At a Washington awards dinner in April 2024, Jeffrey Forbes gave a surprisingly economical account of his professional education. “Dan taught me how to lobby,” he said of his business partner, Dan Tate. By then, Forbes had worked on presidential campaigns, served in the Clinton White House, run a senator’s office, and helped build a government relations firm. It was quite a résumé to bring to a lesson.
He explained that Tate had taught him to look toward the middle, where legislation could acquire enough support to pass or enough resistance to fail. The tribute was affectionate, but its subject was work. Forbes was describing how a colleague had changed the way he understood the job.
That is a useful place to begin with Forbes. His career has involved famous names and consequential institutions. Yet the recurring action is more modest: someone makes an introduction, someone brings a different kind of experience, someone figures out how to assemble the people needed for the next decision. Washington supplies the grand architecture. The inhabitants still have to get along.
A Democrat’s Republican beginning
One early introduction came from Emmett Buell, his political science professor at Denison University. Buell helped connect Forbes to work on Al Gore’s 1988 presidential campaign. The professor was a Republican; his student was beginning a Democratic political career. Forbes later recalled that he had not known Buell’s politics while being influenced by him.
It is a small, pleasing complication in a career often described through party affiliations. A professor could recognize an opening for a student without sharing the student’s political destination. Forbes could accept the help without needing the professor to belong to his team. Their relationship had room for the difference.
Forbes was born in Cleveland and grew up in Northfield, Minnesota. He graduated from Denison in 1987 with a political science degree and an economics minor. The combination would eventually look rather appropriate: a career spent around both elections and the arguments over how governments tax, trade, and spend.
The campaign staffer learns the machinery
In 1992, Forbes became Bill Clinton’s New Hampshire field director. He worked as the Democratic National Committee’s Midwest political director from 1993 to 1995. On Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, he was deputy political director and director of delegate selection. These were organizing assignments, concerned with how a political operation reached people and put its support to use.
Then the work moved into the White House. In 1997, he served as special assistant to the president and staff director for legislative affairs. In 1998 and 1999, he was deputy assistant to Clinton and deputy director of scheduling. The titles cover different problems: relations with Congress, coordination inside the executive branch, and the allocation of presidential time.
A presidential diary puts him at a scheduling meeting on January 4, 1999, from 2:25 to 2:30 p.m., alongside Doug Sosnik and Stephanie Streett. Five minutes is a wonderfully unromantic unit of political history. It also makes the work concrete. An administration’s priorities eventually have to fit into a day, with people in the right place and the next meeting already waiting.
The scheduling entry does not reveal what Forbes said. It gives something more ordinary and, for a working biography, useful: he was part of the operating machinery. Behind the public event was an appointment; behind the appointment were staff members managing a scarce resource. Even a president has only so many afternoons.
Where the vote count meets the tax code
Forbes became chief of staff to Senator Max Baucus of Montana, serving from 1999 to 2002. In 2003, he was the Democratic staff director of the Senate Finance Committee. He had moved from organizing electoral support to working within an institution that helped shape federal tax and trade policy.
Years later, as tax reform approached in 2012, he appeared among the former Baucus aides whose Washington experience was in demand. The attraction of such a background is easy to understand. An organization trying to follow a complicated legislative argument needs people who can interpret its substance and its institutional setting. Knowing an office’s habits can be useful; knowing the policy is useful too.
His next business was Cauthen Forbes & Williams, where he was a founding partner. The progression brought campaign strategy, White House service, and committee experience into a private advisory practice. Forbes also returned to electoral work as a senior adviser to Barack Obama’s New Hampshire campaign in 2008. His career kept a foot in the world where political support had to be earned.
That movement between campaigns, government, and lobbying invites questions about access and influence. It also explains the service being sold. Former staff members possess knowledge of how institutions operate. Clients pay for help interpreting and navigating those institutions. A biography can describe that exchange without confusing a long list of connections with a list of legislative accomplishments.
A bipartisan idea acquires colleagues
Forbes and Tate launched Forbes Tate in July 2012. They had worked together in the Clinton White House’s legislative affairs office. By December, their new practice had announced a hire that made its bipartisan ambition tangible: Jeff Strunk, deputy floor director to Republican Speaker John Boehner.
