The Consultant-Industrial Complex Is Killing What’s Left Of The Democratic Party

News: Real Democrats Don’t Bomb Gaza Or Smear The Left… The Blob Wore Blue

Yesterday, AIPAC whore John Fetterman (PA) ran to Fox to declare how reactionary he’s become: “I’m not a voter in New York City, so I have no dog in that fight. And everything that I’ve read on him, I don’t really agree with virtually any of it, politically. So that’s just where I’m at as a Democrat. So he’s not even a Democrat, honestly.” Who’s not even a Democrat? So far this year, the only voting record among Senate Democrats less Democratic-aligned than Fetterman’s is New Hampshire conservative Maggie Hassan’s.

If anyone’s earned the right to question someone else’s Democratic bona fides, it’s not John Fetterman. In contrast to Zohran Mamdani— an elected DSA assemblymember in New York who’s consistently advanced core Democratic values like housing justice, taxing the ultra-rich, and ending mass incarceration— Fetterman has spent 2024 aligning himself with the priorities of the Republican right. He’s cheered on Netanyahu’s war crimes in Gaza, smeared pro-Palestinian activists, supported GOP immigration crackdowns, opposed a ceasefire resolution backed by most House progressives and gone out of his way to elevate reactionary talking points on Fox News. Mamdani, meanwhile, helped pass New York’s Build Public Renewables Act, fought to fund public transit, and stood up to corporate landlords— actual work to deliver Democratic, though not Fetterman’s, policy goals. If the party is supposed to stand for workers, civil rights, and peace, then Mamdani embodies its future, while Fetterman, wrapped in the rhetoric of “real talk,” is quickly becoming a cautionary tale about its rightward drift.

How did this happen? On Thursday Ben Mathis-Lilley offered on explanation: How Strategist Brain Took Over the Democratic Party. “Democratic politicians— including presidents— come and go,” he wrote. “But the party’s strategists endure, as does the kind of strategy they typically recommend. In the early 1990s, the most celebrated Democratic minds were Bill Clinton–affiliated operatives and pollsters like James Carville, Mark Penn, and Al From— advocates of pragmatic, fiscally moderate economic positions and bold breaks from progressive orthodoxy on cultural issues.” 

Mathis-Lilley claims they remain influential, although not much outside the establishment bubble. The actual Democratic base either never heard of them or despises them as part of the problem. He also added new— and just as hated— strategists to the list: Rahm Emanuel, David Shor and Matt Yglesias— “who are more proficient with new jargon and technology but give essentially the same advice: Follow the polls, talk about middle-class economic concerns, and occasionally make it clear that you’re not one of those liberals by taking a few contrarian, conservative positions on social or cultural issues... Why have Democrats been taking advice from the same small circle of people— who were never chosen by voters, are never accountable to them, and haven’t worked in government in decades, if ever— for more than 30 years? Why don’t these people’s ideas ever seem to change? How might this contribute to the party’s national reputation for irrelevance and ineffectiveness, not to mention the state of the American system of government (i.e., on the verge of collapse)? … The problem is that too many people in the party have forgotten that they’re supposed to do anything else. And while some bright Democratic minds have overcome this handicap in the past by virtue of their own keen instincts, might there be a smarter way to run things?”

In the decades since the Democratic Party got its clock cleaned in the 1984 presidential election, it has gotten really good at one thing: finding candidates who are skilled fundraisers and using the money they raise to carpet-bomb small slices of undecided voters with poll-tested and focus-grouped ads that appeal to their vaguely moderate views on a handful of nationally resonant issues. In the present day, when losing control of the House can mean “There aren’t going to be vaccines or weather forecasts anymore,” this is high-stakes work. The people who carry it out are campaign strategists, and it makes sense they would feel owed a measure of gratitude and prominence.

… [A]lthough the procedural changes that killed off party machines were supposed to put engaged, informed citizens back in charge of their government, that’s not what happened. The decline of party power coincided with the rise of suburbs and television, which contributed to a broader decline in civic participation. Just as bowling leagues and Kiwanis clubs suffered, so too did local party activity: In Pews surveys, the share of Americans who call themselves Democrats has fallen from a high of 51 percent in 1964 to 33 percent today. When Pew started collecting data in 1939, only 18 percent of respondents identified as independents; that number is now 35 percent.

