A North Reading native had his first day in a new role as a senior official in President Biden’s reelection campaign on Monday.
Rob Flaherty, 31, is serving as deputy campaign manager for the Biden-Harris ticket, where he will work with the campaign’s digital, organizing, and paid media teams, a spokesperson said.
Flaherty previously served as digital director for the White House and was the first in that role to attain the title of assistant to the president, the highest designation and same rank as White House press secretary and communications director, the Biden campaign said.
“He’s done a really good job of elevating digital in the eyes of other programmatic needs [and] making sure that digital has a seat at the table in terms of what decision points need to be made,” Clarke Humphrey, former White House COVID digital director, said in an interview Monday.
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Humphrey also has roots in Massachusetts as a native of Dorchester. She worked closely with Flaherty as his deputy when he was digital director for Biden’s 2020 campaign.
“I’m confident that he’ll continue to bring sort of a vision for how digital can integrate across channels on the campaign,” she said.
Flaherty was not available for an interview on Monday, a Biden campaign spokesperson said.
Flaherty graduated from North Reading High School, following in the footsteps of fellow North Reading alum Jon Favreau, who served as former president Barack Obama’s head speechwriter.
“I’m really proud of him, and I’m not super-surprised at all, quite honestly,” said Jon Bernard, who was principal of North Reading High from 2003 to 2014 and then the district’s superintendent from 2014 to 2020.
Bernard said Flaherty has always “had a very broad range of talents and interests” and he made a strong impression even as a teenager.
“He was just a very interesting, good, fun, talented kid,” Bernard said in an interview.
Flaherty was interesting in politics from a young age, and he occasionally exchanged some good-natured ribbing with Bernard over their differing ideological alignments.
When Flaherty came to school wearing an Obama campaign T-shirt, the principal joked with him that he was violating the dress code. When he later asked Bernard for a letter of recommendation, he thanked the principal afterward with a bobblehead doll of former Republican president Ronald Reagan.
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Flaherty went on to Ithaca College, where as a junior he helped in the election of the City of Ithaca’s youngest mayor and first mayor of color.
He worked on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016 as deputy digital communications director. In an alumni profile for Ithaca College’s website, Flaherty said digital strategies must be tuned to the personality and values of the candidate.
“You can’t run an Obama campaign for Hillary Clinton, and you can’t run a Clinton campaign for Joe Biden,” he said in the profile. “We built a program that reflected his values, that brought people together, that showed empathy and didn’t divide people but provided people with hope.”
In the Biden White House, Flaherty has overseen the largest digital team any president has employed. He was among the driving forces behind the White House Digital Partnership team that led efforts to bring in celebrities like Olivia Rodrigo, the Jonas Brothers, the cast of “Ted Lasso,” and TikTok creators to amplify Biden’s message to a wider constituency across digital platforms.
“We built the first ever program to reach out to digital content creators from the White House,” Landon Morgado, former director of digital partnerships at the White House, said in a statement from the Biden campaign. “It was new and unheard of, and Rob was the biggest advocate for our work from the start.”
Flaherty also worked for the Democratic National Committee and on Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign.
Jeremy C. Fox of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Nick Stoico can be reached at nick.stoico@globe.com.