Campaign Consultants are the Gravediggers of Democracy

We publish pseudonymously at Milwaukee Beagle for a reason: our contributors are actual people, with actual lives, who could very realistically be targeted and harmed by the bad political actors we write about. We have already been singled out by powerful people in the Wisconsin Democratic Party –so this isn’t paranoid, it’s practical.

Hopefully the following is enough info about me to lend what I’m saying some credibility: I’ve spent the past nine months or so at the ground level of electoral politics in the Milwaukee area –despite being an anti-authoritarian, abolitionist socialist who knows the electoral system is almost entirely broken and absurd at every level. Why? Simply, I’d rather get paid to talk to strangers and have difficult conversations than sit in a sterile office, slowly losing my mind. I don’t mind getting yelled at by a rabid conservative if there’s some chance of planting a seed of doubt, even a very small chance. It’s not fun, but it’s rewarding, on some level.

In practice, this means I’ve spent a lot of time talking to voters, hundreds of them, probably more than 99.9% of those reading this. I talked to liberal boomers in early July despairing over Biden’s age and seeming mental deterioration, and very similar-seeming folks in late July with newfound optimism for VP Harris’ chances, giddy that we were finally pointing out that reactionaries/Republicans are deeply weird. I talked to highly recommended, reliable volunteers who refused to do work for Harris because of her cowardice on Palestinian genocide. I talked to literally wide-eyed MAGA types obsessed with the non-existent threat of trans kids, well-taught enough to frame that as “parental choice.”

I don’t pretend to draw any “objective” conclusions or wisdom from these individual conversations, including those I had with candidates, campaign staffers, or other volunteers. Except for this: consultants and higher level staffers in the Democratic Party are disastrously out-of-touch with the party’s base and have practically handed the country to Donald Trump, Robin Vos, etc on a platter. They did not ask what I was learning from volunteers and voters at any point in the campaign, and their advice was seemingly almost entirely disconnected from what I learned. 

In my experience –on the ground and from what I’ve learned from past elections: the blob of staffers and campaign consultants who develop messaging, campaign strategy, and other campaign facets for Democratic candidates are largely either overtly hostile to the Dems’ base or are wholly ignorant of what people in it actually want. This is largely because there are few permanent structures or institutions that require them to regularly, directly interact with individuals in that base. Contrast this with Republicans’ contemporary sources of political power: forums like right wing churches and fascist podcasts that are enthusiastically participated in all the time. These same places are practically scoffed at, when thought of at all, by the same people building Dems’ “ground game” during election season. 

My suspicion is that these types would rather lose on “saving democracy” than win on, say, raising the minimum wage. That’s because the former is extremely relevant to someone getting paid six figures to consult for a U.S. Senate campaign –and who wants to continue working on elections, even if they lose them– but the latter isn’t. It really might be that simple.

But it’s probably also ideological hostility to progressive, populist politics. I’m going to return to anecdotes here, but I think they’re useful. Pretty much every paid staffer I spoke to during the campaign understood that the Biden admin’s enabling of genocide is/was horrifying on some level, but several of them still expressed condescension/contempt towards potential volunteers who refused to chip in because of that ongoing enabling of genocide. There was, at least once, open fear that a known Palestine solidarity activist would show up to a canvass launch because of… well, it’s unclear. The issue was treated both as a distraction and as a threat, somehow simultaneously. It rarely came up on doors, but I could see the discomfort in Muslim people’s eyes when my literature featured Harris’s face –so I stopped carrying that lit, when I could get away with it. Maybe I’m assuming too much here, but I don’t think so.

It’s hard to pull evidence on some of these issues from statewide results in Wisconsin because things like abortion, the minimum wage, and expanding Medicaid weren’t on the ballot here. But where they were, the progressive option won even in states that Trump handily carried. Immigration/xenophobia was on the ballot here –in the form of a constitutional amendment prohibiting noncitizens from voting– but it was barely talked about during our trainings, and generally only came up at the tail end of conversations with voters. There was no obvious specific campaign to defeat the measure, unlike the two constitutional amendments on the primary ballot that would have limited Governor Evers’ ability to spend federal funding.

And 70.5% of Wisconsin voters approved it, surely including many, many Democrats.

Did turnout for the anti-immigrant amendment help Trump, Hovde, etc? Did Dem campaigns, including Harris’, avoid it? If so, why? This is basically a block box of a question, since if these questions were asked during the campaign, or are being asked now by the people who helped run failed campaigns, that’s entirely obscured to most of us.

I don’t want to weaponize the issue of trans people’s identity, their validity, or the question of their access to medical treatment. But I do think the Party’s abandonment of them is clearly illustrative of both the Democratic Party’s ineptitude and its lack of moral character. Polling didn’t show that gender identity or genocide were among people’s “top issues,” so neither were seemingly worth risking the election for the sake of principle, and neither promised to peel off the moderate Republicans (who seemingly ended up voting for Trump, or not at all.) “Saving democracy” was relatively popular, polling-wise, and so seemed a relatively safe thing to obsess over. But it means almost nothing to most of us, in practice, when we very obviously don’t live in a democracy. Those in power are clearly indifferent to or hostile to progressive populism even on an issue-by-issue basis, and most of us are living paycheck to paycheck. 

In practice, “saving democracy” was just a craven shorthand for “voting for Kamala Harris,” carrying with it zero promise of material improvements to people’s lives. And no promise of any specific reform or policy that’s actually “democratic.”

Re: our trans friends and neighbors, I’m certain Dem staffers and core volunteers mostly assumed that since anti-trans messaging largely failed in the 2022 midterms, it would fail again in 2024. There was no sense of urgency, or concern, and it wasn’t clear to me that any of these people (whom I mostly like, personally) actually know many trans people, or have any particular concern for their wellbeing. In any case, fear of another Trump Presidency outweighed any specific policy concerns, and the messaging response was almost always to change the subject or promise, as Kamala did, to “uphold the law.” Whatever that means.

I sort of understand this. In the 2022 elections, trans people were barely spoken of, except by MAGA diehards and diehard candidates who disproportionately lost, and were treated retroactively as kooks. But in 2024, trans people –both adults and kids– were the subject of disgusting, lie-filled ads across Wisconsin largely paid for by the Republican Assembly Campaign Committee and the Republican-adjacent Jobs First Coalition. There’s no real principle there beyond “feed into what makes people mad and gets them to vote for us,” but this is what Republicans have done for years –it shouldn’t be surprising when it works, just because occasionally it hasn’t.

And, in my opinion, it clearly worked this time. I’m fairly certain those aforementioned wide-eyed MAGA types were legitimately furious at the idea of “men in girls’ locker rooms.” I even had to assure at least one conflicted supporter of a local Democratic candidate that said candidate didn’t support such things. That candidate’s response, when told of this exchange, was to angrily insist that of course she doesn’t support “men in girls’ locker rooms.”. But isn’t this, in effect, handing hateful, ignorant people the exact framing they want? Doesn’t it continue the demonization of the very small number of openly trans children in Wisconsin, at best dampening it slightly? Isn’t it a complete moral failure that also fails to win elections?

And if it’s not clear, I’m pissed. I worked seven days a week for a big chunk of the election and was almost certainly underpaid for it, given the hours. I wasn’t invited to debrief the local candidate’s campaign at all –except by the candidate herself, privately, and only got bits and pieces of useful post-election data from other staffers’ goodbye emails. If there’s a continuing infrastructure built by the Democratic Party outside of campaigns, local party meetings no one attends, and a very few elected officials, it’s not clear where or exactly what it is. We recruit volunteers, train them, and send them home when they’re no longer useful to us. This is the “democracy” we’re supposed to fight for.

Meanwhile, non-demoninational reactionary churches, antiwoke podcasts, the Heritage Foundation, and MAGA Facebook groups keep chugging along with very clearly high levels of devotion and participation. And the very same consultants and staffers who failed us this time, through some combination of ineptitude and detachment, will probably fail us again in 2026. So it goes.