Brad O’Furey is Ann Arbor Democrats’ go-to campaign manager. In the past three years, he’s helped elect Christopher Taylor mayor, Sabra Briere to council, Carol Kuhnke to circuit court, and Adam Zemke to the state house. But on quiet weekends, he says his favorite recreation “is to blare Simon and Garfunkel and bake.”

O’Furey was Brad O’Conner until last August, when he married Nathan Furey and they combined their names. And he’s baking better now thanks to the Kitchen Aid mixer he got as a wedding present from Sally Petersen, who challenged Jane Lumm in the November election and lost, becoming one of O’Furey’s few candidates who didn’t win.

“In the past, I’ve run my own campaigns with friends,” says Petersen. O’Furey upped her game: “He did everything: advertising, messaging, and mailing. He designed everything. I wrote my own speeches, but we did the debate prep work together.”

“I truly thought that our message was better,” says the bearded O’Furey over coffee in the Espresso Royale on S. Main. “‘Working together for Ann Arbor’s future,’ working together, not having squabbles on council, not having factions on council. We thought our message would resonate over what Jane Lumm had to offer. It didn’t.”

Though not yet thirty, O’Furey speaks with a mature authority–and deep passion. “I love local elections,” he says. “They’re an opportunity to debate important issues like the deer cull, development, and the future of our city.” Thanks to his efforts, more Ann Arborites are engaging in those debates–and changing the balance of power on council.

Born in Houston in 1988, he came to politics early. “When I was five or six years old,” he recalls, “my grandmother would be sitting at the TV and yelling at George Bush senior.”

In high school, “I went to my local Democratic club. I ended up being a precinct captain, an election judge, and was elected precinct chairman. Every time there was a campaign I was involved in it–for Congress, for city council for Houston. I worked with Annise Parker, the first lesbian mayor of Houston.”

After earning a political science degree from the University of Houston, O’Furey moved to Ann Arbor in 2010 as a field organizer for then-congressman Mark Schauer. He also worked with Adam Zemke, who ran for county commissioner, and Christine Green, who ran for state representative; both lost. After the campaigns ended, he returned to Houston briefly.

“I was miserable,” he admits. “I missed Ann Arbor.” So when Zemke called and asked him to run his 2012 campaign for state representative, “I left my job, my apartment, and my family, and packed my car up–again. Something drew me to Ann Arbor, something I loved.”

Working on Zemke’s campaign, he met other people running for office. One day, walking downtown, he ran into circuit court candidate Carol Kuhnke, who told him, “‘I have to go to this event, and I have no idea who can be my campaign manager!’ I said ‘Let me see.'”

Four candidates were chasing the seat, and O’Furey saw Kuhnke as an underdog. But he took the job, dividing his time between the campaigns. Zemke won his primary for a safe Democratic seat. Kuhnke came in second in her nonpartisan contest, advancing to a general election showdown with the better-known Jim Fink. “I worked with Carol through the general election,” O’Furey says, targeting some precincts for door-to-door campaigning and others for direct mail. “She won with 56 percent of the vote, becoming the first elected lesbian judge in the state of Michigan.

“It was at that moment that we saw the impact,” O’Furey continues. “I’ve got this skill, and there are candidates out there who really need an [elected] office.”

The Zemke campaign also introduced him to First Ward councilmember Sabra Briere. “A big portion of Adam’s district is in the First Ward,” Briere recalls. “I was intrigued that his lists [of targeted voters] were all stored on phones rather than on paper.” Though she had run her own campaigns in the past, Briere hired O’Furey to manage her 2013 reelection run. “The deeper I got in council, the more engaged I became in things that weren’t campaigning,” she explains. “I needed a campaign manager to take care of the details.

He did more than that. “I was encouraged to use different techniques,” Briere says. “I had to have a Facebook page. He also said to put everything on postcard-sized materials, to decrease the number of words and increase the number of images, and that was good.”

The following year, Briere asked O’Furey to manage her mayoral campaign, but he declined: “He told me he was running Christopher Taylor’s campaign. He thought Christopher had a better chance of winning. They were right.”

After Briere, O’Furey ran a judicial campaign in Detroit, only to see the seat eliminated, and another local circuit court race, only to see his candidate, French-born Veronique Liem, lose to a candidate who literally grew up around the county courthouse–Pat Conlin, the son and grandson of circuit court judges. O’Furey also worked in 2014 for Alex Milshteyn when he ran for WCC’s board of trustees–Milshteyn lost–and for Kirk Westphal and Julie Grand for city council–who both won.

But O’Furey’s biggest campaign in 2014 was Christopher Taylor’s. The mayor says he was “looking for assistance, knew that [O’Furey] was well thought of, and called him up.”

“I went in and made my pitch,” recalls O’Furey. “‘This is a new campaign in a big city, and you want an organization that can rise above all the confusion, a message that can unify the city.'”

O’Furey landed the gig and mobilized “a team of volunteers and interns organizing fundraising, organizing house parties, putting together talk packets for volunteers and for Christopher to knock on doors, and putting together a direct mail program. I designed the direct mail and ads and had those sent out to a very targeted list of voters–not just every registered voter.

“We knew the people who were going to vote, and we expanded that to the folks we wanted to come out and vote. We needed to turn out younger families and young professionals.”

Easier said than done. “The only really effective way to reach young voters is through social media–Facebook, Twitter, maybe even Instagram–and [personal] networks,” O’Furey says. “I’m not going to know about something unless someone I know says ‘check this out.’ Young voters may not read the newspaper. They definitely don’t read the [MLive] comments section. They don’t look at ads. They don’t care about mail pieces.”