…Democrats, hoping to escape their reputation as “the party of big government,” stopped advocating for New Deal–style big-ticket social programs and embraced so-called submerged state policies— the kinds that are built around little-noticed tax incentives and the outsourcing of government functions to third parties. For elected Democrats, this is a time of both gridlock and caution: There is less actual governing to do than there used to be, and the governing that does get done is less tangible to voters than it once was.

But elections keep happening nevertheless. Sometimes they are largely symbolic competitions between abstract visions of what it means to be American; sometimes they are consequential referendums on whether insurance companies should be able to deny you coverage for brain cancer because you have mild asthma. Feelings about and interest in elections have rarely been higher— and technology has made it possible to conduct public opinion polls, test and target messages, and sort demographic data on a massive scale.

For campaign strategists, in other words, this is a golden age.

“It’s kind of remarkable how much consultants came out of the destruction of parties as a real organizing force in politics,” said Gregory Martin, a professor at Stanford University who studies the role of media and advertising in elections. “And how consultants have substituted for things that parties used to do.” Of the $16 billion spent on political campaigns in 2024, about half a billion went through the party’s national organization.  The lion’s share of political spending, Martin has found, flows from campaigns (or super PACs) through their consultants to media firms that book TV advertising.

“The core work of what a party does— determining what the message is, what does the party stand for, what policies does it pursue, what are the public rationales it offers—all those things have been outsourced,” Martin said. There is still a party machine, of sorts, in that Democratic decisionmaking is disproportionately controlled by a certain group of powerful individuals, like the ones who were accused of putting their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and helping cover up Joe Biden’s decline in 2024. But now those figures are part of a “blob” (that’s another Hollow Parties term) of consultants and fundraisers clustered on the coasts who have neither formal obligations to nor channels of communication with the vast majority of Democratic voters.

Consultants, in other words, have different interests than formal parties do. Their incentive is to find work every two years, then to receive and spend as much money as possible while employed. And they have an incentive to work for the campaigns that are most likely to win, because that helps them get their next job. “We showed that the consultants that are the most high reputation, the ones who command the highest rates and had the best track records, work mostly for safe incumbents,” Martin told me. “Which is the opposite of what you would get if the party was trying to allocate a resource and maximize for its own goals. There’s a lot of very safe incumbents spending a lot of money hiring high-profile, prestigious consultants to run their campaigns. And there’s a lot of uncompetitive races where candidates are running TV ads, which are very expensive and which happen to generate profits for consultants.”

This also means that strategy consulting is the best way to build a stable, well-compensated career in government. “If you want to do well in politics, you can make a lot more money in a consulting firm than working on a campaign or on a staff,” Martin said. (In a recent appearance on Ezra Klein’s NY Times podcast, former Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aide Saikat Chakrabarti described arriving in Congress and being invited to a seminar about how to get policy ideas from lobbyists—the implication being that congressional staffs are too small to do the work themselves.)

But reality encompasses long stretches of time between elections, during which conditions are shaped by factors besides reactions to message tests. Public opinion changes; opposing parties do things; “exogenous shocks” like pandemics and wars and market crashes occur. The party and its blob are finely tuned for outputting effective language about working across the aisle and protecting Social Security. They have proved much less adept at weighing competing short-term and long-term interests while responding to real-world events, protecting the party’s reputation and advancing its overall plan for improving the United States. There is no one left, really, whose job is to do that.

In 2002, as The Hollow Parties recounts, party leaders told Democrats at a “messaging retreat” that polling called for enthusiastic support of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. But as Hillary Clinton learned when her vote to authorize the Iraq war cost her the Democratic nomination in 2008, there is no reason to assume a correlation between a policy that tests well and one that works well. And even in an era of siloed information diets, reality does occasionally leak through to the electorate, even if it sometimes takes longer than one news cycle.

Democrats have long cultivated a penny-wise and pound-foolish relationship with public opinion data. For decades, the party’s presidents have gotten “tough” on the southern border by closing this or that loophole and ordering increased deportations—toughness polls well—without addressing the underlying situation: Roughly 700 immigration judges are somehow supposed to handle literally millions of asylum claims each year while the available legal pathways to citizenship remain narrow and convoluted. The border tends to stay chaotic, an issue for which voters blame Democrats.

