Today there is a wonderfully funny blog about how annoying the, “Send Us Money For The Senate Campaign,” emails have become. These emails are absurd. But they beg a larger question, how is marketing for the DCCC managed? Who decides how they talk to us, how campaigns are managed, and what gets done? It turns that this is handled by a very narrow group of consultants. And they don’t just run the show, they are bad at their jobs and they go after anyone who threatens their turf.
Over the past week or so there has been much angst in the news about why the Democrats did so much worse than people thought they would. Why indeed? Right out of the gate the MSM and Democrats pointed fingers at progressives, Black men, and Hispanic men. Those folks are demographics, voters. When I don’t buy an iPhone, Apple doesn’t look at me and say, “Not reaching our sales objectives is your fault.” They look at their marketers and say, “You blew it.” This is what the Democratic party is doing, they are blaming voters for their losses instead of the folks who build and run their campaigns, you know, the same folks sending you three of four emails a day that say, “Don’t Miss the 700% match!”
Democratic consultants have been underperforming for some time. I first started hearing about their power and control of the party during 2018 when they went after Laura Moser because she didn’t use them to run her campaign. She used her husband’s firm. So, they did opposition research on her and went after her campaign. And while the opposition research failed during the primary, in the end, it cost Moser a shot at the final run.
After this, I began reading up on how the system worked and there is a lot of information out there. This article from 2005 shows you how abysmally these guys have performed, losing race after race after race while protecting their turf. Take the time to read it, you will be appalled. And when you are done ask, why isn’t this covered in the MSM? If you take the time to read this article you will see, these are the same guys who do the polling, you know, the polling that got it wrong in 2016 and 2020. Yeah, those guys.
Even worse, they take the polling information and tell Democratic candidates how to operate, how they should interface with the public. Like telling Kerry not to attack Bush, that worked! And yes, they’d be the guys who put out the milk toast, let’s all play nice, ads that are still the mainstays of what we saw this go-round.
How many folks here loved the Lincoln Project ads? I liked them but had some reservations about whether they were reaching the target audience. If you can, look at the MSM articles about them, some of which I fell prey to; they were all about how they might just be off the target and why they might not be effective. Wanna guess who talked to the MSM and directed that commentary? More importantly, they were the first consultants to take on the standard Democratic consultants and do the whole thing differently. Huzzah to them. Here’s to hoping they take a chunk out of those guys because if there is one thing that is sure, the GOP consultants have been spanking the Democratic consultants for some time. If that is the goal of the LP, a purely mercenary, we can do this better and we are gonna make money at it, approach, well, count me in. My first donation is on the way. Oh, and tell teacherken, I was wrong, sigh.
Now take a look at this article. It lays out the issue from another point of view. How that locked-in set of consultants is keeping minorities and women from participating. Pssst, the majority of our base are minorities and women, I kind of think having them involved might be a good idea. Just guessing.
It is time to stop pointing fingers at the base, the voters, and to start asking why the Democratic party can’t figure this out? And why they have an indecent need to blame us for their losses? To ask the fundamental question, why can’t they run a decent campaign that gets the job done?