David Williams has more than 40 years of experience in crafting innovative and successful political campaigns. They include winning a 2012 ballot measure in Idaho that overturned laws that would have undermined public education, dramatically increasing the turnout of low-propensity voters in a key state in the 2004 Presidential race, and orchestrating a public relations campaign for MA public employees in 1993 that resulted in the passage of a law that derailed efforts to privatize various state agencies.
He has been the Chief of Staff for three members of the US House of Representatives – John Tierney (D-MA), Steve Kagen (D-WI) and Mike Forbes (D-NY). Tierney and Kagen had never held public office before their initial victories and David helped guide them to re-election wins in 1998 and 2008. In 1999, David took over the helm in Forbes’ office after Forbes became the first member of Congress to change parties since the height of Watergate.
David also served as the national political director for Planned Parenthood (2002-05) where he developed a unique program in 2004 to increase the turnout of women who had little or no history of voting. The program capitalized on Planned Parenthood’s reputation as a trusted health care provider and went door-to-door in suburban Portland, OR with apolitical, non-traditional messaging to build a personal rapport. Where multiple individual contacts were made, 80% of the targets voted and these largely single, unmarried women contributed significantly to John Kerry’s 4-point victory in a state which Al Gore had carried by less than one half a point in 2000.
The 2012 Idaho campaign – Vote No on Propositions 1,2,3 – for which David was the manager and chief strategist, was the first successful repeal of laws passed by the legislature since 1936 and was only the second time it had occurred in the state’s history. The laws masqueraded as education reform but their principal goal was to gut the collective bargaining rights of the state’s teachers and impose more restrictive working conditions. The nonpartisan campaign made extensive use of social media – 75% of the state’s voters were on Facebook – and launched Conservatives Voting No on Props 1,2,3 to capitalize on the populist resentment of the GOP establishment’s dictates.
From 2014-20, David was the Director of Government Relations and Communications for the Ohio Education Association (OEA). He first came to OH in 2011 as a communications consultant at the behest of the national labor table – a coalition of prominent unions. He subsequently served as a deputy manager for the campaign that successfully overturned a law (SB-5) that would have severely weakened the rights of the state’s public employees.
In 2014, at David’s direction, OEA and partners created an interactive website – https://knowyourcharter.com/– that enabled parents, teachers and other interested parties to compare the performance of local public schools with that of charter schools. Ohio had a reputation for a large number of poor-performing charters that were draining needed funds from public schools that were in a large majority of cases doing a better job of educating their students. The Ohio Charter School Accountability Project brought attention to the sorry state of Ohio’s charters without casting aspersions on the many lawmakers who had voted to set up charters with little or no oversight. A number of these legislators had also received large campaign contributions from some of the worst charter school operators. The focus was on the students who were being underserved and on the taxpayers who were being fleeced. Using creative videos that were targeted digitally at key constituencies and capturing the personal stories of parents and educators who had had bad experiences with charter schools, the Ohio Charter School Accountability Project built public support for reform. Within a year of launching the website, legislators were persuaded to pass badly-needed changes in the laws governing charter schools.
David began his career as a radio and television reporter in Boston at WBUR-FM and WGBH-TV.