The Consultant Con

Try as Nancy Pelosi might to spin things otherwise, it is hard to deny that the Democrats are out of touch. In the wake of Kamala Harris’s decisive loss to Donald Trump, the reactionary take is that the party has become too beholden to the left: the social progressives that committed the party to an identity politics that has no resonance with the day-to-day life of “ordinary Americans,” as well as the economic progressives too focused on bold structural transformations at the expense of inflation. The more analytical, establishment friendly, perspective is slightly different. They argue that the failure of a red wave to materialize in the 2022 midterms led party strategists to believe that one last heave of the anti-MAGA coalition could see Trump off, once and for all. This mistaken assumption blinded the party to Biden’s deep unpopularity, enabling him to stay in the race until it was effectively too late, dooming Harris before she even accepted the nomination. While these diagnoses differ, they share the base assumption that the party deprioritized its own “electability.”

An obsession with electability is not new; it is the cudgel that the Democrats use for flagellation after every electoral defeat. Electability is derived from an understanding of the voter as a data point for observation rather than a human with complex emotions and beliefs. Through surveys and focus groups, voters are categorized into key demographics that hold specific preferences. If a party is electable, it adopts policy positions and develops messaging in line with its target voters. But, the thinking goes, when a party indulges special interest groups—by which they mean “woke” ones, not AIPAC—over the data, it hobbles its chances at the polls.

The Biden administration thought that it was responding to the data. Adopting the explanation that voters without college education and people living in exurban and rural areas had switched, in droves, to Trump in both 2016 and 2020 because he had translated their lack of economic opportunity into a cultural backlash, Biden sought to refocus the terms of political debate around material questions. Enter: “Bidenomics,” a marked shift from the low-investment, low-growth paradigm that had been the consensus for years. The administration made the technocratic calculation that voters would reward it for policy delivery, so it coupled industrial policy with pro-labor and anti-monopoly administrative appointments in an attempt to reform markets. Even when Democrats failed to pass all of the Build Back Better Plan, the much-watered-down Inflation Reduction Act substantially increased investment and created jobs, particularly for rural communities in swing states.

The problem was that the medium-term time horizon of these projects did little to abate the immediate consequences of the inflationary price shock of 2021–2022. Surveys report an immediate and significant decline in economic confidence, particularly among the groups that could swing the election. The problems, in terms of electability, emerged when this discontent failed to dissipate even when inflation proved to be transitory. But the traditional measure of inflation failed to fully capture the scale of the shock to food and gas prices, which were the second worst on record. And across the board, even after inflation cooled, prices remained higher than before the onset of the pandemic. It is too simplistic to say that Biden ignored this reality; his playbook was to talk about the economy by pointing to the success of his administration in driving a jobs-led recovery while committing to do more, largely through a focus on price gouging. In reality, this was more a rhetorical flourish, largely because it relied on the existing anti-trust administrative approach over more the tangible, directly impactful implementation of price controls through legislating price-gouging laws and a windfall profits tax.

Technical macroeconomic debates are important, as they have significant implications for policymaking, but they should not prevent a political party from offering a meaningful explanation as to why voters feel the way that they do—as well as a plan for doing something about it. The Democrats undoubtedly commissioned hundreds of surveys to capture voter sentiment, and the party responded by pointing to the ways in which the Biden administration had created jobs and increased wages. While such a claim was true, it was not a response that acknowledged the real pain that people were feeling, nor was it a comprehensive program to address the precipitous rise in the cost of living.

When Biden finally bowed out of the race, it was possible to project onto Harris the belief that the party was taking mass frustration seriously. It is plausible that the lack of clarity over who or what Harris represented aided this perception, at least in the short term. But as the campaign unfolded, Harris’s inability to explain how she was different from Biden belied an inauthenticity that could never bridge voters’ demands to be taken seriously, and no celebrity endorsement was going to make up for it. In the space of three months, Trump went from being “weird” to an existential fascistic threat, and the only thing standing in his way was the gun-toting former prosecutor who was unwilling to be interviewed by Joe Rogan. The Harris campaign began with the tagline “We’re Not Going Back,” which needed to be “retooled” in the final month, as she was incessantly flanked by Liz Cheney. While it was brash, deceptive, and indecent, Trump did offer an explanation for people’s experience of frustration and economic stagnation while charting a path forward, however light on details. As Gabriel Winant argued in Dissent, this contrasted with the Democrats’ desire to restore “normalcy,” which was “the fundamental reason the Democrats are often experienced as a force of inhibition rather than empowerment by so many voters.”

