The GOP Changes Candidates and Changes Strategies, But One Part of Its Failing Formula Never Changes: The Political Consultant Class That Profits Off Endless Losses

Loading

by Ace

Victoria Marshall at The Federalist.
 
I’ll say this about the Democrats: They would never put up with a cadre of failures like this.

For years, millions of dollars in grassroots donations have gone to prop up GOP candidates, only to end up in the pockets of the political consultant class. Back during the 2012 presidential election, 10 of the consulting firms behind the effort to get Mitt Romney to the White House grossed a combined $1 billion in the process. In the 2014 election cycle, the same consultants reaped more than $19.6 billion.”Big money campaign consultants on the GOP side are in the business of losing,” former Kansas Congressman Tim Huelskamp told The Federalist. “Investing in the ground game makes campaign consultants almost no money — arguably it costs them money. On the other hand, hundreds of millions of ads put 10-15 percent of that total in hand of the media buyers/consultants — and upwards of 30-50 percent of campaign mailers typically are profit.”
 
In the 2020 election cycle, for example, four Republican House candidates in dead-end campaigns raised over $42 million combined but drew less than 30 percent of the vote in each of their races. A lot of that money went to pay consultants.
 
…”When the incentive is on the money-making, it’s time for Republicans to reexamine this consultant class establishment that’s been running Republican Party politics,” Huelskamp said.
 
Axiom, one of the top GOP consulting firms, grossed nearly $50 million this past federal election cycle — despite having a success rate of only 55 percent in both the primaries and the general — per the FEC.
 
In just one example, in Arizona’s Republican primary for U.S. Senate, Blake Masters defeated Jim Lamon by a resounding 12 points — after Lamon spent $13,829,274 on Axiom.
 
On the local level, Republican Lauren Davis ran for county judge in Dallas County, Texas. After spending more than $1 million — roughly $600,000 of which went to Axiom — she lost by 25 points.
 
Such bleak numbers are simply ignored by the political consulting class, which functions as a revolving door between congressional staff, GOP leadership PACs, and media consultants. Any Republican seeking higher office is immediately told which consulting firms and strategists he should hire within the GOP’s insider network.

My dear departed friend Michael Flynn told me about this scam. If you run for office, you have to use the GOP insider network. You’re forced to. Coerced to.
 
Because if you don’t, the GOP insiders will tell other insiders to tell their donors not to donate to you and other vendors not to provide services to you. They’ll starve you for money and make sure you lose — unless you hire one of the incompetents from this guild, which ruthlessly enforces its right to do all political work for all GOP candidates.
 
And of course they all do this to make sure they all protect each other’s phony-baloney jobs.
 
They make sure no one can enter this field, except through the guild system, which involves first being a useless office-worker hack in the GOP party structure. After you do your time as a useless GOP functionary, you get out and go into the field to make your real money as a consultant.

Read more
 

5 1 vote
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
1 Comment
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Good ads can be very effective (especially radio commercials), but first you need someone who knows how to write killer copy. And by that, I mean copy that would make liberal “Democrats” cringe — copy that ruthlessly exposers them for the traitorous, country-killing Marxist Socialists they are. But most of the consultants are puff balls themselves. They lack the killer instinct, and they don’t mind pouring money down the drain on ads that don’t work (so long as they get their cut), mainly because they are liberals themselves. Liberals are incapable of writing ruthless, Democrat-killing copy — copy that the average Joe and Jane can relate to. But, if the candidate himself is a disgusting, despicable RINO, then no amount of money spent on ads will clinch the election for him. People who are naturally conservative can smell a phony bologna RINO a mile away.