D.C. veteran brings political business to Upstate

GENEVA--A political consultant with extensive experience in campaigns, and deep roots in upstate New York, has brought his business back home.

John Balduzzi launched his political consulting firm, The Balduzzi Group, in January. He and his fiance returned to upstate New York, where they both grew up, after 10 years working in Washington, D.C.

Balduzzi says they had both had enough with the life in the nation's capital and felt their home state offered a better lifestyle and a better place to raise a family. Fortunately for Balduzzi's business, it doesn't really matter where he is.

All he needs is a laptop, an Internet connection, and close proximity to an airport.

"My clients are all over the country," he says. "Even in D.C., I was going to be getting on an airplane anyway."

Balduzzi, a Syracuse native and graduate of Ithaca College, was most recently political director at Kennedy Communications, a Washington-based political-communications firm. While there, he worked with unions, state parties, and candidates at the municipal, state, and federal level.

While political consultants sometimes focus on one aspect of campaigns--communications or research, for example--Balduzzi says he's gained experience in a variety of areas and his firm is offering a range of services.

They include messaging and crisis communications, general political consulting, campaign research, legal and corporate research, and public affairs.

"I'm kind of a jack-of-all-trades," he says.

His clients include mayoral candidates, state legislators, candidates for the U.S. House and Senate, and governors. Most are outside upstate New York and he expects to continue working mainly with candidates outside the local area.

He has current clients in states including California, Texas, and Nevada.

At this time, Balduzzi runs his firm from a home office in Geneva. He and his fiance are planning to buy a house in the area and he says hell decide after that where to locate an office.

And while his firm is a one-man shop at the moment, he expects to hire about a half-a-dozen contractors to help him during next year's busy campaign season.

In fact, Balduzzi says he's already been in touch with a few professors at Syracuse University's Maxwell School to recruit students to help him. He notes that when he graduated from college, he picked up and moved to Washington and later Alabama to gain experience in a campaign.

Working for a firm in the local area will be a much easier path for current Maxwell students, he says.

Balduzzi says his father was heavily involved in unions while working for Allied Chemical. That provided Balduzzi's first exposure to politics.

"So I always had the bug in me," he says.

While at Ithaca College, he met an alum with connections at the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Balduzzi's name wound up in front of the committee's chair at the time, Terry McAuliffe, an adviser to both Bill and Hillary Clinton who later ran for governor of Virginia.

The connection landed Balduzzi an internship with the DNC and afterwards working on Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman's campaign.

He later worked as a political director and campaign manager with the Service Employees International Union, was a research associate and regional press secretary at the DNC and John Kerry for President, and worked as campaign manager and senior aide during Dan Maffei's first run for Congress in 2006 against Rep. Jim Walsh.

Balduzzi also served on the staff of New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg.