Sean Patrick Maloney’s elevation to chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) last month gave him a powerful position within the party and also stuck him with a tough job. The DCCC’s immediate task is to defend Democrats’ wafer-thin House majority in the 2022 midterms, a cycle that a new president’s party usually loses. This comes after Democratic House candidates have underperformed as a whole in two out of three cycles. Maloney getting the DCCC chairmanship is a bit like being put in charge of the Titanic as it heads toward an iceberg—if he manages to steer the party away from disaster, it will be a remarkable feat—but the more likely outcome is disaster.
Who is Maloney, and where did he come from? He’s a relatively new member of Congress, having first won election in the 2012 cycle, and relatively young (54) by the octogenarian standards of Democratic House leadership. Here’s what you should know about Maloney.
He’s a longtime Democratic operative
He got his start in politics working for Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, and after a stint working as a lawyer, joined the second Clinton administration in 1996 working for White House Chief of Staff John Podesta. He was one of the representatives sent by the White House to Matthew Shepard’s funeral in 1998; an Associated Press article about the event described him as “the highest-ranking openly homosexual man on the White House staff.” (This speaks to how few out gay men were involved in politics at the time, as Maloney wasn’t particularly high-ranking.)
After Clinton left office, Maloney moved to New York City and helped start Kiodex, a firm that provides technical services to financial companies, and returned to practicing law after it was sold in 2003. He toyed with a New York City Council run but instead ran for state attorney general in 2006, losing in the primary. Maloney then went on to serve in Governor Eliot Spitzer’s administration, a stint that would be used years later to tar him as involved with the “Troopergate” scandal, in which the governor used the State Police to keep tabs on a rival politician. The New York Times invoked that association years later as a rationale for not endorsing him for Congress, but a Wall Street Journal article noted that no one accused him credibly of anything resembling wrongdoing.
When Spitzer resigned over yet another scandal, Maloney worked for his successor, David Patterson, then bounced back to the private sector to work for a couple of big law firms. His career trajectory was pretty typical for a rising politico, in other words. That Journal article, citing people Maloney worked with, described him in political roles as a “dedicated, ambitious, occasionally abrasive aide who always seemed to be calculating his next move.”
He’s a centrist down to his roots, and ambitious
In 2012, Maloney ran for Congress in New York’s 18th District, a Hudson Valley seat that was occupied by a Republican but had just acquired more Democratic voters thanks to the post-2010 redistricting, making it a target for Democrats. Maloney and his husband owned property nearby and had spent time in the area, but in order to qualify for the office, he bought a home in Cold Spring. Despite that newcomer status, he won a competitive primary and beat the incumbent, Nan Hayworth, by four points. He beat her in a rematch two years later, and held on to the seat in the following cycles, even as the 18th voted for Donald Trump in 2016.
Like many Democrats from purplish districts, Maloney hews to the center, belonging to the New Democrat Coalition and the No Labels Problem Solvers caucus. His commitment to bipartisanship extends to the point that, in 2019, he endorsed the Republican mayor of Poughkeepsie, a conservative who had opposed same-sex marriage. It was a striking position for a gay politician to take, especially since Maloney has spent a not-insignificant amount of energy advocating for protections for LGBTQ people. But Maloney doesn’t portray himself as a progressive, instead emphasizing his love of bipartisanship.
Maloney hasn’t made a secret of his desire for higher office. After the 2016 elections, he nearly ran for DCCC chair, but instead embarked on an investigation into the party’s problems in that cycle. (The final report was provided to lawmakers behind closed doors but hidden from public view.) In 2018, he ran unsuccessfully for New York State attorney general.
His election shows the party leadership isn’t tilting left
To secure the DCCC chair, Maloney won a narrow victory over California’s Tony Cárdenas, who was widely praised for his leadership of Bold PAC, the campaign arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and was seen as the favorite of progressives, though The Intercept noted that “no progressive candidate ran for the position.”
Both men had promised to roll back the blacklist on firms and consultants who worked on the campaigns of primary challengers to incumbent Democrats, a controversial policy that critics said hurt the party badly by limiting its access to left-leaning campaign shops that are also the most innovative on the digital side. (Maloney has indicated he agrees with this criticism.) Maloney, the first-ever LGBTQ DCCC chair, also promised to “elevate Latinas” and other people of color in an effort to reach out to the Democrats’ core constituencies.
But Maloney stumbled on this latter promise right out of the gate when he appointed Tim Persico, a white man who was his former chief of staff, to be his top deputy. That move prompted Black and Hispanic members of Congress to complain to Politico and warn that they were closely watching his staffing operation for signs that it would be too white, a longstanding problem. Perisco drew controversy during the 2018 cycle when, as a DCCC operative, was accused of asking Greg Edwards, a Black progressive, to drop out of a congressional primary and seek lower office. (Edwards went on to lose that primary; the DCCC said at the time that it was merely trying to make sure it had quality candidates running for the state senate.)
These flashpoints show how difficult a job the DCCC chair is. Lawmakers of color have often not seen the organization as representing the diversity of the party, while many progressives distrust it and accuse it of putting its thumb on the scale for milquetoast centrists. Heading into 2022, Democrats will have to both reach out to swing voters and continue to energize the young voters and people of color whose high turnout helped them win in the 2018 midterms—and they won’t have anti-Trump sentiment to fall back on to inspire those voters.
Maloney obviously knows a lot about winning swing voters. But he’ll have to earn the trust of the more left-wing parts of the Democratic coalition, which will be tricky. It remains to be seen whether the DCCC will once again be accused of favoring centrists in primaries, but the most important metric will be the obvious one: Can Maloney navigate all this to hang onto the House?
