Former DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe left a few
surprises for incoming DNC chair Howie Dean.
Perhaps the biggest was McAuliffe’s decision to give to the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) full access to the
DNC’s donor database known as “Demzilla.”
McAuliffe didn’t consult with Dean or any of Dean’s advisers in
giving the two congressional campaign committees access to the
list. For years, the RNC has given its party’s House and Senate
campaign committees access to its version of the data base, but
that’s partly because both committees help finance the list and its
upkeep. Neither Democratic committee will be paying the DNC a dime
for what many on Capitol Hill consider a huge windfall to the DCCC
and the DSCC.
Dean was not happy when he learned of McAuliffe’s decision. “He
was pissed,” says a former Dean campaign staffer, now at the DNC.
“Demzilla is one of the few tools the DNC had that it can leverage
for fundraising. The money we raise would then be used to help
support Democratic candidates and the party operations. Now
everyone has the same list, the same data. The DNC has no chit to
play.”
According to a senior adviser to House Democratic leader
Nancy Pelosi, McAuliffe was approached about
opening up Demzilla during a Democratic retreat after the November
elections. New campaign committee chairmen Rep. Rahm
Emanuel and Sen. Chuck Schumer, along
with Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid, the Senate
minority leader, lobbied McAuliffe for full access. “Each of them
made the point that given Dean’s background and the doubts Reid and
Pelosi had about him, it would be most helpful to give them the
same tools the DNC would have. This was a pure power play by Pelosi
and Reid, nothing more, and a slap at Dean.”
Dean publicly has said he is supportive of the file-sharing, but
privately advisers say he is seething that McAuliffe made a major
executive decision without fully consulting with him. “Dean might
have come to the same conclusion that McAuliffe did,” says the new
DNC staffer. “Or he might have disagreed. The issue from our
standpoint was did McAuliffe have the right to make that big a
decision on his own. This is something that may hamstring the DNC
for some time.
The biggest concern is donor exhaustion. Demzilla contains more
than 175 million donor names, along with voter and general consumer
data. The database allowed the DNC to better target specific
fundraising appeals to segments of the population, saving the party
money on mailings, and giving the DNC a bigger return for the
appeals it sent out.
Demzilla was touted by McAuliffe as the great equalizer for the
Democrats in the search for “small” donors, those who typically
donate smaller amounts of money, but more frequently, say, several
times a year, to the party. Since the 1980s, Republicans have held
a huge edge in drawing upon those types of donations.
Dean, though, believes he still has a couple of cards to play
that may give the DNC some proprietary data. He has asked his staff
to pull up his full mailing list from both his presidential run, as
well as from his organization, Democracy For America, and to run it
with Demzilla to determine how many unique names they can draw upon
for the party. “We expect that after we scrub these lists, we’ll
have something that the congressional campaign committees won’t
have,” says the DNC source. “And we won’t be sharing it with
them.”
