The Harris campaign raised $1 billion but ended the race in debt. Her loss underscores a bigger party problem.

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.

  • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
    4·
    28 days 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