FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 22, 2020

ICYMI: Biden for President and North Carolina Coordinated Campaign Announce Key Staff Hires in North Carolina

Today, Biden for President and the North Carolina Coordinated Campaign announced key staff hires in North Carolina, joining State Director L.T. McCrimmon, Senior Advisor Scott Falmlen, and State Advisor and Chief of Staff Maggie Thompson. The new hires include North Carolina natives as well as former staff from various Presidential primary campaigns and state and local races.
 
Katie Hendrickson, North Carolina Political Director
Katie Hendrickson is a political strategist based in Raleigh, NC. She previously served as the NC Political Director for Mike Bloomberg during the 2020 Democratic Primary, Deputy Director of Boards and Commissions in the Office of Governor Roy Cooper and on Secretary Clinton’s National Advance team. Katie is a Raleigh native and graduated from NC State with a degree in Business Administration.
 
Maya Humes, North Carolina Communications Director
Maya Humes previously served as a consultant for Stockton, California Mayor Michael Tubbs and as his chief of staff when he was National Co-Chair of Mike Bloomberg's presidential campaign. Beforehand, Maya served as California Communications Director for Kamala Harris' presidential campaign and National Press Secretary for NextGen America.
 
Bajeyah Eaddy, North Carolina Coalitions Director
Bajeyah Eaddy, a South Carolina native and graduate of Barber Scotia College who worked as a regional political director for Biden in this year's South Carolina primary; and traveled to MI in the role of special projects director for their primary, and most recently as special projects director over the great lake states including WI, IA, SD, ND, MI,IN,  MO, and MN before assuming the current role.
 
David Berrios, North Carolina Coordinated Campaign Director
David Berrios most recently served as the national deputy campaign director for Organizing Together 2020. Prior to that, David worked on Cory Booker's presidential primary campaign as the national organizing director. He has done stints at the Democratic National Committee, and served as the GOTV director for the 2018 Ohio coordinated campaign.
 
Douglas Wilson, North Carolina Senior Advisor to the Coordinated Campaign
Douglas Wilson is the founder and principal of Alexander Wilson Consulting LLC., a political and public affairs company. Wilson has worked in political and community outreach for more than 16 years. In 2014, he served as the late Senator Kay Hagan's State Political Director. Wilson also served as a Regional Field Director for President Barack Obama’s campaign in the SC Democratic Primary, and as the State Director of Constituency Outreach in SC during the 2008 Presidential General Election.
 
Amanda Clarke, North Carolina Coordinated Organizing Director
Amanda Clarke returns to North Carolina after serving as the Voter Registration Director and Deputy Organizing Director there in 2016. She brings nearly a decade of experience in building and managing innovative organizing programs. Most recently she worked on the Bloomberg campaign in Texas. She previously worked as Regional Director with Run for Something, served as the Organizing Director for Mayor Bill de Blasio's re-election campaign and for Jim Johnson's New Jersey gubernatorial race, and worked on Congressman Ro Khanna's 2014 campaign. She has also worked with Future Now Fund and the National Democratic Training Committee.
 
Owen Berger, North Carolina Coordinated GOTV Director
Owen Berger most recently worked as North Carolina Organizing Director with Warren for President. Past campaigns include McCready for Congress in NC-09, Bew for Congress in NC-03, and coordinated campaigns in New Hampshire 2018, Virginia 2017, and Pennsylvania 2016. He lives in Durham, N.C.
 
Alexis Hebert, North Carolina Coordinated Digital Organizing Director
Alexis Hebert is from Chapel Hill, NC. Hebert most recently served as the Digital Director for Organizing Together 2020 NC and before that as Digital Director for Mike Bloomberg 2020 in NC. Previously, she was Co-Executive Director for Emerge Kentucky, part of the Emerge America network, and has worked in political fundraising and at a political media and communications firm.
 
Hannah Slovut, North Carolina Coordinated Data Director
Hannah Slovut previously served as the Data Director at Organizing Together, National Data Manager on Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s presidential campaign. Beforehand, she was a deputy field director on Angie Craig's congressional campaign in MN-02 and the campaign manager for Phillipe Cunningham's Minneapolis city council campaign.
 
