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The Democratic strategist sits down with Hadley Stewart to discuss his work with some of the most recognisable names in modern US politics, his fears under the current Trump administration, and his hopes for more LGBTQ+ presidential candidates.
DJ Koessler spent the evening of 5th November last year fielding texts from his friends and family. Those closest to him, albeit incorrectly, assumed that the thirty-something political strategist would have some behind-the-scenes insight into who was winning the race to the White House before the TV networks did. “On election night you don’t know anything,” he admits. “We know as much as anybody else. It’s just like a waiting game.”
But it’s somewhat understandable that people were turning to Koessler that night. As someone who has a CV punctuated with the likes of Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg and various political campaigns, I’m almost surprised that he didn’t know anything ahead of time either. What he did know, however, was that he wanted to be at home this time around. “The scars of 2016 are still pretty raw,” he tells me of when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. Koessler was working for Clinton at the time. He says he couldn’t face seeing Trump win again.
That said, he still had a sense of optimism that Kamala Harris would win. “I was convinced,” Koessler tells me a few weeks after the election, over video call from his apartment in New York City. The day before election night, Koessler was on the front row at Harris’s last rally in Philadelphia, where Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey and other iconic names made appearances. “I know that crowd capacity at rallies doesn’t equal an electoral victory; I understand that as a practitioner, but the energy just felt electric.” So on election night he waited up until about midnight, before going to bed. But he couldn’t sleep. And when he checked his phone at around 3am, the scars of 2016 reopened: Donald Trump had been re-elected.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that Koessler decided to pursue a career in political communications in the first place. Growing up in Macomb County, Michigan, which is just outside of Detroit, he witnessed first-hand how politics can influence a community and the wider country. Koessler’s Midwestern hometown is dubbed home of the Reagan Democrats, a political term that refers to working class residents who traditionally voted for the Democratic Party, yet supported the Republican candidate Ronald Reagan in the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections. It’s a term that lives on today, and makes the swing state of Michigan a political battleground for Republican and Democratic Party nominees in the race to the White House.
But putting the White House to one side, Koessler tells me that his upbringing played a significant part in his desire to go into politics too. “I grew up in a union household,” explains Koessler, adding that his experiences of being a gay kid growing up in Michigan in the noughties, coupled with the political turmoil in his hometown, pushed him forward into a career in politics. “My dad worked for Chrysler and seeing the auto industry go through some really tough times in the 2000s, seeing what happened to my community as a result, really got me fired up about policy and understanding that it’s about people’s lives.”
His childhood experiences of politics really hammered home the effect those working in the arena can have on society. “It’s not some abstract thing,” says Koessler. “It’s about how you can make people’s lives better.”
Having graduated from university, Koessler returned to his hometown to organise youth voters for Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign. Despite his role being at the bottom of the political totem pole, it was a formative experience. “I loved it,” he recalls today. “I just knew I wanted to pursue a career in politics.” He opted to focus on political communications, telling me that he quickly realised how important it was for candidates to be able to tell an effective story during their campaign. Koessler secured a place to study at Columbia University in New York City, where he pivoted to digital strategy by securing an entry-level role working with Obama’s former digital team at Blue State, an agency that specialises in online fundraising and campaign consultancy.
The Obama campaign would be one of the first political glass ceilings Koessler would play a small part in trying to break. Having been part of the team that helped secure the re-election of the United States’ first black president in 2012, Koessler turned his sights on getting the first female president into the Oval Office when he went to work for Hillary Clinton in 2016 as one of her Regional Digital Directors. It was a role that saw him leading Clinton’s digital strategy for 37 states. “That was a lot of digital organising,” says Koessler. “So understanding how to use social media and digital marketing channels to get people to the right place, or to reach them with the right message.”
Arguably the right message didn’t come across in 2016, nor did it last year. When I ask Koessler what he thinks went wrong for the Democrats when it came to Trump being re-elected as President of the United States, he tells me that he believes there were multiple factors at play this time. “It was unlike any election cycle in our history,” he remarks, pointing to the fact that President Joe Biden had stepped aside, leaving his Vice President, Kamala Harris, to become the Democratic Party nominee, through a legal process. “It was also the shortest campaign in modern US history,” he adds.