In 2009 Democrats who wanted to project moderation and responsibility killed off major parts of Obama’s stimulus bill, which then failed to adequately stimulate the economy, leading (in part) to many of those members’ defeats in the 2010 midterms. (Obama’s advisers also counseled him against bailing out the auto industry— it polled poorly in Michigan— but he did it anyway, and it ended up being considered one of the keys to his 2012 reelection.) The same process repeated itself during Biden’s term, when centrist Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin vetoed the portions of the Build Back Better bill that would have benefited voters with young children and seniors who required in-home health care. The party settled instead for long-term investments in semiconductor manufacturing and green tech; those may be worthy initiatives, but polls showed that voters never ended up hearing about them.

… The strategy guys who work out of fancy offices tend to have staying power, though, no matter how poor their advice on subjects other than campaigns turns out to be. Rahm Emanuel, for instance, ended his tenure as mayor of Chicago with an 18 percent approval rating and is now considering a run for president. 

For this, the blame might extend beyond the world of politics. The U.S. is a country that rewards the clever, scalable, levered shortcut. Private equity, hedge funds, venture capital: For ambitious and high-functioning individuals, making morally disinterested, data-driven strategic decisions is the most obvious path to wealth and status.

It’s not uncommon, either, for those with this vocation to switch back and forth between finance and politics. (Consider how absurd it would seem today if a modern president spent his post–White House life, like Jimmy Carter did, helping build houses for poor families by hand—an intrinsically unscalable activity and a disastrously inefficient deployment of Carter’s human capital.) In addition to Emanuel, a part-time investment banker, a list of the most influential Democrats of the 21st century would also include hedge fund managing partner/economic policy guru Larry Summers and LinkedIn founder, VC investor, and megadonor Reid Hoffman. (Sam Bankman-Fried was on his way too.)

But the shortsightedness of the campaign strategist’s approach to governing parallels the financial industry’s fixation on short-term results—a fixation that often creates long-term problems that end up erasing whatever gains were made in the first place.

In a new book called The Unaccountability Machine, author Dan Davies describes how companies like Wells Fargo and Boeing raised their earnings by, respectively, incentivizing low-level employees to open as many accounts as possible on “behalf” of customers and outsourcing major parts of the manufacturing process. Those decisions led directly to huge scandals and big losses. “It’s really easy for an organization to fool itself, like Wells Fargo, that what it’s doing is really clever, it’s increasing revenue per customer,” said Davies on the Complex Systems podcast to host and tech-world figure Patrick McKenzie, “when what it’s actually doing is building up a huge operational risk liability for itself five or 10 years down the line.” Every individual decision to cut costs is supported by data: This will increase earnings, which will make the stock go up, which is what companies are supposed to do, according to the theory of maximizing shareholder value. But the wrong series of individually justifiable “good” decisions can function as one very big bad decision.

… A number of earnest ideas have been proposed for what Democrats could spend time and money on, besides the usual, to improve their reputation and long-term outlook. Some of those include rebuilding local news, organizing local chapters around service projects or social events, and supporting the growth of labor unions. In Nevada, the late Sen. Harry Reid put time and money into drastically expanding the on-the-ground presence of his state’s Democratic Party organization, creating notable turnout advantages. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has touted “deep canvassing,” which is just a gross way of saying talking to regular people even when there’s not an election coming up. Some political scientists think that’s evidence that it can work to change minds— and the amount of shoe leather that Zohran Mamdani and his volunteers expended seems to have contributed to his surprise victory in the New York City mayoral primary. 

A lot of these ideas are, in a way, the same idea: to raise the likelihood that someone encounters a Democrat in real life, while going about their day-to-day business as a human with friends, neighbors, and a family. As Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy put it in a recent interview with The Atlantic, the party needs to address the “spiritual crisis” of social isolation that has driven Americans toward right-wing politicians and influencers, except without the right-wing stuff.

… Murphy critiques the center of the party from its left. On the flip side, there is moderate Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who recently sat for a long interview with the NY Times about the urgency of creating a new and presumably centrist Democratic “economic vision” in which she didn’t name a single specific idea for what such a vision would actually entail. It’s positioning-induced paralysis— being very clear on how you want to be perceived but not on what you need to do to get there.

