Meet the Team: Hanna Bouten

Hanna Bouten

Campaign Strategist

Where are you based?

Columbus, OH

Can you tell us a little about your background and what inspired you to work in politics?

I grew up in a family of Democrats who were politically informed and politically active. My parents always voted, they hosted a fundraiser for John Kerry in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in 2008, and in 2020 my mom had a “Biden” themed Christmas tree (aviator sunglasses and Biden signs on a bright silver tree. The blue really popped!). I became especially interested in working in politics after the 2016 election. I was in college at the time, and I remember campus feeling like a ghost town the day after the election. I felt how deeply impactful the election was and I wanted to get more involved with politics. I started out interning at a lobbying firm after college, where I watched many hours of congressional hearings and learned how our federal government functioned day-to-day, and then switched over to the campaign side to help get good people elected to those positions.

What does a typical day look like for you?

I get up and hang out with my cat for about an hour before work, have a cup of coffee outside if it’s nice, and log onto my computer. I check all my emails and messages, write out a to do list for the day, and get started! I usually spend the day working on targeting, drafting mail plans, writing mail pieces, and on calls with clients. Each day is a little bit different, which is something I love about campaign politics!

What are some of your hobbies or interests outside of work?

I love to swing dance, crochet, cook, hang out with my cat, Bluto, and facetime my six-month old nephew (even if he can’t hold the phone on his own just yet).

Can you share a memorable project, unexpected challenge, or proud achievement you've had in your career?

A year ago I earned a Master’s degree in Religion, Politics, and Governance from the University of Leiden. I had the wonderful opportunity to live in the Netherlands for two years and study with people from various cultural backgrounds who helped me step away from an American-centric view of politics and religion. I had the opportunity to perform research on women’s autonomy and freedom of choice (not specifically related to reproductive rights) within the context of religious belief, social opinion, and government involvement. This gave me a broader understanding of U.S. political history and government involvement in both the practice of religion and women’s freedom. After completing my studies I’m glad to be back in campaign politics trying to elect more women to office!

What advice would you give to someone considering a career in politics? Or, what is the best piece of advice you’ve received?

Have a good answer for why you want to work in politics. Talk to as many people as you can who work in politics or in a political-adjacent field. If you’re interested in campaigns, apply for an organizing job or volunteer if you’re able. Any campaign would be happy to have more people knocking doors!

What movie never fails to make you cry?

Interstellar - the last scene with his daughter gets me every time.

Meet the Team: Ben Escobedo

Ben Escobedo

Vice President

Where are you based?

Los Angeles, CA

Can you tell us a little about your background and what inspired you to work in politics?

I have been working in politics for 20 plus years and started in organizing and field before starting in the direct mail arena. As a young college student, I was a student activist advocating for access to education and encouraging at-risk youth to attend college to attain a degree or learn a skill to launch their careers. This inspired me to work in politics where I can make a difference and be that advocate. I enjoy working with candidates with a shared vision, advocating for working families and equity and building better communities.

What does a typical day look like for you?

After a long walk in the morning, I return messages from clients, contacts, and friends in the industry. I am intentional about keeping in contact with different folks to see where I can be helpful. I enjoy being part of the creative process for our direct mail and digital and collaborating with clients during a photo shoot, meeting prep, and messaging for their campaigns. Campaigns are full circle and we do a little bit of everything to help our clients be successful.

What are some of your hobbies or interests outside of work?

I walk everywhere and enjoy watching LAFC and the Dodgers any chance I get. I also love an occasional meeting during a round of Top Golf.

Can you share a memorable project, unexpected challenge, or proud achievement you've had in your career?

I first started with BZD in 2016 and worked on a state assembly race in the Inland Empire. The candidate was running against an incumbent, and I was fortunate to be a part of the campaign from the ground up, where I learned about the district and the candidate firsthand. Our mail and storytelling of her deep roots, background, and commitment to community allowed us to unseat the incumbent by 10 points.