Spectrum News: Biden Campaign Announces Key Staff Hires in North Carolina
7/22/20
 
NORTH CAROLINA – The Biden campaign is expanding staff and efforts in North Carolina.
Starting July 22, Biden For President and the North Carolina coordinated campaign will have nine new senior directors and 114 new staff in the Tar Heel state.

The new senior hires include North Carolina natives and former staff from various presidential primary campaigns and state and local races...

The Biden-DNC Victory program has organizers across the state reaching out to voters. Staff are focusing on areas like voter protection, defining and localizing Trump, and constituency outreach.

In April, the Democratic Coordinated Campaign in North Carolina made over 200,000 calls and recruited over 390 volunteers, 90 percent of whom had not previously made calls with the program. In June, over 1.22 million voters were called.

Earlier this year, North Carolina was also a part of the first wave of Battleground Build-Up 2020 investments, which allows state parties to dramatically increase the immediate scale of their organizing programs by roughly doubling the amount of on-the-ground field organizers across battleground states.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 25, 2020

ICYMI: Biden for President Announces Key Staff Hires in North Carolina and Nevada

 
L.T. McCrimmon, NC State Director
L.T. McCrimmon will be joining the campaign from Governor Roy Cooper’s office, where she serves as Deputy Legislative Director. McCrimmon previously served as Political Director for Deborah Ross for Senate. Ms. McCrimmon worked on Capitol Hill for five years for former Congressman Bob Etheridge (D-NC) as a legislative assistant. She is a native of Scotland County, holds two bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and Criminal Justice from Shaw University and a Master of Public Administration from North Carolina Central University.
 
Maggie Thompson, NC State Advisor and Chief of Staff
Maggie Thompson was most recently the North Carolina State Director for Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for President and is currently serving on the Education Unity Task Force for the Biden campaign. She is the former Executive Director of Generation Progress, the youth engagement arm of the Center for American Progress. Prior to that, Maggie worked as an appointee in the Obama Administration at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and in the office of the Director at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Maggie worked for then-Sen. Barack Obama starting in 2007 during the Nevada caucus. She graduated with a degree in economics and classical archaeology from Macalester College.
 
Scott Falmlen, NC Strategic Advisor
Scott Falmlen is a co-founder of Nexus Strategies, the leading Democratic political consulting firm in North Carolina. He has helped coordinate and execute strategic planning, communications, and outreach for political efforts at the local, state and federal levels. Falmlen previously served as the executive director of the North Carolina Democratic Party and the Florida Democratic Party. In its most recent rankings, Campaigns & Elections magazine named Falmlen one of the top ten political influencers in North Carolina. Scott Falmlen received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science with Minors in Business and History from Georgetown College.
 
Yvanna Cancela, NV Senior Advisor
Yvanna Cancela represents Nevada’s 10th district in the State Senate, a seat she has held since 2016. During the 2020 Presidential Caucus, she served as the senior advisor for the Nevada Biden for President Campaign. Previously, Cancela worked as the political director of UNITE HERE’s Local 226, the Culinary Workers Union; the state’s largest labor union with 60,000 members. 
 
Alana Mounce, NV State Director
Alana Mounce most recently was the Executive Director of the Nevada State Democratic Party. She previously worked for DNC Chair Tom Perez and for the Clinton campaign in Colorado. She has worked on political and presidential campaigns in Nevada, Colorado, Virginia, and Alaska.
 
Shelby Wiltz, NV Coordinated Director
Shelby Wiltz most recently was the Caucus Director for the NV Dems and planned and executed the Nevada 2020 presidential caucus. In 2018, Shelby was the Field Director for the NV Dems and has previously worked on the Clinton Campaign in 2016 and in other states like Iowa, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New Hampshire.
 
Shelby and Alana led the NV Dems team to historic wins in 2018 by helping flip six out of seven statewide seats from red to blue. This year under very challenging circumstances they led the NV Dems to hold a successful presidential caucus.
 
POLITICO: Biden bulks up staffing in battlegrounds North Carolina and Nevada
By Christopher Cadelago, 6/25/20
 
Joe Biden is on a hiring spree across battleground states, with the presumptive Democratic nominee rolling out his teams in North Carolina and Nevada on Thursday.
 
