Name: Sean Coit
Hometown: Reston, Va.
Position: Communications director for Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del.
Age: 29
Alma Mater: St. Joseph’s University
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Washington Examiner: Describe what you do and your responsibilities.
Coit: Everything that’s public-facing from Sen. Coons and our office. It’s not just when he goes on television or speaks to reporters for an interview, but it’s also, what [will] our constituent mail look like? What will our email newsletters look like? What [will] our social media look like? What events is he going to? So, it’s really taking a look at the big picture of what are people in Delaware and what are people around the country seeing from Sen. Coons on any number of different mediums and outlets, and making sure that that is as close to an accurate representation as we can get and as close to the message we want to be driving.
Washington Examiner: What’s the focus of the press office and Sen. Coons?
Coit: There’s always going to be issues that are kind of hot in Washington. But one thing that we talk about a lot and the senator talks a lot about is institutions and how much they matter and how we can protect them, such as the legislative filibuster, NATO, and the Senate Prayer Breakfast. That’s something that our communications office tries to talk a lot about because it’s something Sen. Coons cares a lot about, and I think in a time when everyone is as partisan as ever, that’s an important message.
Washington Examiner: How did you end up on Capitol Hill and Sen. Coons’ office?
Coit: I was much more focused on being a journalist back in college, actually, and happened to land a great internship with a guy in Philadelphia named Larry Ceisler. He does so many different things — works for companies, advises politicians, all sorts of stuff. He helped expose me to politics in a way that I hadn’t really been before, so I kind of caught the bug. I got my first job on the Hill with [former Rep.] Gabby Giffords, and have just been lucky to find one opportunity after another.
Washington Examiner: How is being in the minority with a Republican president change how you communicate?
Coit: Being in the minority is always different, and in some ways it’s easier because we have very little control over what’s on the floor and what’s kind of driving the news coming out of Congress.
One thing, I think, that’s been really interesting about these first six months is in a sense we’ve been going on offense, and in a sense we’ve been criticizing some of their proposals. But almost every one of their proposals has been to tear down a Democratic idea, whether it’s EPA regulations, the Affordable Care Act, or the Paris Agreement. You’ve seen Democrats be as full-throated as ever not just of the policies, but of the ideas we believe in.
Washington Examiner: You worked for Katie McGinty’s campaign against Sen. Pat Toomey last year. What was your major takeaway from that race and 2016?
Coit: My takeaway is that we didn’t know what race we were running. Up until the last weekend, we assumed we were running a race in a state where the Democratic presidential candidate was going to win by several points, and we needed to do a good job of making sure that as many of the voters coming out for Hillary Clinton were coming out for Katie McGinty. I don’t think anyone, including the Toomey campaign, knew what was going on in Pennsylvania. Election Day showed a country and a state that, at least politically, a lot of people didn’t realize we were in. There were a lot of feelings on election night of “Wow, we had no idea this is where Pennsylvania was politically.”