What advice would you give to someone considering a career in politics? Or, what is the best piece of advice you’ve received?

Be intentional, work hard, and be kind.

What movie never fails to make you cry?

"Dad" to cry and "Elf" to laugh.

BZD's 2023 Pollie Wins

We are thrilled to announce that Bergmann Zwerdling Direct won 13 Pollie Awards for our work in 2022! Our team is proud to earn the industry’s highest honor from the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC), the largest association of political and public affairs professionals in the world.

Among our exciting wins, BZD brought home the top prize – Gold for best Democratic direct mail campaign – for our work sending Vicente Gonzalez back to Congress while ousting MAGA extremist Mayra Flores in TX-34. We were also honored to win Gold Pollie Awards for best mail piece for a Democratic congressional campaign (Congressman Josh Harder, CA-09) and for best GOTV mail piece (SEIU Pennsylvania). This year also continues our streak of winning more direct mail awards than any other firm, Democrat or Republican.

Additionally, we earned more regional awards than any other firm, regardless of medium, including:   

• Best mail piece for any Democratic state legislative candidate campaign, South: Florida Senator Shevrin Jones

• Best mail piece for any local Democratic candidate campaign with a budget less than $1 million, North: Saratoga Springs Public Works Commissioner Jason Golub

• Best mail piece for any independent expenditure campaign for any Democratic state legislative candidate campaign, West: SEIU California

• Best mail piece made for any independent expenditure campaign for any local candidate campaign with a budget greater than $1 million, West: Communities United (Karen Bass for LA Mayor IE)

A heartfelt thank you to our clients and their teams who entrust us to tell their stories and vision for the future. We are truly grateful for the opportunity to develop impactful, innovative strategic programs and compelling creative tailored to the campaigns, progressive causes, and labor organizations with which we work. Check out more of our award-winning work HERE. 

We are so proud of everything we achieved alongside our clients and strategic partners in 2022. Here’s to keeping up the momentum and the fight, this year and beyond!  

Celebrating 10 years

Bergmann Zwerdling Direct is celebrating our 10-year anniversary of winning campaigns nationwide and creating direct mail voters can proudly display on their fridges!

Join us on Thursday, March 30th from 5:00-7:30 PM at Baby Wale in Washington, DC to celebrate this momentous occasion — and opening day of the Major League Baseball season!  Please click here to RSVP so we can ensure there's enough food and drinks for all.

After ten years of hard work, we're proud to have received nearly 100 Pollie Awards and helped hundreds of campaigns at all levels achieve success. We're still charging forward and would love to have you join our entire team in celebrating a #BZDecade!

IF YOU ARE COMING FROM THE NATS OPENING DAY GAME:
Head to the Navy Yard-Ballpark Metro station and take the Green Line to Mount Vernon Square — Baby Wale is right near the corner of 9th and M St. NW.

Looking forward to seeing you for a night of food, drinks, and friends!

- The Team at BZD

BZD’s 2022 Creative Produces Wins

Reflecting on 2022, it was a year of historic challenges for Americans with a partisan Supreme Court rolling back reproductive freedoms and big corporations raising prices to pad their profit margins.  

And Democratic candidates faced the challenges of that political environment along with unprecedented opposition spending.

From helping Vermont become the first state in the nation to enshrine reproductive rights in its constitution and helping flip the Michigan and Pennsylvania Houses, to protecting all of our incumbent members of Congress and helping Karen Bass become the first woman mayor of Los Angeles, the BZD team was proud to help candidates from coast to coast overcome challenges and win historic races.  

In over 20 states, our creative made a difference between winning and losing.  Some of our favorite game-changing pieces from 2022 are below.

BREAKING THROUGH FOR MEMORABLE IMPACT

People are getting a lot of messages in a lot of places.  So, we developed creative and messaging to cut through the noise, get attention, and make a memorable impact.  

