Ron Rosenblith, Democratic political strategist and Hotline co-founder, dies at 75

By Matt Schudel,

Ron Rosenblith, a political strategist who had a long association with John F. Kerry and other Democratic officeholders and helped launch the Hotline, one of the first sources of aggregated political news from around the country, died July 12 at his home in Durham, N.C. He was 75.

The cause was respiratory failure, said a daughter, Gillet Rosenblith. She said doctors could not pinpoint a precise cause, but it appeared to be related to a lung transplant he had in 2016 as a result of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Mr. Rosenblith began working in political campaigns in 1968, when he was an organizer for the unsuccessful Democratic candidacy of Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy (Minn.). He went on to work on every Democratic presidential campaign through 2004. He also founded a fundraising firm geared toward small donors.

He was perhaps best known for his work with Kerry, beginning in 1982, when he was political director for Kerry’s campaign for Massachusetts lieutenant governor. He got the job after confronting Kerry and criticizing his strategy during the primary campaign.

Kerry won the lieutenant governor’s race, then two years later was elected to the U.S. Senate with Mr. Rosenblith acting as a principal architect of the campaign. Mr. Rosenblith then served two years as Kerry’s first Senate chief of staff.

In a statement, Kerry, who later served as secretary of state under President Barack Obama, said Mr. Rosenblith “had as good a sense of the country’s direction as anyone in politics.”

Mr. Rosenblith helped guide Kerry’s four successful Senate reelection efforts and his 2004 campaign for the presidency, which he lost to Republican incumbent George W. Bush.

In 1987, Mr. Rosenblith became executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The same year, he helped found the American Political Network, which published what was then called the Presidential Campaign Hotline. Other key founders included Republican strategist Douglas L. Bailey and political advisers Roger Craver and Jeffrey Halley.

The Hotline, as it was later known, was among the first daily news digests to use a computerized database to collect political news from around the country. It was originally distributed by fax to journalists, campaign officials and political insiders who paid hefty subscription fees that could exceed $4,000 a year. The Hotline, which is now part of the National Journal, was later published online.

“One of the most important things is that even though there are news digests at a variety of places around town,” Mr. Rosenblith told The Washington Post in 1987, “they are not being created by people with a sense of politics.”

A key component of the Hotline, Bailey told The Post at the time, was its bipartisan approach. “If Ron were doing it alone, nobody in my party would trust it,” he said. “If I were doing it alone, nobody in Ron’s party would trust it.”

Mr. Rosenblith went to work at 4 a.m. during the early days of the Hotline. A young staff of aspiring journalists — which came to include Norah O’Donnell, now the anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” and Chuck Todd, political director of NBC News — assembled political analysis from around the country and distributed reports by 11:30 a.m. each day.

“The Hotline was in some ways the first aggregator, before aggregating was cool,” Tom Rosenstiel, a scholar of journalism, told Politico in 2010. “ . . . They had the idea that a new technology made it possible to do a news summary and distribute it by fax. Here we are almost a quarter century later, and that’s become the soul of a whole new information revolution.”

By 1990, Mr. Rosenblith had moved on to found Integral Resources, a telemarketing company to help political candidates and nonprofit groups develop fundraising efforts, particularly through grass-roots contributions. His clients through the years included the Democratic Senatorial and Congressional Campaign committees, President Biden’s 2020 campaign, the Environmental Defense Fund and American Council of the Blind. He remained chief executive of Integral Resources until his death.

In 2003, Mr. Rosenblith played an advisory role in helping his wife, Page Gardner, launch the Voter Participation Center, which has added millions of people of color, young people and other underrepresented groups to voting rolls nationwide.

Ronald Francis Rosenblith was born June 18, 1946, in Rapid City, S.D., and grew up in Brookline, Mass. His father was a scientist and administrator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His mother was a psychologist and a professor at Harvard and later at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.

Mr. Rosenblith attended Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and Boston University before becoming a political organizer. He worked on Boston-area political campaigns, including the short-lived 1980 presidential run of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). During the 1970s, Mr. Rosenblith made a living by making and selling his own pottery; he also enjoyed betting on horse races. In 1981, he was elected to Brookline’s town board, running on a platform of making rents more affordable.

Mr. Rosenblith settled in Washington in the mid-1980s and lived in McLean, Va., before moving to North Carolina in 2019.

His first marriage, to Joan Borysenko, ended in divorce. Survivors include Gardner, his wife of 41 years, of Durham; a son from his first marriage, Justin Borysenko of Cape Coral, Fla.; two daughters from his second marriage, Gillet Rosenblith of Charlottesville and Charlton Rosenblith Murphy of Frederick, Md.; and two grandchildren.

“Over a 50-year friendship,” Democratic strategist and former White House chief of staff John Podesta said in a statement, “Ron taught me the value of analytics — how to win elections, how to build a successful business . . . even how to make money at the racetrack.”

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