As embarrassing as it sounds, to move forward, Democrats may need to look into their own hearts. “As far as shaping where I was from a policy standpoint, I didn’t find looking at polls terribly effective, because at least when I’ve run for public offices, it’s to try to make a difference, and that’s why I was doing it,” Inslee said. “If you don’t want to make a difference, why are you running? Let some other schmuck do it.” He also, for the record, feels that my take is a bit too cynical. “I think people would actually be surprised there’s more decisions made in Congress on what people believe is in the public interest than in venal self-interest,” he told me. “Many of those decisions are wrong. But!”

In the meantime, money continues to flow to consultants and strategists. The Times reported that a number of donors and operatives are putting together projects, some with anticipated budgets in the tens of millions of dollars, to fund and amplify influencers and podcasters— a belated top-down effort to adjust to the ways the national “narrative” is now created. (One of the people quoted in the article works for a super PAC, founded by Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother, that Bankman-Fried allegedly use d to circumvent campaign-finance laws.) On June 3, Politico reported that a well-connected operative named Adam Jentleson will be launching a “messaging hub” called Searchlight, which will advocate for the adoption of “popular positions.” Noted a perceptive anonymous source: “We already have a bunch of entities who do that.”

Ironically, what the party could probably use most is a version of Trump who works for good rather than evil: someone who is attentive to the public mood but has a permanent and easily communicated agenda, who gets people off their butts at the state and local level, and who uses leverage to enforce the advancement of long-term goals even when it is not in the immediate interest of their personal “optics.” (This could also be a group of people, in the strong-party tradition.)

What it might not need is more public opinion data and advice about how to find the sweet spot in the middle of it. If Democrats took a five-year sabbatical from polling and message testing, how much insight would the world really be deprived of? Everyone knows what polls say: Kitchen-table issues are good for Democrats, surges in crime and undocumented immigration are bad for Democrats, gender/race stuff is in the middle depending on what’s in the news, and it is always important to work across the aisle. One thing that seems to be forgotten by the crusading centrists citing current polls to decry the party’s 2018–20 leftward shift on race, immigration, and sexual identity issues, in fact, is that the polls were also shifting leftward at the time. In 2017 only one-fifth of the country believed that gender transitions constituted a “mental illness,” while the majority of Americans said that the country should do more to protect transgender rights and that they would welcome and support a friend who “came out” as trans. Picking a lane and sticking to it is the kind of thing that can prevent exuberant leftist excess too.

Public opinion can be fluid; a party that wants to succeed in the long term— and especially one that bears the burden, in a two-party system, of maintaining a functional country— needs to have priorities besides winning the next election. With these truths in mind, Democrats have a choice. They could put their heads together to make an educated guess about what the country might look like, think like, and need out of its government in 2028, then conduct themselves accordingly for the next three years. Or they could spend several hundred million dollars to find out again that the middle class likes the phrase “lift up the middle class.” Which do you think they’re more likely to choose?

The party’s rot doesn’t begin or end with figures like Fetterman— he’s just one of the more cartoonishly transparent cases. The real blame lies with the calcified ecosystem of consultants, donors and cautious, power-hoarding careerists who treat politics as branding rather than governing. They’ve convinced themselves that the best way to build a durable majority is to triangulate, muzzle their base and cling to outdated assumptions about the political center—  all while handing millions to the same Beltway operatives who lost winnable races, totally misunderstood the electorate and advised Democrats to run away from their own accomplishments. The result? A party that seems more afraid of its own voters than it is of Republicans, more eager to please Morning Joe than organize in Milwaukee. As long as this remains the dominant ethos, the “center” will continue to be defined not by where most people are, but by where the consultant class insists they must be.

The good news is that there’s a growing insurgency within the party— people like Mamdani, AOC, Pramila, Summer Lee, Mark Pocan, Rashida, Greg Casar, and others— who reject this failed model and are trying to build something more democratic, more accountable, and more aligned with the actual FDR values the party claims to uphold. They understand what too many Democrats have forgotten: that movements, not message tests, change the world. That courage, not caution, is what inspires turnout. And that policy rooted in justice can shape public opinion, not just react to it. The longer the party allows risk-averse technocrats and glorified PR men to define its soul, the more voters will tune out, drift away, or look elsewhere for answers. What’s needed now isn’t a better strategy memo— it’s a different kind of politics altogether.