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.
While most political strategists agree that some spending on paid media is necessary to win a campaign in 2024, Faiz Shakir, a senior advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told Salon that the Harris campaign's spending profile is indicative of a structural issue with how the Democratic Party approaches paid media and political strategy.
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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 30-second ad being pushed by media consultants is often seen as the easiest way to solve a problem, even if it won’t solve that problem,” Shakir told Salon. “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?”
Shakir summed up the issue saying that “there is often a product problem and not a sales problem” with Democratic campaigns. However, there is another side to the problem with paid media, in Shakir’s view. At every step in the process of making an ad, everyone is taking their cut.
“The opportunity to make money off of the firm that has created 30-second ads and the person who has placed the ads is ripe for abuse because there are hundreds of millions of dollars going into it and everyone is taking their skim,” Shakir said. “There’s a huge escalation every step of the way because of a skim at every level.”
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.
“It’s the influence of money, which is absolutely a cancer.”
This way of doing paid media where the cost escalates at every step of the process is how campaigns end up like Harris’, spending upwards of $690 million on paid media. According to an analysis by The Times, outside groups supporting Harris spent even more on paid media, $2.5 billion.
President-elect Donald Trump trolled Harris' campaign about its exorbitant ad spending after his victory tweeting that "I am very surprised that the Democrats, who fought a hard and valiant fight in the 2020 Presidential Election, raising a record amount of money, didn’t have lots of $’s left over."
“Now they are being squeezed by vendors and others. Whatever we can do to help them during this difficult period, I would strongly recommend we, as a Party and for the sake of desperately needed UNITY, do,” Trump tweeted. “We have a lot of money........