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"Everyone is taking their skim": How Democratic consultants cashed in on Harris' losing campaign (www.salon.com)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by IndustryStandard@lemmy.world to c/politics@lemmy.world

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In the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat, recriminations have flourished inside the Democratic Party with different factions blaming different policies or groups to explain the loss. Critics, however, describe a deeper structural problem with how the modern Democratic Party runs campaigns, which lines the pockets of party insiders, bloats campaign budgets and boxes out influences from outside party elites.

The Harris campaign broke campaign finance records, raising nearly a billion dollars, but ending the race $20 million in debt, spending millions on consultants and hundreds of millions of dollars on paid media.

According to Shakir, Democratic strategists often see cutting a new 30-second ad as a sort of cure-all to a campaign’s problems and a way for campaigns to address a weakness without re-evaluating the message or stances they’ve taken. “There’s no room you walk into in which saying we should run an ad sounds like bad advice," he said. “The bigger problem to me is when there is a flaw or problem in the campaign it often wrongly becomes understood that there is a 30-second ad that can cure it. If we have a problem with Latino men, or young people or working-class people in Pennsylvania, how about another 30-second ad for that?”

According to Shakir, it doesn’t have to work this way but media firms and campaigns often push for more expensive production strategies like more shoots, or oversaturating airwaves, because it’s an opportunity for everyone to get paid. In some cases, Shakir said, even senior campaign staff will get a cut of ad spending.

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[-] simplejack@lemmy.world 32 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

If you looked at the districts / states where the has a big ground and ad game, those places performed a percent or two better than the places they didn’t campaign in.

The ground game worked, but the broader national message and messaging strategy didn’t work as well as the republican’s. In places where there was no aggressive campaign spend from the GOP or DNC, the Dems often underperformed by an extra percent or two.

Maybe it’s the new media landscape that the GOP is so good at controlling, or maybe the Dems core message wasn’t strong enough, or maybe it was because Harris had to do what Trump had been campaigning on for 4 years, or maybe people are hurting and think the grass will be greener. People will probably debate this shit for decades.

But, IMHO, the media and ground game did quantifiably move the numbers in Harris’ favor. But she was down by 3% or 4% and only clawed back 1 or 2 with media.

[-] Bacano@lemmy.world 22 points 2 days ago

"Reviewing the ad spending from the Harris campaign, it’s clear that the bulk of the money was funneled through firms run or owned by Democratic Party insiders."

Bruh. Rn the comments are about how the DP can better leverage ad spending and I'm thinking to myself these first few commenters have to be bots with the express instructions to avoid talking about corruption within the party.

This article is about corruption. Our government is corrupt.

Fuck outta here with this media landscape shit

[-] UsernameHere@lemmings.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Are you saying money from firms owned by democrats is a sign of corruption? Do you expect the money to come from republican firms? Who else would it come from than firms owned by democrats?

Russia needed Trump to win to survive the invasion they started. China wanted Trump to win to weaken the US for their invasion of Taiwan.

Billionaires were literally buying votes to help Trump because they didn’t want Harris/Democrats to tax them.

Democrats had to spend a lot just to counter all support Trump had that wasn’t on the books.

[-] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Young people aren't watching CNN and MSNBC.

Hell, even millennials aren't watching them.

Harris threw in her lot with a dying media format while not hitting the YouTube/podcast circuit hard.

I'm not saying she needed to go on Rogan, fuck Rogan. I'm saying the numbers bear out that not that many people are watching traditional media outlets in traditional ways.

https://www.nbcuniversal.com/article/msnbc-tops-cnn-presidential-election-night-first-time-network-history

Here's an article crowing about 6 million viewers on election night. How do you think MSNBC fares on a non-election night? It's a joke.

The same article admits that the MSNBC live YouTube channel of their election coverage had about 30 million viewers, which is, let's just say quite a few more, and yet those numbers still pale in comparison to massive YouTube channels like MrBeast (slight retch) which clocks in at 330 million subscriptions.

The reality is that the YouTube and podcast sphere of influence absolutely fucking dwarfs traditional cable television networks and over-the-air networks.

And despite that, even if she had hit the YouTube and podcast circuit, I'm not sure how much it would have moved the needle because I think the real issue is that Republicans succeeded with No Child Left Behind actually gutting our education system. I don't think talking policy works with people who read and speak at less than a sixth grade reading level, which at this point is a significant portion of the country. Trump spoke in word salad, but he never used big words that made them feel dumb. In fact, I'd wager the arguments that came from the right that Kamala spoke in a word salad are entirely related to the fact that they didn't understand half the words she said, so to them, that's a "word salad" of words they don't understand.

[-] simplejack@lemmy.world 16 points 2 days ago

IMHO, it’s probably a combo of stuff. She also went up against a guy that is a master at making himself the center of attention for bat shit crazy stuff, then claiming the press is overreacting to what he said.

Harris was able to control the spotlight for the first couple weeks of her campaign. But after the novelty of her unorthodox campaign died down, and the debate memes were behind her, she didn’t really have any keys to jiggle in front of Americans. American’s turned their focus back to the clown, and Harris kind of went back to the old Biden campaign strategy.

[-] CitizenKong@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

Having the richest man in the world and his propaganda network and Russian cyber warfare trolls in your pocket probably helped as well.

[-] gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I think the way more important thing (if only because we can do something about it) are all the rich idiots ostensibly on our side getting out of pocket

Tobias described a dynamic where campaign staff and candidates are hesitant to publicly push back on the assertions of billionaire donors like Hoffman, even if the campaign doesn't intend to let them direct policy.

Tobias indicated that the apparent influence of the super-wealthy has a dual effect. It undermines the Democratic Party’s support from its traditional base by steering policy discussions away from economically populist ideas that go against the interest of the wealthy, while simultaneously helping support candidates who are charismatic but don’t come into politics with a consistent ideological framework.

The influence of billionaires was directly early in Harris’ bid for the presidency when moguls like Mark Cuban warned the Harris campaign that a billionaire tax, for example, would be too aggressive, according to the Washington Post. Other business executives, like Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber and Harris’ brother-in-law, also served as advisors and, according to the Atlantic, helped steer the campaign away from criticism of corporate power.

Like Musk and Putin are shitheads who are going to do shithead things until we force them to stop, but at least our ostensible allies could stop screwing us over in the meantime

e; Just now noticing that I forgot which thread I was commenting in and I just relinked the OP, which was a silly thing to spend effort on, but spending the effort to delete it at this point also seems silly

this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2024

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