USING HUMOR TO GET ATTENTION AND DRIVE MESSAGING - BOTH POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE

To stand out even more, we used humor when appropriate to deliver both positive and negative messages.  In several cases, our creative was shared by voters on social media, propagating the message.

GRAPHIC AND EMOTIVE STORYTELLING FOR POSITIVES

We have always been proud of our storytelling for positive mail and we used creative concepts to elicit emotion and make strong positive impressions. 

DRAWING CLEAR CONTRASTS ON PRIORITIES

Elections are about choices.  When that is a binary choice, it is critical to show a clear contrast to help the voters visualize the choice.

Navigating Congressional franking

A term like “franking” doesn’t become its own verb unless it’s important — and anyone who has set foot in a Capitol Hill office knows that it’s a valuable communication tool. I’m a former Capitol Hill communications director, so I’ve been in your shoes. There are never enough hours in the day to get your boss prepped, draft a floor speech, and hammer out talking points for your next committee hearing. The prospect of drafting mailers, building a mail universe, and crafting a message that’s impactful and get the Franking Commission’s approval can seem overwhelming — but that’s where we come in.

At BZD, I help Hill clients create eye-catching franked mail that sticks to the message, zeroes in on your boss’s hard work, emphasizes local impact, and is Franking-approved.

Franking is a vital part of your communications strategy because it lets you break through the noise to reach your constituents directly. Not every constituent watches local news, follows your boss on Twitter, or signs up for your e-Newsletter, but every constituent has a mailbox. If you want to highlight new funding for opioid addiction treatment in your region, improvements to local infrastructure, or your constituent service success stories, franking allows you to do just that — while controlling the message and meeting people where they’re at.

Our goal is to make the franking process easier for you. We can help you decide what size and type of mailers fit your goals and budget, and work with you to craft a mail plan that hits the right messaging points and reaches the right people. For example, if you’re doing a mailer featuring your boss’s wins for local seniors, we can pull a mail list for you that targets senior citizens in your district.  We also handle the entire printing process for you — we will work with a union printing shop as close to your district as possible to ensure you get local union printing. And our award-winning design team will make your mailers eye-catching so you don’t get lost in the shuffle.

Franking can be an intimidating process, but it’s one of your most important communication tools. If you have any questions about our services for franked mail, please reach out to me at bwelch@bergmannzwerdling.com or 860-514-6749. Let’s get to work!

BZD wins big at the Pollies -- again!

For yet another year, BZD’s creative work stood out with the most AAPC Pollie wins of any Democratic direct mail firm.

We’re proud of our creative product, but we’re even more proud of the wins that our work helped produce in 2021. BZD’s team approaches every campaign uniquely and treats each piece of mail we develop with the thought and care as if we were personally going to be speaking to a crowd the size of each mail universe. 

Times Union Commentary: For a winning strategy, Dems can look to the Spa City

The national narrative coming out of the November election is that Democrats lost ground and the Republican strategy of stoking divisive culture wars looks like it may be a successful strategy for them to win control of Congress in 2022.

Not so fast.

Democrats can look to a small city in New York’s Capital Region for a roadmap to victory in 2022.

Saratoga Springs is a mostly white and suburban-like community. It is politically moderate and has a long history of Republican leadership, though Democrats have gained a small edge in voter registration. With its commission form of government, the mayor and elected department commissioners comprise the five-member City Council. Most of the current council members were supported by Republicans in the 2019 elections, but with four members choosing not to run for re-election, Democrats had an opportunity to elect a majority.

The long-simmering tension between social justice activists, including Black Lives Matter, and the Saratoga Springs Police Department over the death of Darryl Mount reached a boiling point this summer, with additional police called in with riot gear and armored vehicles being deployed during a peaceful protest.

The police response led to activists forcibly detained and later arrested for violations when they could have been mailed a summons, producing more protests and an investigation by the New York attorney general’s office.