Biden is racing to build out state operations in places where President Donald Trump and Republicans have been on the ground for months. The new hires in North Carolina — where the Republican National Convention was originally planned before being moved to Jacksonville, Fla., over a safety dispute — will work to flip the state back to Democrats after Trump won it in 2016.
 
Biden is also announcing three operatives in Nevada, who join newly assembled teams the campaign unveiled in the last five days in Wisconsin and Arizona. Like the previous two states, the hires in North Carolina and Nevada have spent time working on campaigns there.
 
L.T. McCrimmon, who until recently was deputy legislative director for Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, is coming on as Biden’s state director there. A Scotland County native, she was the political director on Deborah Ross’s unsuccessful challenge to Sen. Richard Burr in 2016 and a legislative assistant for former Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.).
 
Maggie Thompson, Biden’s new adviser and chief of staff in the state, was Elizabeth Warren’s North Carolina state director. She is currently serving on the Biden campaign’s Education Unity Task Force. McCrimmon and Thompson are joined by adviser Scott Falmlen, a Raleigh-based strategist and former executive director of the state Democratic Party.
 
Trump was supposed to give his convention speech in Charlotte, but Republicans failed to settle on terms with Cooper that he and state leaders had stressed were needed to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Biden has stayed mostly hunkered down around his Delaware home, but he and surrogates have held several events aimed at the state, including a recent virtual listening session with the candidate’s wife, Jill Biden, on safely reopening schools and a roundtable on Biden’s “Lift Every Voice” plan for Black Americans.
 
Biden’s state ramp-up has been a top priority for his campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, who has talked extensively about expanding the map in the fall to states such as Arizona, Georgia and even Texas. While Biden aides have said they are in regular touch with local health officials and state parties to weigh when it’s safe to resume in-person campaigning, O’Malley Dillon earlier this week downplayed the significance of door-knocking as the “gold standard” for campaigns and said she was hoping to engage voters in other ways.
 
Another priority for the Biden campaign has been building out its state teams on the front end rather than pulling them together in fragments. In Nevada, the campaign has named Alana Mounce as its state director. She was the executive director of the state Democratic Party, after working for the Democratic National Committee’s chairman, Tom Perez, and the Hillary Clinton campaign in Colorado.
 
State Sen. Yvanna Cancela is coming on as a senior adviser, a title she held with Biden ahead of Nevada’s caucuses this year. Before her election to the Legislature in 2016, Cancela was the political director for UNITE HERE’s Local 226, the powerful Culinary Workers Union.
 
Biden’s new coordinated campaign director, Shelby Wiltz, who is the caucus director for the state Democratic Party, will synchronize between the Biden campaign and the party. A Clinton campaign veteran, she worked with Mounce to help Nevada Democrats sweep nearly every statewide office in the midterms.
 
The Nevada Independent: As presidential matchup pivots toward general, Biden campaign makes top-level hires in Nevada
By Jacob Solis 6/2/20
 
With roughly 19 weeks before the general election, the campaign for former vice president and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden named three top-level staffers in Nevada on Thursday, expanding the campaign’s state-level operation as it looks to ramp up general election efforts in a handful of key battleground states.
 
State Sen. Yvanna Cancela, who served as a Biden campaign adviser in the run-up to the February caucus, was named as Nevada Senior Adviser, while state party Executive Director Alana Mounce was named as the campaign’s state director.
 
Shelby Wiltz, most recently the caucus director for the state party responsible for planning the 2020 presidential caucus, was also named as the state coordinated director and will run the coordinated campaign.
 
The staffing announcements come after a report last week from Bloomberg News that some Democrats felt the Biden camp had moved too slowly to fill leadership positions at state-level organizations and that it had missed an internal deadline to appoint those staffers by the beginning of June.
 
Even so, the Biden campaign is not alone in organizing the Democratic bid for president, and the Democratic National Committee has invested millions in its so-called “Battleground Build-Up 2020” since January. The program is meant, in part, to buoy the number of on-the-ground organizers and open additional field offices in roughly a dozen key swing states, including Nevada.
 
Biden’s hiring push remains a stark contrast to the re-election campaign for President Donald Trump, which — without the need to defeat any primary challengers — spent much of 2019 and 2020 building up state and regional operations. That includes Nevada, where a regional director overseeing seven western states was appointed in May of 2019.
 
