WASHINGTON – Washington lobbying firms, trade associations and corporate offices are moving to hire more well-connected Democrats in response to rising prospects that the opposition party will wrest control of at least one chamber of Congress from Republicans in the November elections.
In what lobbyists are calling a harbinger of possible upheaval on Capitol Hill, many people who make their livings influencing government have gone from mostly shunning Democrats to aggressively recruiting them as lobbyists over the past six months or so.
“We’ve seen a noticeable shift,” said Beth Solomon, director of the Washington office of Christian &Timbers, an executive search firm that helps to place senior lobbyists and trade association heads.
In June, one of Washington’s largest lobbying law firms, DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary LLP, transferred the chairmanship of its government affairs practice from a Republican, Thomas O’Neil, to a prominent Democrat, James Blanchard, a former governor and congressman from Michigan.
“Being a Democrat didn’t hurt me, that’s for sure,” Blanchard said. “This is going to be a big Democratic year.”
At Patton Boggs LLP, another lobbying powerhouse, the calculation is similar. “Democrats’ stock has clearly risen in the interviewing process this year as the chances for a Democratic takeover (of the House) have increased,” said John Jonas, the head of Patton Boggs’s health practice. “Serious hiring” of Democrats, he added, has become “a high priority here at Patton Boggs.”
“Earlier this year the propensity was to look mostly at Republicans” as candidates for lobbying jobs, said W. Michael House, director of the legislative group at the law firm Hogan &Hartson. “Now, we’re looking at both Republicans and Democrats closely.”
Lobbying managers have for years tended to hire Republicans because both Congress and the White House are controlled by the GOP and access to officials at both places is lobbying’s stock in trade. But, in recent months, many of Washington’s top lobbyists said that their decision-making has been altered by an emerging consensus among election experts that that Democrats will boost their numbers in the House and the Senate in the midterm elections and have a strong shot of winning a majority in the House.
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