Jennifer O’Malley Dillon had barely began the job when she shut all of it down.Simply two days after Ms. O’Malley Dillon was named President-elect
Jennifer O’Malley Dillon had barely began the job when she shut all of it down.
Simply two days after Ms. O’Malley Dillon was named President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s marketing campaign supervisor, her operation went completely distant, an early concession to a virus that might come to outline all the election.
Ms. O’Malley Dillon, 44, discovered herself taking over duties by no means earlier than dealt with by a marketing campaign, like organising testing protocols to maintain her employees and a 77-year-old candidate protected from a lethal virus, whereas additionally attempting to win a race that her occasion considered as an existential battle for the way forward for the nation. Her marketing campaign battle cry, based on mates and former employees members: “We are able to do exhausting issues.”
Ms. O’Malley Dillon will now sort out one other troublesome job when she assumes the function of deputy chief of employees within the new Biden administration. A stalwart of Democratic politics, she has by no means labored within the White Home and is a uncommon new admission into Mr. Biden’s tight circle of trusted aides. Anticipated to be charged with managing White Home operations — a job that has historically included logistics, administration and ensuring the place runs on time — Ms. O’Malley Dillon will be a part of an administration dealing with a raging pandemic, financial instability and a fiercely divided nation.
“She’s a fixer,” says Christina Reynolds, an outdated buddy of Ms. O’Malley Dillon and a vice chairman of Emily’s Listing, a number one Democratic girls’s group. “She offers with the state of affairs that you just dwell in, not the state of affairs you would like you had.”
The daughter of a faculty superintendent and an elementary-school trainer, Ms. O’Malley Dillon spent greater than twenty years winding her manner via Democratic Get together politics. In 2003, she labored on Senator John Edwards’s first presidential marketing campaign, the place she met her husband, Patrick Dillon. (Their first date: the traditional political stomping floor of the Iowa State Truthful.)
In 2008, she ran the battleground-states operation for Barack Obama’s presidential effort and have become the manager director of the Democratic Nationwide Committee after the election. 4 years later, she was the deputy supervisor of Mr. Obama’s 2012 re-election marketing campaign earlier than beginning a public relations agency. Her purchasers embrace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and Stacey Abrams, a former minority chief of the Georgia Home who was briefly thought of as a working mate for Mr. Biden.
Thought of one of many prime organizing skills in her occasion, Ms. O’Malley Dillon was sought out for recommendation by varied Democratic main candidates earlier than becoming a member of the marketing campaign of former Consultant Beto O’Rourke of Texas.
When Mr. O’Rourke give up the race, Anita Dunn, a longtime Biden ally, requested Ms. O’Malley Dillon to remodel what was then a shoestring Biden main marketing campaign into what turned a common election juggernaut. Although she had little of a relationship with Mr. Biden, the 2 discovered widespread floor of their Irish Catholic roots. He’s my individuals, one among Ms. O’Malley Dillon’s mates recalled her saying of Mr. Biden.
Through the marketing campaign, she ignored the complaints inside her occasion over Mr. Biden’s gentle journey schedule in the course of the pandemic, but in addition charted a standard strategy to successful again the White Home by specializing in the historically Democratic states that eluded the occasion in 2016 — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Working from her suburban Washington dwelling, Ms. O’Malley Dillon carried out late-night conferences from the seat of her Peloton bike and ready her employees for the rollout of the vice-presidential decide along with her 8-year-old twin women and 3-year-old son simply offscreen.
With Mr. Biden’s victory, Ms. O’Malley Dillon turned the primary lady to handle a victorious Democratic presidential marketing campaign. The one different lady to handle a successful presidential marketing campaign was Kellyanne Conway, who spent three months on the head of Donald J. Trump’s operation in 2016.
“Not solely did Jen win a marketing campaign in opposition to an incumbent president, which has solely occurred a handful of instances during the last 200-plus years, she secured the best in style vote ever within the midst of a world pandemic,” stated Stephanie Cutter, a Democratic strategist and co-founder of Ms. O’Malley Dillon’s agency. “That’s a feat that may go down within the historical past books.”