Nobody Marks It Zero, Man (consultants)
The consultant class loses, cashes out, and shows up Monday to do it again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This is part II of Infrastructure Week. The Dude woke up too damned early, and cranked out almost 4K words, so three posts in one day. He’s sorry to hammer your inbox, but he didn’t want to waste this quick series.
You can read Part I
You want to understand why Democrats keep losing? Not the big structural stuff — the gerrymandering, the Senate math, the Electoral College cartography drawn by men who owned other men. That’s real and we can get into it. But right now I want to talk about something smaller and in some ways more infuriating.
I want to talk about what happens in the parking lot after the loss.
Not much, man. That’s what happens. The consultants get in their cars and drive home and their phones start buzzing with the next gig before they hit the highway. Nobody marks it zero. Nobody gets thrown out of the league. The game continues, same players, different cycle, same result, different invoice.
You lose a bowling match, you lose. That’s the rule. Ask Walter. Walter has opinions about rules. But in Democratic consulting, apparently that’s not how it works.
The Skim
Here’s the thing about campaign consultants that most people don’t know, because most people, reasonably, have better things to think about. A lot of them get paid as a percentage of what gets spent. Run a TV ad, clip a commission. Buy another TV ad, clip another commission. The incentive isn’t to win. The incentive is to spend.
Kamala Harris spent over a billion dollars. Trump spent around $425 million. Harris outspent him by $455 million and lost. The consultants who advised her to spend that money are doing fine.
One million dollars went to Oprah’s production company. $575,000 went to wrap the Las Vegas Sphere — the giant golf ball — in a 90-second ad. The people who approved these decisions billed for them. There is a word for this and it’s not “strategy.”
Salon got a source to say the quiet part out loud. The people running campaigns are incentivized to make “small ‘c’ conservative” decisions, because even though their stated goal is to win, they also have to be able to explain their decisions after a loss. The calculation comes down to the fact that “they’re worried about their jobs and their future jobs.”
Their future jobs, man. They’re protecting their future jobs while running your current campaign.
The Carousel
Here’s how the carousel works, and it is beautiful in a nauseating way. You get a job on a campaign. The campaign loses. You get a cable news contract to explain why the campaign lost. You use that platform to establish yourself as an authority. You get hired for the next campaign. That campaign loses. You get a Substack. The Substack gets you speaking fees. You use those to fund a consulting retainer. You get hired for the next campaign.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, you become a DNC contractor. The DNC contracts, it turns out, renew automatically after each two-year cycle as a matter of course. Some consultants have been on the DNC payroll since before your kids were born.
Let’s name some names, man, because “the consultant class” is an abstraction and abstractions let people off the hook. David Axelrod ran Obama’s campaigns, went to MSNBC, then CNN. David Plouffe ran Obama’s 2008 operation, went to Bloomberg, then Uber, then the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. Robert Gibbs went to MSNBC. Jim Messina — this one’s my personal favorite — went off to consult for the British Conservative Party between American gigs. The British Conservative Party, man. He helped the Tories win. Then he came home. And Democrats kept fucking hiring him.
One New York state senator described the type perfectly. These are, he said, mercenaries who earn lucrative contracts by “drifting from campaign to campaign, administration to administration, cable contract to cable contract” — even when the party loses.
Especially when the party loses, if we’re being honest. Losing generates more cable hits than winning.
The Revolving Door Spins Both Ways
The media side of this is its own thing. Jen Psaki went from CNN contributor to Biden press secretary and back to MSNBC. Symone Sanders went from CNN to Biden’s team. Karine Jean-Pierre came from MSNBC. The Biden communications operation was, at points, basically an MSNBC alumni mixer with a podium.
This should make everyone uncomfortable, and it does, but only the people who are comfortable making it make anyone uncomfortable, which are mostly Fox News commentators, which means the actual critique gets contaminated by the source. So the revolving door keeps spinning.
What it means practically — and this is the part that matters — is that the people analyzing Democratic strategy on TV and the people setting Democratic strategy are largely the same people, operating in the same social world, attending the same events, protecting the same relationships, and absolutely not going to say anything on air that makes future employment difficult.
Maude would call this a conflict of interest with extra steps. She’d be right. She’s usually right. It’s annoying but there it is.
The Autopsy That Autopsied Itself
After 2024, the DNC commissioned a report1. An after-action document. They were going to figure out what went wrong. Very serious. Very thorough. Many consultants were involved. All the top men…
The new DNC chair, Ken Martin, received the report, read it, and released a statement. The statement said: “I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards. I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it.”
He released it anyway, because not releasing it would have created more speculation than releasing it.2
That’s where we are, man. The post-mortem has a cause of death that even the coroner won’t sign off on.
I’m Trying to Abide Here
I want to be fair. Some of these people are smart. Some of them have genuine expertise. The analysis on why they keep getting hired despite losing isn’t that they’re stupid. It’s that the system that hires them isn’t designed to reward winning — it’s designed to reward familiarity, credibility within the donor world, and the ability to explain a loss coherently on television afterward.
“Politics and political campaigns are the last true bastion of the good old boy system,” one Democratic strategist said — not as a criticism but as a description of reality. The folks who get hired are the same groups who have the experience and who work on all the races. There’s no entry point for the outside firm, the unconventional approach, the person who doesn’t already have a cable contract.
Walter, at this point in the conversation, would be pulling a firearm out of his bag and threatening someone. Which is not productive and also against the rules. Walter’s relationship with rules is complicated.
But I’m not Walter. I’m sitting here at the end of the lane with a White Russian, watching the same people throw the same ball into the same gutter, collect their checks, and explain on TV why the pins were probably rigged.
The Dude is trying to abide. The Dude is finding it difficult.
The aggression of spectacular, consequence-free failure — sustained over two decades, lubricated by cable contracts and Substack subscriptions and automatic DNC retainer renewals — this aggression will not stand, man.
It’s still standing, though.
Next time: The Twitter-to-Substack pipeline — same fumes, nicer furniture.
The Dude drinks White Russians in Reseda. The consultants drink something more expensive somewhere closer to the water.
Probably worth noting that it was going to be leaked so Mr. Martin was doing forward looking damage control. What a fuckin’ weasel.
"Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide."
But where does this leave the humble voter?
I dislike Ken Martin and what he stands for, but apparently he at least funnelled most of this cycle's funds to mostnof the state parties. Hopefully, that will have some value.
2028? Maybe AOC and Stephen Colbert will duke it out.