Strunk brought experience with House leadership, parliamentary procedure, and floor operations. The firm said he would start in January. For Democratic founders, hiring someone from the Republican speaker’s operation meant bringing another institution’s working knowledge into the room. A bipartisan firm has to make that promise visible somewhere. An employment offer is a good place.
There is a practical distinction between knowing that the other party exists and employing people who understand its decision-making. The latter gives a team colleagues who can question an assumption before it reaches a client. It also provides continuity when control changes. Elections rearrange Washington’s offices; an advisory business has to keep working through the rearrangement.
The firm’s services expanded beyond traditional lobbying into communications, advocacy, research, digital strategy, and coalition building. Forbes’s campaign background fits that development. A policy argument can reach a congressional staff member through a meeting, a local conversation, a news story, or an organized constituency. Each route requires a different kind of work.
The numbers have opinions
After the 2020 election, Forbes looked at Democrats’ narrow congressional margins and anticipated that ambitious ideas would encounter the limits of the vote count. “There will be a lot of action, a lot of advocacy,” he said. Political control creates opportunities, but a small majority can make the search for agreement unusually exacting.
His business was growing during that period. Forbes Tate Partners reported $15.1 million in federal lobbying revenue for 2019 and nearly $20 million for 2020. In the first half of 2021, it reported more than $12.1 million, compared with $9.3 million in the same period a year earlier. These are firm figures, attached to specified reporting periods. They describe demand for lobbying work.
A growing practice, in two comparable years
One part of the demand came from organizations trying to understand proposals affecting spending, taxes, financial technology, and other regulated activity. A congressional debate can change a company’s expectations before it changes the law. Advice becomes valuable while the outcome is still uncertain, when the client needs to decide which developments deserve attention.
Bringing the digital work inside
In November 2022, Forbes Tate Partners acquired Engage, a Washington digital media agency. The two firms had worked together on projects before the acquisition. Forbes described the deal as the next step after a decade in business, emphasizing the existing partnership and the fit between the teams.
The acquisition gives his company-building story a concrete turning point. A capability supplied through collaboration became part of the firm itself. The promise was closer coordination between government relations and the digital work surrounding an advocacy campaign. Whether a message reaches an audience and whether that audience can act on it are closely related questions.
Forbes later said that the parent company, Public Policy Holding Company, had supplied capital for the Engage acquisition and for hiring. That introduces another part of the founder’s job. Expertise must be financed and organized. A larger business needs people who can deliver its expanded services, along with the resources to recruit them.
Another chair at the table
The bipartisan hiring continued. In February 2025, the firm brought in Tori Smith from Senator Marsha Blackburn’s office to strengthen its tariff, trade, tax, and financial technology expertise. Forbes welcomed the knowledge and connections she brought from Congress and the executive branch. It was another specific staffing decision behind the firm’s broader positioning.
Then, in April 2026, Forbes Tate Partners announced a new name and leadership structure. It would become FTP. Robert Mathias would lead as managing partner, Libby Greer would lead government relations, and Michelle Baker would continue to head public affairs. Forbes became founding partner and chairman, with long-term strategy and business development responsibilities and expanded work across PPHC.
The transition changes the scale of his attention. A founder involved in daily operations has immediate decisions to make. A chairman concerned with strategy has to consider the organization those decisions will produce over time. For Forbes, the new assignment follows years of adding colleagues and capabilities to the practice he and Tate began.
“Dan taught me how to lobby.”
Jeffrey Forbes / April 2024
There is also a smaller institution in his story. A student from Denison’s Hilltoppers, the a cappella group Forbes had belonged to, once asked him about summer plans. Forbes replied, “Why don’t you come here?” The invitation helped begin an internship program. A singing-group connection had found a rather different use for the alumni network.
The professor’s introduction and the student’s invitation bookend something recognizable about his career. Help arrived through a relationship; later, he could extend an opening to someone else. Between those moments came campaigns, schedules, committee work, and a company. At the awards dinner, with all that experience behind him, Forbes still gave credit to a colleague for teaching him the craft. It was a fitting acknowledgment from someone whose business depended on finding people worth working with.