hand-in-hand with the Whitehouse campaign and the Rhode Island Democratic Party to construct a $2.5 million program with more than 60 staff in a state with only two Congressional districts. The goal of the field plan was to identify 235,000 supporters of Sheldon Whitehouse, which was projected to be 1/3 more than was needed to win the race. Campaign staff and volunteers knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors and made hundreds of thousands of calls to help identify Whitehouse supporters and persuade swing voters to support his candidacy.
The get-out-the-vote effort put thousands of volunteers on the street to remind those 235,000 supporters to vote for Sheldon Whitehouse on Election Day.
The Result:
Sheldon Whitehouse won by a stunning 8-point margin against a popular and well-respected incumbent senator who many thought could never be beat.
“In one of the most closely watched races of the midterm election,
Whitehouse, the son of a career diplomat, beat Republican moderate Lincoln
Chafee, the son of a senator, who was well-liked in Rhode Island because of his
liberal politics but tarred by Whitehouse as beholden to an unpopular president.
For Republicans, Whitehouse’s victory ended the Chafee family legacy in the
Senate; Lincoln and his father, John H. Chafee, had held the seat for a total of
30 years. For Democrats, winning meant control of the Senate by just one seat.”
-- CQ Politics in