The Taylor campaign identified prospective supporters using software from a progressive political consulting company The idea, he says, was “‘Let’s get ten young professionals together who aren’t usually involved in politics and have them talk to their networks. Then let’s get networks organized and engaged and have a young professionals event.'”

The get-together at the Last Word bar “was full of people from the start-up community. These sixty people aren’t regular city council voters. They may be presidential voters, maybe even midterm voters, but they aren’t people who come out for an August city council race because they don’t feel like they have a stake in it. Young families and young professionals, Millennials, even Gen Xers, don’t get involved in the process because we don’t feel the process works for us.”

O’Furey engaged them with issues they care about: “affordable housing, transportation, public transportation–not just public transportation, but things like Uber and Lyft. That was what the Obama campaign did–talk about issues that would motivate young people to vote–and that’s what we did. Affordability, parks, transportation: things that are important to a young family.”

Of course, they reached out to other voters as well. “Taylor’s campaign was very targeted, very scientific,” O’Furey explains. They asked themselves, “What message do we send these voters, how do we reach those voters, what message resonates with these voters, retired versus young professional.”

Didn’t they figure the heir apparent to seven-term mayor John Hieftje was a shoo-in? “We didn’t think so. We weren’t taking anything for granted.”

O’Furey says he worked twelve-to-fourteen-hour days, seven days a week for Taylor, but he doesn’t claim sole credit for the victory. “I wasn’t by any means the person who came up with all this stuff. There was a kitchen cabinet that would meet once a week and talk for hours. It was definitely a big group effort.”

“Campaign managers block and tackle,” says Taylor. “They administer the campaign, provide day-to-day staffing, assist with literature, make sure you have the palm cards you need, the turfs you need.” The mayor says he’d “absolutely” recommend O’Furey to any current or aspiring councilmember. But, he stresses, a campaign manager can only take a candidate so far.

“It’s a pretty simple process in the end,” the mayor says. “You are who you are, you believe what you believe, you have goals and you articulate those goals, you knock on doors and talk to people about their concerns and see what happens on the first Tuesday of August.”

Or on the first Tuesday in November–which is when Sally Petersen lost to incumbent Jane Lumm.

“I approached her,” recalls O’Furey. “I saw the Second Ward needed a fresh voice that’s not so polarizing.”

Hoping to repeat his previous successes, O’Furey used personal networks to invite prospective Petersen backers to a family picnic. “It was a great event,” he says. Yet his candidate got only 36 percent of the vote despite spending a record $33,000 on the race. In the end, O’Furey says, “it didn’t make any difference. No matter how much money we spent trying to get our message out, other issues were more important.”

Yet Petersen, too, would recommend O’Furey’s services. “He’s a terrific guy,” Petersen says. “He’s quiet on the exterior, so you think he’s quite the tough guy. But he’s one of the sweetest people I know.”

When I ask O’Furey how he met his husband, the savvy political operative actually blushes slightly (it was at the Necto dance club). Nathan’s “mom was a stats teacher at Huron,” O’Furey explains. After three semesters at WCC, he’s transferring to the U-M in January to study data science and computer science.

O’Furey was raised as an evangelical Protestant. “Coming out in the far suburbs of Houston wasn’t easy,” he says. “A lot of the harassment was from friends that I went to junior high with. Oftentimes I would come out, and my car was egged, or ‘faggot’ was written on the house.”

He broke away by winning a scholarship to a Jesuit high school. It wasn’t easy being out there, either, but “I had a lot of good mentors, a lot of the priests were very progressive, especially on homosexuality, and so they were a good source of support.”

At home, O’Furey’s older brother had already come out, “so it was a little easier”–though his mother worried that with two gay sons, she wouldn’t have any grandchildren. Now that his brother has a child, O’Furey adds, “she’s fine.”

O’Furey hopes to have kids of his own someday. “I want to send my kids to Ann Arbor schools and take them to Ann Arbor parks,” he says. “For a gay family, I have no issues being here or raising a family here.”

Though politics is O’Furey’s passion, it’s not his living. He has a full-time job in sales development at Nutshell, which makes customer relationship management software. “I was looking for a job that could sustain me and my family,” he explains. “Campaigning doesn’t do that.”

No kidding: He usually gets between $250 and $500 a month for a campaign’s duration–though Petersen paid him $1,500 a month. He also has a volunteer gig as head of the Jim Toy Community Center–he says he was asked to get involved “because the gay community needs to evolve and incorporate younger members of the community, and not just younger members but transgender members, bisexual, pansexual, the whole alphabet of communities.”

O’Furey doesn’t know which politician he’ll work with next. “I’m not out there searching for the next campaign.”

He does know that Washtenaw County is the limit of his ambition. “I worked for Congressman Dingell as a field rep. I didn’t particularly like that. That was a little too not-local for me.”

Would he ever run as a candidate himself?

“I’m not one to put myself in front of the public,” he replies. “I’m generally a private person and like to stay behind the scenes, but I haven’t ruled it out.”

Then O’Furey adds with a rare small smile, “I’m not a very good politician.”

This article has been edited since it was published in the January 2016 Ann Arbor Observer. The outcome of Adam Zemke’s county commission run, and Jim Fink’s first name, have been corrected.

Credit for Alex Yerkey

To the Observer:

Thanks so much for your article on Brad O’Furey [“Campaign Manager to the Stars,” January]- he’s a tremendous asset to the community and did first class campaign management work for me and others. I’d like, however, to also ensure that his former business partner, Alex Yerkey, gets recognized. Brad and Alex co-managed my 2014 campaign through their business, Checkmate Campaign Strategies. They are tremendously talented campaign managers, sophisticated in their approach, low-drama in their demeanor. Last summer, Alex managed two successful Council challenger campaigns, and he is working again this season in the 52nd District race. I have the highest regard for them both.

Sincerely,

Christopher M. Taylor