As presently constructed, the Democratic Party is ill-equipped to offer much else. That’s because the “party” is little more than a vision-starved blob made up of candidates, nonprofits, billionaire donors, and super PACS—all connected by data-addled consultants. Look at the Harris campaign, which was in effect directed by the super PAC Future Forward. According to the New York Times, Future Forward was founded by “a close-knit network of PhDs who have ascended in the party by displaying encyclopedic knowledge of randomized-controlled trials and political science literature more than working the Washington cocktail circuit,” and it raised over $950 million through the efforts of tech billionaires Denis Muskovitz, Reid Hoffman, and Eric Schmidt. Obama campaign alumni praised the group as “the most analytics and evidence-driven PAC”: in 2024 alone, it individually surveyed over ten million voters to road test thousands of messages and television and social media advertisements to ensure that the Democrats’ messages resonated with target electoral groups.

Future Forward provided a real test for the popularism thesis advocated by David Shor and Matthew Yglesias. It is the latest brainwave in data-driven political strategy that essentially boils down to only talking about what is popular, as determined by polling, and ignoring everything else. As Shor told Ezra Klein in 2022, “Traditional diversity and inclusion is super important, but polling is one of the only tools we have to step outside of ourselves and see what the median voter actually thinks.” The firm where Shor serves as the head of data science, Blue Rose Research, was, incidentally, “incubated” by Future Forward.

To supplement the work of Future Forward, the Democrats also had a well-funded get-out-the-vote operation. Across the swing states, the Harris campaign hired over 2,500 staff to work in 353 offices. These staffers compelled enthusiastic supporters to volunteer their time, door knock, and phone bank hundreds of thousands of voters to convince them to undertake their sacred civic duty. Their work was aligned with nonprofits like Focus for Democracy, who funnel donations to voter turnout programs. Focus for Democracy identifies races that it determines are “critical to protecting our democracy” and directs funding to programs that have employed randomized controlled trials to ensure that a specific intervention, like direct mail, is measurably effective in nudging people to vote.

But over a billion dollars, and all the rigor in the world, could not buy the Democrats a compelling narrative. As Adam Tooze argues in the London Review of Books,

An excessively data-driven analysis can itself be profoundly misleading. The fact that 32 per cent of voters identified the economy as their number one issue in this election, and of that group 80 per cent voted Trump, should be taken for precisely what it is, a close association. The question of causation remains open. People have real economic problems, but we should not underestimate voters. If in this election you chose to say that the economy was your top concern, you were first and foremost rejecting the rhetoric of democratic emergency that dominated the Harris campaign. If this election was for you about bread and butter issues, you were not enrolling in the resistance.

If internal polling says that the only popular message that Democrats have is “saving democracy,” it does not follow that they should not talk about cost-of-living pressures. Progressive reform is so obviously obstructed by its own political institutions, to the point that distrust of Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court is at unprecedented highs. Why would voters be compelled by a campaign oriented around the uncritical defense of institutions that regularly fail them?

Leaked memos reveal that Future Forward was frustrated by the Harris campaign’s decision not to air highly rated ads talking about the economy. But this does not offer the absolution Future Forward may seek. Talking only about what’s popular ultimately compounds the party’s disconnect with working-class Americans. The crux of the problem is that the Democrats use data to reflect the mirage of public opinion. The American public is cognizant that it is being treated with disdain when, without offering a cogent explanation, the Democrats shift messaging and develop policies in response to the vaunted “median voter.” Of course, these shifts tend to occur on policy issues that don’t run counter to the party’s donors. So if public opinion opposes sending weapons to Gaza, or supports worker representation on corporate boards, it tends to be ignored. The lack of consistency only suggests that the party is not saying what it really thinks, and meekly chasing the latest poll does little to generate confidence that the Democrats actually understand or care why the working class is fleeing to the Republican Party in droves.

Developing a platform that can convince a disenchanted public that you can solve their problems is not without its challenges. It is contingent on the possession of a core ideology around which policies and messages can cohere. It also requires tools that can convince people that these are not only smart ideas but will make tangible improvements in their day-to-day lives. This requires bottom-up party building, connecting to local civic life to generate meaningful involvement for ordinary people inside the party. As Osita Nwanevu argues, “If we want to protect democratic values, we’ll have to convince the American people that democracy can work. And first, we’ll have to convince ourselves—to either rediscover our first principles about why democracy matters to begin with or develop some.”

