Nobody Got Fired - Democratic Consultants
How the Democratic Consultant Class Ran the Party Into a Wall and Billed Them for It
There is a financial structure at the heart of Democratic Party politics that explains almost everything that happened in 2024. I wrote about the mechanical details of it over at Shitpost Dude[1] — same firm, same building, same managing partner, a billion dollars raised, a campaign that still ended in debt. Go read it. I'll wait.
Jeffery Lebowski
Back? Good. Because that piece is about the plumbing. This one is about what it did to the house.
The Dog That Didn't Bark: Biden and the People Paid to Tell Him What He Wanted to Hear
When the history of 2024 gets written the question is going to be a simple one: how did everyone in the room know and nobody in the room say it?
The answer, at least part of it, is that the people in the room had a financial interest in not saying it.
Biden's consultant apparatus — the strategists, the handlers, the media advisers, the people whose retainers and ad buy commissions depended on a Biden candidacy proceeding — were exactly the wrong people to deliver the one message that needed delivering. Every alarm that went off got routed through people whose next invoice depended on the campaign continuing. Their diagnosis, every single time? Messaging problem. Bad press. Unfair coverage. Get him out more.
This is not cynicism about individuals. This is just incentive structures doing what incentive structures do. When your livelihood is attached to a conclusion, you find your way to that conclusion. The debate wasn't a cognitive emergency to these people. It was a communications failure. Run more ads. Which, incidentally, they would also be billing for.
Biden world didn't hang on too long because the people around him were stupid. They hung on too long because the people around him were paid.
The Swap: Same Contracts, Different Candidate
When Biden finally stepped aside the party congratulated itself on an act of courage. And to be fair, getting an incumbent president to stand down is not nothing.
But look at what actually happened. There was no primary. There was no competitive vetting. There was no moment where Democratic voters got to weigh in on who would carry the flag. There was a phone tree, a series of endorsements that cascaded with suspicious coordination, and a coronation. Kamala Harris became the nominee because the people with the power to make her the nominee decided she would be.
And crucially — the consultant class that had been running Biden's operation didn't get disrupted. They got reassigned. The same firms, the same relationships, the same retainers, just pointed at a different principal. GMMB, which had been the central media firm for Biden's 2020 campaign, was in the orbit of the Harris campaign and the super PACs around it. The machine didn't get rebuilt. It got rebooted.
What followed was one of the most expensive messaging campaigns in American political history. Freedom. Joy. Weird.A politics of vibes, assembled by professionals who are, at their core, in the business of vibes. It raised more than a billion dollars. It lost the presidency, the Senate, and the House. And as noted elsewhere, somehow ended in debt.
The swap wasn't a course correction. It was a rebranding. And nobody who built the brand was asked to leave the room.
Why It Was Always Going to Be a Messaging Problem
Here is the thing about consultants. They have one tool. The tool is messaging. So when you ask a consultant what went wrong, the answer is always some version of: we didn't communicate our wins effectively, working people didn't hear our message clearly, we need better framing.
This is not entirely wrong. Framing matters. Communication matters. But there is a diagnosis that sits underneath the messaging diagnosis that consultants are structurally incapable of delivering: maybe the product is the problem.
If the issue is substance — if working people don't believe Democrats because Democrats have actually drifted from working people's interests — then messaging is not the fix. You can't message your way out of a thirty year repositioning toward donor class priorities. Voters are not confused about what they're seeing. They see it clearly. That is the problem.
A $50 million Democratic super PAC announced after the 2024 loss that it would begin by doing extensive research to craft, in its own words, "a credible working class message." Read that sentence again. Research to find a message for working class voters. From a party that used to be the working class party. From a party that once didn't need research to know what to say to a guy on a factory floor because the guy writing the platform was a guy from a factory floor.
They are not asking why working people left. They are asking how to talk to them as if they're strangers. That is a tell. That is the consultant model perfectly expressed.
The Punchline: Nobody Got Fired
Here is where we land.
The firms that managed the Biden messaging through the cognitive decline years are still operating. The firms that built the Harris campaign's billion dollar burn are still under contract. The people who decided a no-primary coronation was a viable path to a general election win are still getting their calls returned.
There is no accountability mechanism. There are no performance clauses. There are no clawbacks. You lose, you write the after-action memo explaining it was a messaging problem, you collect the check, and you start making calls about 2026.
The party would have to do three things it has shown no appetite for. Hire differently. Pay differently — tie compensation to outcomes, not ad volume. And be willing to sit in a room and hear someone say the policies are the problem, not the packaging. That last one is the hardest, because it means the donor relationships need to change too, and the donors are the ones funding the consultants in the first place.
It is a closed loop. And everybody inside it is very comfortable.
The Dude abides. The invoices go out. The working class votes Republican. Sweaty starts drinking too much.
1 - yeah, I am running an experiment to see if it is possible to game the Substack algorithms. So far it is failing, but I will continue for a while. If you want to help boost those subscription numbers there, I would be mighty obliged.