As a strategist, Koessler explains to me that the data told him that America wanted an alternative from both Trump and Biden. Although he acknowledges that Harris was already part of the Biden administration, she did bring, in his view, “a new generation of leadership.”
In addition to Harris being an alternative to the two previous presidents, she also came at a time of great debate with regards to women’s rights in the United States. In particular, Koessler signals to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a 1973 US Supreme Court case that established a woman’s constitutional right to abortion. It was later overturned in 2022, to much outrage from people across the United States and further afield. “That was still a primary motivator for a lot of swing voters, especially women in the upper Midwest and in Pennsylvania,” explains Koessler.
Yet access to reproductive healthcare aside, it soon became clear to Koessler that voters in these key swing states had other issues that felt more pressing for them, such as pandemic-induced inflation. “Democrats were off base. We were not really tuned in to where most voters were,” he says.
Although Koessler wasn’t working on the Harris campaign, so didn’t have direct access to what was happening in the wings, does he believe that the Democratic Party did enough to ensure voters knew who Harris was and what she stood for? “Although she had been Vice President for four years, most of the electorate wasn’t familiar with her,” he replies. “They didn’t know her story. They didn’t know what she stood for.” It is his view that there should have been more of a focus on building her profile and introducing her to the country with what she stood for, rather than framing her as an alternative to Trump and heir to Biden. “I think there was a real miscalculation on failing to drive substantial contrast with Joe Biden.”
Whilst Koessler reasons that there are people living in, what he describes, a “MAGA bubble”, there are also voters in swing states that, chiefly due to a fragmented media ecosystem, have found themselves turning to social media for political information – with varying levels of misinformation. “They’re just busy people,” says Koessler. “They’re not turning to MSNBC or CNN, they’re on Facebook or TikTok. They’re following cultural influencers.”
Koessler reasons that these voters will be aware of the big political issues facing the country, be it access to abortion or the price of groceries, but that they’ve become swept up in a “MAGA zeitgeist” that has become “deeply rooted” in many swing states, and poses a challenge for Democrats to secure their vote. “I think we have as Democrats a true problem on our hands on being culturally relevant to a lot of Americans,” he argues. “We as Democrats have lost credibility with them, because they don’t see us as being relevant to their lives.”
Another topic which has been making headlines across the Atlantic during this election run, and continues to spark a divisive narrative into Trump’s second presidency, is LGBTQ+ rights. What are Koessler’s concerns when it comes to being a gay man living under another round of Trump? “Now is not the time for Democrats to walk away from its support of the LGBTQ+ community.” It was, in his view, “an anti-trans election” that saw Trump target and weaponise the trans community in the US for political gain. “It’s obviously disheartening,” he says. “It’s crushing.”
He tells me that he woke up on the morning after the election anxious about what his rights would look like under Trump’s administration. “I was concerned for my rights, for marriage equality, for access to health care. But I was really thinking about gay and trans kids, who have their whole lives ahead of them, and they’re going to have to deal with an administration and a president who chose to bully them throughout his campaign, and may choose to continue bullying them.”
Koessler acknowledges the strides that have been made when it comes to societal acceptance of queer people in America, yet his concerns for the trans community is palpable. “They’re living in a world that’s still not built for them, or that doesn’t understand them,” he tells me. “We have a president who chooses to use his power not to facilitate conversations of understanding or empathy, or to try to open Americans’ eyes to the experiences of other Americans; he’s choosing to use it as a wedge issue and to further divide us.”
As well as being concerned about LGBTQ+ rights today, he is equally keen to stress that going forwards, the Democratic Party should not be silent when it comes to these issues. “It’s not the time to accept political leaders within the Democratic Party who tell us that we should not be vocal about the issues that concern our lives or about our rights being at stake,” he says, pointing out that Kamala Harris’s campaign allowed Trump to frame the narrative on trans rights. “As the Democratic Party reckons with its future and how it decides on which issues to talk about, we shouldn’t run away from the fight for equality. We should defend LGBTQ+ rights. We should stand up for the trans community. We can do that from a position of strength and talk about human rights in a common-sense way. If we walk away from what we believe in, we will continue to lose.”