In spite of this charged environment with public safety as the top issue and a 3-to-1 spending disadvantage, Democrats swept the four open seats and elected the state’s first Asian-American city mayor and the city’s first out LGBTQ woman of color to the council. How we did so, particularly for Ron Kim’s winning mayoral campaign, is a good blueprint for Democrats across the state and the nation.

Let’s start with what we made a point not to do.

We did not focus on Donald Trump.

We did not get lost in manufactured Republican culture warfare, even though the political environment was ripe for it.

We did not talk about “defunding the police.” In fact, we neutralized that potential attack and talked about increasing spending for public safety while strengthening accountability.

We did not talk about masks or vaccine requirements in the campaign’s advertising.

Instead, we focused on solutions that bring people together, not on issues that divide us. We had a consistent message about listening to people and delivering for them. Nothing went out from the campaign without saying that Kim will listen and make Saratoga Springs a safe city that works for everyone, not just a select few.

We had a clear strategy to build a foundation for Kim, persuade swing voters, and invest in mobilizing Democrats who do not ordinarily vote in municipal elections. And when Republicans did attack, we responded forcefully, called them out for being deceptive and divisive, and used the attacks to pick apart the Republican mayoral candidate’s “independent” message.

We also emphasized Kim’s experience and preparation for the job. People make decisions emotionally and find reasons (hopefully facts) to back up their decisions, and voters want to feel comfortable when making a choice for an executive office.

There is a reason the moniker “swing voter” is popular with the press. Between 15 percent and 25 percent of voters will swing back and forth between the Democratic and Republican parties, sometimes on the same ballot but more often against the party they perceive to hold national power in the given year.

The results in Saratoga Springs are proof that Democrats can stop that backswing by focusing on people and solutions instead of purist ideology and culture warfare. Disciplined campaigns matter.

Achim Bergmann of Saratoga is a Democratic strategist who currently runs a national political consulting firm with clients in 25 states.

Source: https://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Commentary-For-a-winning-strategy-Dems-can-look-16677868.php

Daily Journal: Regaining trust of rural voters

In the wake of the Virginia election, the group Third Way commissioned a focus group to figure out why Biden voters switched to Republican Glenn Youngkin this year. In an interview with the New York Times, Brian Stryker, who conducted the groups, said of the Democrats, “We’ve got a national branding problem that is probably deeper than a lot of people suspect…People think we’re more focused on social issues than the economy — and the economy is the No. 1 issue right now.”

I would argue that Democrats and progressives also have a trust problem, especially with voters in rural areas. Maybe that trust has been diminished by the propaganda of outlets like Fox News, but some of it has also been eroded by progressives who emphasize culture changes that unsettle a lot of working class people. It’s also been hurt by a cultural elitism that has left many Democrats with little understanding or sympathy for the plight of rural America, particularly areas that are still struggling to recover from the damage done by trade deals of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Democrats aren’t going to regain that trust just by promising legislation that will help working class people. While voters may support positions like higher minimum wages and Medicaid expansion, the distrust of Democrats is deep and personal in rural America. The percentage of rural voters supporting Democrats has been shrinking for years, but it has cratered since 2016. Democrats might want to write these voters off as racist Trumpists, but they can’t win in states like North Carolina if they do.

Besides, it’s not just White voters that are leaving the Democrats. Black voters in rural areas are starting to slowly shift toward Republicans, according to UNC-Charlotte political scientist Eric Heberlig. He told WFAE in January, “I think just the perception that Democrats emphasize urban issues, talk about things from the perspective of their urban core: higher educated constituencies that appeal to issues that are relevant to those upper-income, upper-educated voters. Talking in a way that rural voters perceived to be condescending and dismissive of their values.”

To retain or win back some of these voters, Democrats need to do more than promise policies. No messaging is going to restore trust among people who don’t believe Democrats have their best interests at heart. They need to become programmatic and engage with these communities.