A campaign framed around democracy should have argued that democratic institutions need to change so that they can allow “ordinary Americans” to exercise a degree of control over the social and economic conditions that shape working-class life. To make such a case, the Democrats would have to consistently demonstrate that they believe that working-class people deserve such agency, that they possess valuable wisdom that the party itself could learn from. Given their fetish for data-driven analytics, and Barack Obama’s paternal lecturing of Black men and Muslim voters, there is vanishingly little evidence that this is how the Democrats think about the electorate. Instead, pollsters and consultants perceive voters as a passive audience in need of the right messaging. Any debate over ideas is inevitably dismissed with the retort that it’s actually weird to talk this much about politics because most people don’t care all that much. Well, sure, if “politics” is breaking down the electorate into different groups to identify which minorities you can just assume will support you and which ones you have to experimentally prod to determine which messages move the needle by a point or two.

Constructing an ideology is hard, but it is, quite specifically, the purpose of a political party. The Democrats, however, are a business masquerading as a party. They long ago eschewed organizing through mass-member organizations, where grassroots mobilization facilitated exchange and connection between elected representatives and the party on the ground. Today, the only time a politician might talk to an activist is for a PR opportunity. There are no members to hold party officials accountable. Candidates, super PACs, nonprofits, party committees, and donors are the essential elements, and they contract—at great expense—consultants to conduct surveys, produce advertisements, send out direct mail, and turn out voters.

Consultants are the lifeblood of the party, and they prefer to be paid as a percentage of campaign expenditure, so the more that a campaign spends, the more they earn. Harris’s campaign featured a drone show before a Steelers game in Pennsylvania, advertising on the Sphere in Nevada, a Bon Jovi concert in North Carolina—and Oprah for everyone! One campaign ally reported that “we had so much money it was hard to get it out the door.” It doesn’t matter that none of this worked in the end because an election defeat, while painful, provides more data to identify where the party failed, enabling the refinement of the messaging. Defeat may have repercussions for individual consultants, but like a game of whack-a-mole, there is always another one at the ready with a Monday.com board and “actionable goals.”

The Bernie Sanders campaign, particularly in 2016, was a breath of fresh air in this system. In contrast to Hillary Clinton, Bernie genuinely cared, and in his eschewal of corporate donors, he put his money where his mouth was. This should not be mistaken for a lack of innovation. Bernie’s campaign was one of the first to work out how to use the internet to target and speak to individual voters. In turn, his campaign spawned a whole new generation of polling and strategy firms, who claim that they have a more authentic blend of herbs and spices to target and turn out voters. By coming into contact with the party apparatus, this attempt at transformation ultimately dissipated; some of its offshoots, like Data for Progress, came to emulate what they sought to counter, while actually promising efforts, like Our Revolution and Justice Democrats, withered.

In an ideal world, the Democrats would transform their organizational structure from the grassroots up. Instead of spending all that donor money on a Beyoncé appearance in the blood-red state of Texas, or entertaining for another second Jon Fetterman’s Carhartt cosplay, they would invest in long-term civic infrastructure, shifting decision-making power from the consultants to the public. Such a transformation could not be measured by a randomized control trial. So why would the DNC-contracted consultant put themselves out of work by advising such a shift in strategy?

None of this is to say that the Democrats can’t perform introspection—they’re certainly eager to do that. Indeed, the DNC’s finance chair has vowed to “push for an introspective study and analysis of the [Harris] campaign, its structure, its messaging, all communication platforms and budgeting.” Elsewhere, a common line of criticism is that Biden’s refusal to withdraw earlier prevented the Democrats from engaging in a real selection process. Like in 2016, the party establishment cleared the field of challengers. If this process had been more competitive, Harris or whoever the party ultimately chose would have been stress-tested by the voter base that would be decisive in the general election. So, the logic goes, in 2028, they must have a genuine primary contest.

But the idea that the primary in 2020 was a genuine contest is a pretense. When it appeared that the plethora of establishment candidates would steal votes from each other and enable Bernie Sanders to secure the nomination, Obama engineered a mass withdrawal to ensure the party coalesced around Biden. The party will not hold a contest that it can’t control.

More to the point, if Harris could not develop an appreciation and an explanation for the working classes’ suffering in four months, what would an extra three have done? If another candidate, say Josh Shapiro or Gavin Newsom, had prevailed instead, do we really think that their campaign would have been fundamentally different? According to Politico, Newsom is an early frontrunner for the 2028 nomination because he has a “full-time political operation that includes Harris’s lead 2024 pollster and several of her current and former advisers; raised $151 million for himself and others since 2020; has a combined small-donor list that includes nearly 30 million emails and phone numbers and is close to some of the country’s biggest donors.” So probably not, then.