Joe Trippi
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Joseph Paul Trippi (born June 10, 1956) is an American Democratic campaign worker and consultant. Trippi has worked on the presidential campaigns of Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, Dick Gephardt, Jerry Brown and John Edwards. He served as campaign manager for presidential candidate and former Vermont governor Howard Dean. He currently serves as a Fox News contributor.
Trippi began his career in the mid-1970s working on several local elections in San Jose, California, before leaving college a few credits shy of graduation to join Ted Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1980. Trippi served as Deputy Campaign Manager for Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s successful reelection bid in 1981 and again when Bradley ran for governor in 1982. During Bradley’s gubernatorial campaign, Trippi installed one of the first in-house computers for a political campaign: the DEC-PDP11. Trippi used it for fundraising and targeting.
Trippi remained in California to hold his first and only government position as Lieutenant Governor Leo McCarthy’s Deputy Chief of Staff, before overseeing several successes in Vice President Walter Mondale’s 1984 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Starting with a come-from-behind victory at the Maine State Convention, Trippi eventually managed operations as the state director in Iowa and Pennsylvania, where Mondale won by 30 and 14 points respectively.
Following the Mondale campaign, Trippi joined Senator Ted Kennedy’s PAC, the Fund for a Democratic Majority, as Deputy Director under Paul Tully. At the time, Bob Shrum was chairman of the committee, but he soon resigned to start the media firm Caddell, Doak and Shrum, taking Trippi with him to be Vice President of the firm. During Trippi’s tenure at what became Doak and Shrum, the firm worked on several media campaigns for gubernatorial and senatorial candidates including those of Virginia Governor Jerry Baliles, Senator Alan Cranston of California, Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, and Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey. Shrum has attributed Trippi with conceiving and producing the famous spot on Cranston’s campaign, “Zschau’s Greatest Hits”.
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