Joe Trippi

Joe Trippi (born June 10, 1956, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) is an American political consultant who worked on political campaigns for many prominent members of the Democratic Party. He is best known for his work on the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean in 2003–04, which was an early successful example of online grassroots political activism.

Trippi attended San José State University, starting in 1975, and pursued a degree in aerospace engineering; however, he did not graduate. In 1980 he worked on Sen. Ted Kennedy’s presidential campaign, which became the first of several election campaigns he was part of involving candidates at the city, state, national, and international levels. In 1981 he served as Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s deputy campaign manager during Bradley’s reelection bid. He worked on the presidential bids of former vice president Walter Mondale and Sen. Gary Hart in 1984. He served as deputy national campaign manager for Rep. Richard Gephardt during his campaign to win the 1988 presidential election. He worked on the Greek prime ministerial bids of Andreas Papandreou in 1993 and his son George A. Papandreou in 2007. Trippi served as a senior adviser to Sen. John Edwards in Edwards’s quest to win the 2008 presidential election. Trippi has also worked outside politics as a consultant for various multinational corporations, including Toyota, DaimlerChrysler, IBM, and Lionsgate Films.

Trippi’s most notable campaign was that of Vermont Gov. Howard Dean for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. As national campaign manager, Trippi created and developed a number of strategies and tools for online campaigning that transformed political campaigning in the United States and were widely adopted by political candidates. One of the most important innovations was the creation of the first-ever campaign blog, initially named Call to Action and later changed to Blog for America. Trippi used the blog as a way to appeal to supporters directly for fund-raising. Trippi also pioneered the use of online television—setting up DeanTV, a Web site devoted to playing videos of candidate speeches and clips from the campaign trail—as well as the use of social networking Web sites such as MeetUp.com to organize and connect supporters. When the MeetUp site became insufficient for the massive number of people who signed up to support Dean, Trippi ordered the development of special software, which became DeanLink. DeanLink, which was a free download, allowed supporters to connect to each other according to their common interests and geographic location to campaign for Dean.

Trippi and other members of the Dean campaign broke all previous fund-raising records for U.S. Democratic primaries by collecting more than $12 million during the third quarter of 2003. Trippi explained that his vision was rooted in decentralizing the way political campaigns were run and in involving voters in the political dialogue. It also sought a large number of small monetary donations rather than a small number of big ones. Trippi described his work for Dean’s campaign in his book The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything (2004).

Trippi later was involved in various other political campaigns. Notably, in 2017 he helped Doug Jones become the first Democrat in 25 years to win a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama.