This is the full report — lincolnproject.us/…
There is a lot in that report — a lot. The below is what interested me the most —
The marketing results appear between pages 7 and 9. In the end they were the number four marketers of the year — just behind McDonalds and Lowes and Tiktok. Their reach was very impressive. Much greater than I thought. Think they may have tipped 42,918 votes we needed — really?
Between pages 10 and 13 they lay out case studies of certain ads. The average ad was 30K production costs. It lays out time to produce (sometimes 3 hours) and their analysis on the effect. They ran 300 of them. Seems like some of their better ones were actually cheaper.
Go to pages 29 and 30 — that is their finances. On page 29 it is for all costs, but on page 30 it breaks out costs related solely for the two main firms controlled by 2 members within the totals. These are not disputable — they were reviewed by outside counsel and an outside compliance firm. No bullshit from people that could not possibly have known the internals — this is the real deal. 81 percent of that is costs of money raising, advertising, production costs (mostly advertising). And I am not counting live streaming, townhalls, and support they paid to help other PACs (Meidas Touch was one of them) and a myriad of overhead costs, legal, compliance etc…. All laid out for everyone. Take a look.
Now — about those two firms above — Summit and Tusk — they were indeed paid 49.7 million dollars — but guess what — almost all the advertising and production costs — they paid! 7 million of the 9 million production costs they paid —37 million of the advertising costs — were paid by them. And it goes on like that. The principals — how much were they paid? — they AND their staff got all together 7 million total — all of the principals and all their staff combined. That’s it.
This is not subject to speculation any more — this is what happened for real. It was independently checked — twice — by actual professionals. Not news paper opinion.
They raised actually 91 million dollars and spent 89 million (thru the Georgia run-offs.)
Interesting to me at least — they had killer internal controls as they went. I did not know — but every disbursement they made had to be approved by two compliance officers before they ever got approved.
I really think this cut I took from their report is right on — and Machiavelli would be proud:
“We treated Trump like any other bar room bully: the best way to win is walk up and hit him in the face. From years of experience on Republican campaigns, we all knew that Democrats were good when it comes to pushing issues like health care but less skilled at the brutal art of pinpointing and exploiting their opponent’s weaknesses. If Biden’s brand was going to be decency, someone had to be willing to drop the hammer.”
The Lincoln Project waged asymmetrical political warfare. We were the smaller force that made the larger force engage us. In doing so, The Lincoln Project changed the race and greatly contributed to Trump’s defeat. We planted a logic bomb inside Donald Trump’s head and waited for it to go off. We knew our target. We were Republican consultants who had worked on the biggest races of the last decades. We had studied Donald Trump, diving deep into that sewer of insecurity, vanity ,fear, greed and ignorance. He had strengths – an animal instinct for weakness in others, a ruthlessness unencumbered by social norms of decency. But we were convinced he had fatal weaknesses that could be exploited for his own self-destruction. On Tuesday, May 5th, in the middle of the night, the bomb went off….Inside the “losers project,” we knew that we had set in motion a process of disruption that could be exploited to greatly weaken the Trump campaign. We knew how to get inside Trump’s head and once we moved in, we never left...”
Like them or hate them — these financials are reality.
It still leaves the question — how in the hell did they get a pervert founder exactly. This is still to be determined. And I sure want to know, too.