That’s just what the New Rural Project is doing. Founded by former Democratic candidates Cynthia Wallace and Helen Probst Mills, the organization is going into small towns and rural communities to provide services. Right now, they’re setting up vaccination clinics. Listening to the people in these communities to understand their needs is a core component of the New Rural Project.

A few weeks ago in Morven, NC, the New Rural Project partnered with local organizations that set up a vaccination clinic that also provided meals, free clothing, and even haircuts for men and boys. That’s how progressives can regain trust. Actions speak louder than words. Once they’ve got the attention of the community, they can begin conversations about policies that affect the people who live there.

Instead of blasting TV or radio ads hoping to win votes, progressives need to put people in places providing services to better understand the perspective of rural voters. They need to regain trust and show that they care about the needs of people outside of intellectual centers and urban hubs if they want to earn their votes.

The New Rural Project could provide a model for Democrats to re-engage in small towns and rural communities. If they don’t, they probably need to get used to being a minority party. They can’t win in states like North Carolina as long as their vote share continues to shrink outside of the suburbs.

Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com.

Source: https://www.yourdailyjournal.com/opinion/104197/thomas-mills-regaining-trust-of-rural-voters

News Herald: Wyandotte resident recognized as one of best campaign professionals under 40

Charly Norton has been honored by the American Association of Political Consultants as one of the 40 best and brightest campaign professionals under 40 years old.

She serves as vice president of Bergmann Zwerdling Direct, a leading Democratic voter contact firm based in Washington, DC. The Wyandotte resident is based in metro Detroit and handles work for clients in Michigan and across the country.

“AAPC is pleased to recognize Charly Norton as a member of our 2021 class of 40 Under 40 for their outstanding achievements,” said AAPC President Becki Donatelli. “Each year, this award recognizes 40 rising stars in American political consulting who have made a real difference in campaigns.”

Norton said she was honored to earn this recognition from her peers, mentors and industry professionals.

“Although it isn’t exactly a walk in the park working in this industry as a woman and a mom of a young child, I am grateful for the opportunity to work with a great team to elect public servants, from all backgrounds and walks of life, who share our values,” she said. “With our democracy under attack, this is another important reminder of the responsibility each of us have in building a fairer, safer, healthier, more just country where everyone can thrive.”

From leading communications on top U.S. Senate and ballot measure campaigns to managing constituency press for President Barack Obama’s re-election in Chicago HQ, Norton is a battle-tested Democratic strategist with experience leading programs in more than 30 states, the AAPC stated in a press release.

BZD specializes in persuasive direct mail, taking aim at winning campaigns for Democratic candidates and progressive organizations nationwide.

The AAPC recognized the winners of the 40 Under 40 Awards at the 2021 Pollie Conference on Oct. 19 in Las Vegas. The conference brings the leading political professionals in the world together to network and hear from top technology innovators, pollsters, pundits and service providers. The 40 Under 40 Awards Ceremony and Reception was sponsored by PayClearly, and was held at Caesars Palace.

“This year’s judging process was especially difficult for our bipartisan team of judges as this year’s nomination pool included many qualified and talented young political consultants who excelled in the face of incredible obstacles throughout the 2020 campaign cycle,” said AAPC Vice President Larry Huynh. “We were beyond pleased to celebrate the achievements of this year’s 40 Under 40 class in person at Pollies 21 Live.”

Only 20 Democrats and 20 Republicans in the United States were named to AAPC’s exclusive “40 Under 40” winners list. Candidates were evaluated on their role as a strategic consultant in the industry, along with leadership and professional accomplishments in political consulting.

Founded in 1969, the AAPC is a multi-partisan organization of political and public affairs professionals dedicated to improving democracy. The AAPC has over 1,400 members hailing from all corners of the globe. It is the largest association of political and public affairs professionals in the world.

Source: https://www.thenewsherald.com/2021/12/02/wyandotte-resident-recognized-as-one-of-best-campaign-professionals-under-40/