Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign hired two longtime Democratic operatives Wednesday, according to a Clinton aide, adding to the operation’s already sizable staff.
Heather Stone, a longtime co-worker of campaign manager Robby Mook, will serve as the campaign’s chief of staff, the aide said. Stone’s primary job will be to make sure different departments are streamlined and working well together.
This is the same job Jim Messina held during then-Sen. Barack Obama’s successful 2008 run.
Stone most recently worked as the deputy national political director at SEIU, an international union representing service employees, where she oversaw the group’s 2012 and 2014 independent expenditure campaigns.
Stone last worked with Mook when she was deputy director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s independent expenditure during the 2010 campaign cycle. Mook was the director.
Also hired on Wednesday: Craig Smith, a Clinton friend whose work with the family dates back to Bill Clinton’s first term as governor. Smith was the first hire on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and worked as assistant to the president and political director in the Clinton White House. He also advised Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign.
Smith, a native Arkansan, will be a paid consultant for the campaign, focused primarily on the early voting states other than Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. Smith’s work will focus on Florida and the broader South.
Most recently, Smith was a paid senior adviser to Ready for Hillary, the super PAC that helped lay the groundwork for Clinton’s 2016 run. Smith had a hand in nearly every decision the group made, according to multiple Ready for Hillary staffers, and was particularly close with Adam Parkhomenko, the group’s co-founder and now Clinton’s 2016 director of grassroots engagement.
Although Ready for Hillary was widely considered a de facto campaign-in-waiting for Clinton, only around a dozen of their staffers ended up working for the campaign.
The hires add to Clinton’s already large – and expensive – campaign operation. The campaign has hired over 300 people since launching in April, according to the Federal Election Commission, and spent a whopping $18.7 million in their first three months.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s strongest Democratic opponent, is running a shoestring campaign by comparison.
Sanders has a total of 64 paid staffer as of Aug. 4, according to a spokesman. Thirty-nine of those staffers are in Iowa and 12 are at campaign headquarters in Burlington, Vermont. Sanders has six operatives in New Hampshire, two in South Carolina and none in Nevada.
Sanders also has 15 paid interns, bringing the total of people paid by the Sanders campaign to 79.
In the same quarter that Clinton spent nearly $19 million, the Sanders campaign only spent $3.1 million.