Still, Nevada Democrats have enjoyed broad electoral success over the last two cycles, including nearly sweeping competitive races for statewide and federal offices in both 2016 and 2018 and providing a narrow win for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race for president.
 
Further complicating the election landscape are the as-yet unknown effects of the coronavirus pandemic on both the campaign and the election itself. Case numbers have continued to rise across nearly half of U.S. states, but debates over the widespread use of absentee voting by mail have continued nationwide as Democrats and Republicans spar over the logistics of voting during a pandemic. 
 
All the while, many of the traditional tentpoles of the presidential campaign season have already begun to fall away. Traditional campaigning, including rallies, door-knocking or other in-person electioneering, have almost entirely stalled, with the lone exception of Trump’s sparsely-attended rally last weekend in Oklahoma.
 
Adding to the continued downsizing of campaign traditions, Democrats announced Wednesday that they would vastly scale down plans for an in-person convention and urged state delegates not to attend in person.
 
That announcement comes as Republicans have rushed to move their own convention to Florida, after the original host, North Carolina, raised concerns that the convention could not be held under existing social distancing guidelines.
 
 
The News Observer: New poll shows Biden with large lead over Trump in North Carolina
By Brian Murphy, 6/25/20
 
Former Vice President Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump by nine points in North Carolina, an edge that mirrors his national advantage, according to a new New York Times/Siena College poll.
 
Most other polls, including one released Wednesday by Raleigh-based Public Policy Polling, show a much tighter race in North Carolina, one of six states identified by both parties as a key battleground.
 
Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, leads Trump 49% to 40% in the New York Times poll released Thursday morning. Trump, a Republican, won the state by nearly four points in his 2016 electoral college victory against Hillary Clinton.
 
In The New York Times poll, Biden leads by at least six points in those six battleground states: North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida and Arizona.
 
The poll was conducted with 3,870 registered voters in those states from June 8 to 18.
 
The Times’ national poll, released Wednesday, showed Biden with a 14-point lead over Trump, 50% to 36%, a bit higher than the Democrats’ 10-point average lead.
 
The state-level polls comes the same day the Biden campaign announced its top staff hires in North Carolina, including picking his state director.
 
Biden led Trump 48% to 46% in North Carolina in a Public Policy Polling survey released Wednesday and every poll result this year recorded by Real Clear Politics has fallen within the margin of error.
 
Last week, the Biden campaign launched television and digital ads in North Carolina and the five other battleground states seen as key to determining the winner.
 
Trump carried all six of those states in his 2016 Electoral College victory. He topped Clinton by about 173,000 votes.
 
The last time a Democratic presidential candidate carried North Carolina was in 2008, when Barack Obama, with Biden on the ticket, topped Sen. John McCain by about 14,000 votes. The Obama-Biden ticket lost North Carolina in 2012 by less than 100,000 votes.
 
The last time the state was decided by more than four points was in 2004 when President George W. Bush carried the state by more than 12 points on his way to re-election.
 
North Carolina has 15 electoral votes.
 
Staffing up
 
Biden announced his top staff in North Carolina on Wednesday, tapping Gov. Roy Cooper’s deputy legislative director L.T. McCrimmon to be his state director.
 
McCrimmon graduated from Shaw University in Raleigh and earned a master’s degree from North Carolina Central University in Durham. She previously worked as political director for Deborah Ross’ 2016 Senate campaign.
 
Maggie Thompson will be the campaign’s state advisor and chief of staff. Scott Falmlen, co-founder of Raleigh-based Nexus Strategies and former executive director of the North Carolina Democratic Party, will be the campaign’s state advisor.
 
Bloomberg reported last week that the Biden campaign’s slow pace of state hires was troubling some Democrats, despite his big lead in national polls.
 
The Trump campaign has had staffers in North Carolina for more than a year.
 
In March 2019, the Trump campaign named Jason Simmons, who served in Gov. Pat McCrory’s administration, as its regional director for North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.
 
Bethany Hudson, a former president of the Wake County Republican Women’s Club, is the RNC’s state director. Hudson, a graduate of UNC-Wilmington, was the North Carolina director of coalitions and surrogate operations for Trump’s 2016 campaign.

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