David Barnhart and the Distance Between K Street and Everywhere Else

David Barnhart’s first Washington accommodation had a steering wheel. He spent three nights sleeping in his car downtown, having come from a small-town dairy farm with ambitions large enough to survive an uncomfortable beginning. Years later, recalling his arrival, he included a wonderfully specific ingredient: too much The West Wing. Television had supplied the grandeur. Washington supplied the parking.

The detail is useful because it keeps the career that followed at human scale. Before the chief executive title, before the office lease and the research appointments, there was someone trying to get started. Barnhart’s work would eventually involve helping organizations enter public conversations. His own entrance was considerably less polished.

He founded Locust Street Group in 2008. Today, as founding partner and CEO of LSG, he advises a business whose work includes public affairs, communications, research and community engagement. Across those jobs runs a recurring question: who gets heard when decisions are made far from the people affected by them?

Fifty-two counties, one person at a time

For a concrete example of Barnhart at work, go to western Iowa during John Kerry’s presidential campaign. Barnhart was managing 52 counties. He hired Joe Maloney as a field organizer in Creston, where Maloney recruited people to help, including interns drawn from his own connections.

Barnhart’s later recollection lingered on the organizer’s ability to bring others in. The important action took place at the scale of individual relationships: someone agreed to help, then someone else did. A campaign could draw a territory on a map. An organizer had to turn that territory into people willing to act.

The relationship continued after the election. Barnhart joined Dewey Square Group, and Maloney worked there with him. When Barnhart started Locust Street Group, Maloney followed again. An Iowa hiring decision became a professional connection that survived changes of office and employer.

That sequence gives Barnhart’s campaign background a texture a résumé cannot. Political experience is often described through candidates and job titles. Here it appears through his recognition of another person’s ability to organize. The skill was portable. So was the working relationship.

A longer job description, a shorter name

By October 2022, Barnhart was ready to change the name of his firm to LSG. In his account of the rebrand, the business had widened to include strategic insights, stakeholder engagement, public relations, coalition building and community marketing. The initials made room for a longer list of capabilities.

A name change is a pleasant assignment compared with the work it announces. Three letters can fit neatly on a website. The research, communications and organizing behind them need people who know how to work together. Barnhart’s subsequent hiring decisions offer a more revealing account of the business than the abbreviation alone.

In July 2023, LSG added Jasme Bantens and Caroline Carlson to its research and insights practice. Bantens arrived with experience in media science and market research; Carlson brought a background in data analysis. The announcement specifically described an expansion into brand-building and product-marketing research.

That matters to the story of a campaign veteran. A political campaign asks how to persuade people within a defined contest. A broader communications practice must also understand how people encounter a product, judge an organization or form an opinion about a brand. The questions multiply. Hiring becomes a way of admitting that one person’s original experience cannot answer all of them.

Measuring the room before addressing it

In August 2024, Barnhart added Yoni Gedan as a partner to lead data analytics and measurement and expand corporate-brand and consumer research. Gedan had held research leadership positions at Zeno Group and worked at Edelman. His arrival extended a practice that had already been adding specialists.

The choice suggests a practical ambition: make audience understanding part of the work from the beginning. A message can be elegant and still miss the people it is supposed to reach. Measurement introduces a less forgiving question. Did anything change? For a founder trained in campaigns, a business that asks that question has an intelligible appeal.

October brought another kind of expertise. Erin Billings joined as a partner to lead crisis communications and expand public affairs work. Her background included 15 years as a reporter and editor, covering state politics in Montana and national politics in Washington.

Barnhart singled out her reporting experience when welcoming her. That is a revealing thing for a communications executive to admire. A former journalist understands the difference between an assertion and an explanation that survives questions. Clients may want their preferred version of events to travel. An experienced reporter knows what happens when that version meets an editor.

These appointments show Barnhart widening the kinds of judgment available around him. Research can challenge assumptions about an audience. Journalism can challenge assumptions about a story. Both make the founder’s original interest in people more demanding, because people have the tiresome habit of resisting a convenient description.

Growth needs somewhere to sit

In August 2023, LSG reported that its workforce had grown from 25 employees in 2021 to 54. The firm also signed a long-term lease for 21,500 square feet in Washington’s Herald building, with plans to leave a 4,500-square-foot Dupont Circle office.

The figures describe a particular moment in the company’s development. They are useful precisely because they have dates attached. A larger lease makes expansion visible; the harder question is what a larger team can accomplish together once everyone has somewhere to sit.

By March 2025, Barnhart had added an executive charged with that organizational problem. Teal Baker joined in a newly created managing director role, reporting to him and overseeing a nationwide team described at the time as more than 50 experts. Rachel Shell and Dayna Adelman also joined as senior vice presidents.

The appointments broadened the firm’s brand and corporate communications experience while giving daily coordination a named leader. For a founder, that is a significant choice. The early business runs on the people close enough to hear every conversation. A dispersed firm needs responsibilities that remain clear when people are in different cities.

Barnhart’s career has moved from managing a territory to managing an organization. In both cases, distance matters. The work depends on people being able to make decisions where they are, while contributing to something larger than their own patch of ground.

A birthday with 250 storytellers

In 2026, that interest in place found a new expression in The 250. LSG introduced a growing network of American storytellers, with the aim of representing all 50 states during the country’s 250th year. The project brings accounts of livelihoods, communities and personal milestones into a national conversation.

The firm paired the initiative with The State of US, a survey of 2,000 likely voters fielded in late spring 2026. In the results LSG published, 97 percent said freedom and individual rights were important to being American, and 96 percent said the same of treating everyone equally.

These are findings about stated values. They leave plenty of room for disagreement over policy, priorities and the country’s direction. Their relevance to Barnhart’s work lies in the combination: research looks for a broad pattern, while a storytelling network supplies particular people and places.

On LinkedIn, Barnhart promoted the initiative around Independence Day, describing a celebration he attended with his seven-year-old girls. He noticed small, family-made parade floats. It is a modest detail, and an apt one. National occasions become personal through what a child watches go past.

His company biography offers another family ambition: taking his children on an African safari. It also records that he can milk a cow. Executive biographies usually have room for strategy. Barnhart’s leaves room for a skill acquired well before Washington and an expedition still on the wish list.

“I grew up on a dairy farm and can milk a cow”

David Barnhart

A place in the stands

Another 2026 chapter happened outside agency life. In April, the University of Maryland recognized Barnhart and Kevin Ford as the youngest donors supporting athletics in its 1856 Society. Their recent contributions supported the Director of Athletics Fund. The society recognizes cumulative gifts of at least $1 million or planned gifts of at least $5 million; those thresholds do not specify the amount of this particular contribution.

In a joint statement, they explained that they wanted to provide unrestricted gifts in support of athletics leadership. The choice puts confidence in other people’s judgment. It is a useful companion to the agency story, where Barnhart has likewise brought in specialists and given them work to lead.

He has travelled a considerable distance from those first nights downtown. The public record now includes an agency, campaign colleagues, researchers, storytellers and a place in the stands. The dairy farm remains part of how he introduces himself. Washington gave him a career; people elsewhere keep giving that career something to talk about.