Compared with five years ago, it almost feels like we’ve taken a huge step back when it comes to the progression of LGBTQ+ rights in America, I tell Koessler. Perhaps a prime example of this is when Pete Buttigieg, then mayor of South Bend, Indiana, announced his plans to run for President of the United States in 2019. A former naval officer who served in Afghanistan and Harvard graduate, he quickly rose to become a serious Democratic Party contender, winning the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses, and earning the nickname ‘Mayor Pete’, as late-night TV hosts grappled to pronounce his last name.
Buttigieg also happened to be married to a man. He made history as the first openly gay candidate to win a US presidential primary contest, and if he’d become President of the United States in 2020, he would have been both the first gay person to hold this position, as well as being the youngest. It felt like a huge step forward for both LGBTQ+ representation on the political stage, as well as LGBTQ+ rights more broadly. Buttigieg would later serve as Secretary of Transportation under President Biden’s administration.
Koessler moved from New York to South Bend, Indiana to work for Buttigieg in 2019, in what he describes as a “small and scrappy campaign,” leading Buttigieg’s social media efforts, as well as helping to tell his husband Chasten’s story. “Pete was an underdog,” he explains. “Not many people were putting their bets on the gay millennial mayor of a mid-size Midwestern city winning the Iowa caucuses.”
As well as the thrill of working for the underdog candidate, it was their shared Midwestern upbringings that drew Koessler to work on Buttigieg’s campaign too. “His story resonated with me because I was also a gay guy from the Midwest,” says Koessler. “He grew up in Indiana, I grew up in Michigan. He is older than me, but for the most part, we both came of age in the early 2000s.” Did he view Buttigieg as an inspiration? “Of course I was inspired by Pete,” he replies.
While viewing him as an inspiration and having a shared background, I venture that this must have added some pressure to Koessler to tell Buttigieg’s story in an authentic way, that didn’t somehow feel exploitative or intrusive. “We really wrestled with this, because when you’re the first, there’s no blueprint,” he replies, adding that whilst the same could be said for Hillary Clinton as the first woman to secure a major party’s nomination, Clinton was a familiar political figure to the American electorate. “For Pete, he was a fresh commodity.”
Koessler says there was “no avoiding” the fact that Buttigieg is gay. “We saw that as an important part of who he is.” He recalls during a town hall debate, a young person raised their hand and asked Buttigieg to tell him that it was ok to be gay. Buttigieg is, in Koessler’s view, a “beacon of hope for LGBTQ+ young people.”
During his campaign, there was also the notion of breaking down stereotypes of queer people amongst wider society, adds Koessler. “When they saw Pete on stage, first and foremost, they saw a military veteran, a Harvard grad, an accomplished professional and a tested leader. Pete proved to people, as he has said, that there’s no right way to be gay. We’re not a monolith.”
Buttigieg didn’t always receive a positive reception, I venture, and faced some pretty heavy criticism even from within the LGBTQ+ community. Comments on social media saying that he wasn’t “gay enough” or was leaning towards heteronormativity to secure votes. What did Koessler make of that? “For me personally, it was pretty tough,” he sighs. “Listen, there are so many within our community who, rightfully so, want to see themselves reflected in a candidate. Pete ran for president as his most authentic self, and as a result, he broke barriers for all of us. We should celebrate that and encourage more LGBTQ+ Americans to enter the political arena. There’s a place for all of us in politics.”
Having now founded his own company, Koessler Strategies, Koessler continues to help political leaders, causes and companies get off the ground. I wonder, though, given the current political ecosystem, if he is hopeful for the future of politics in America. It’s Koessler’s view that Buttigieg was the first, but he won’t be the last LGBTQ+ person to run for presidency. Do you think he’ll run again, I ask. “Well, he ran for president once, so I hope so!”
DJ Koessler is a Democratic strategist and founder of Koessler Strategies, a boutique impact communications agency.
