Your phone buzzes with a frantic text message. “DEMOCRACY IS ON THE LINE.”It’s not the first time you’ve gotten a fundraising text like this from the Democratic Party and its candidates. Nor the first time you’ve rolled your eyes. But the ask makes sense. Democracy really is on the line. You have asked yourself what you would have done if you had lived under the authoritarian regimes of the past, and volunteering some time and money seems like the least you could do. You click the ActBlue link and donate $100. The country must be saved, after all.

We’re here to tell you that this view is wrong. The Democratic Party is being devoured by an ecosystem of consultants. Mostly out of view of the party’s voters and activists, political consultants are paid to raise the money, place the ads, and set the strategy. And they’re paid regardless of whether the party wins or loses.

We’ve been studying money in U.S. politics for many years, from uncovering racial inequality in campaign contributions to showing how money in politics helps explain why there are so many lawyers in Congress to studying the feedback loop between wealth inequality, political donations by the ultra-wealthy, and their influence over economic and regulatory policy. More recently, what started as a research project on the exclusion of younger Americans from campaign finance spawned an investigation of what we call “spam PACs” in the Democratic Party fundraising ecosystem.

These spam PACs are the groups that raise the bulk of their money by squeezing elderly donors with those high-pressure text messages. What started as a high-volume spam model by a few fundraising organizations in the 2010s has spread to the point that even the Democratic Party’s official campaign committees like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee are some of the groups that profit most from this strategy.

Fundraising spam is destroying trust and enthusiasm for the Democratic Party, driving away young potential donors, and extracting the bulk of funds from a small set of vulnerable senior citizens.

A political party is a vehicle for groups in society—voters, activists, and politicians—to come together to elect representatives who will change the world through public policy and governance. It’s a collective enterprise in which different groups debate and negotiate the direction of the party in primary elections and then come together to take control of government and implement that negotiated agenda. The problem is that the incentives of the Democratic consultant class are not aligned with these goals.

Our thesis is a simple one: Campaign consultants are businesses that act to maximize profits, and this profit-seeking is often at odds with what’s best to defeat American authoritarianism.

In this piece, we detail how and why the consultant class weakens the Democratic Party. We bring new data analysis showing that there is no meritocracy when it comes to Democratic vendors. They are paid the same whether their candidates overperform or underperform in elections. This same consultant class pushes Democratic campaigns toward short-term money over long-term growth and sells campaign strategies that are lucrative for them but ineffective for the party.

In pursuing their financial incentives, the consultant class has reshaped who runs for office, how the party raises and spends money, what it says and claims to stand for, and how it relates to its own supporters. They have made the party older, weaker, less honest, and less capable of fighting the most serious authoritarian threat in American history.

Follow the Money Let’s begin by following that $100 you donated. We’ve spent the last two years tracing money through Federal Election Commission records, vendor networks, and data on hundreds of millions of transactions. We research money in politics for a living, and we’re used to uncovering troubling realities in the data. But when we traced the Democratic fundraising environment, what we found shocked even us.

If your $100 was in response to a fundraising text or email, the single most expensive way to raise money in American politics, $65 is instantly consumed by the cost of asking you for it. Asking this often, and this aggressively, is expensive. It means paying the data brokers who traffic in your personal information, the digital copywriters who draft the inexplicably bizarre messaging, the email and SMS providers who specialize in slipping past spam filters, the compliance lawyers, and, of course, the fundraising consultants.

Another $2 goes to strategic consultants for advice on how to spend what’s left, and $14 to administration, travel, and staff. Of the $19 that finally goes toward advertising for the actual candidate, $6 is skimmed off the top as a placement commission before a single ad airs. In the end, barely $13 of your $100 buys real airtime or digital ads.

Fundraising via text message represents the high end of fundraising costs. Even averaged across all itemized donations, including the wealthy mega-donors writing checks, Democratic campaigns now spend 45 cents of every dollar on fundraising costs, a fourfold increase since 2004. Today’s campaigns like to imagine themselves as efficient machines, remade by big data and microtargeting. In reality, they are less efficient and more extractive than at any point in modern history.

Most charity watchdogs will not certify an organization that spends more than 35 percent of its revenue on fundraising. The Democratic Party once cleared that bar, but it no longer does, and for the small-dollar donors it leans on hardest, it isn’t close.

In 2024, Democratic campaigns burned through $2 billion on fundraising operations alone, nearly as much as they spent on advertising. Across both parties, spending on donor contact lists exploded from $20 million in 2004 to $351 million by 2020. Your contact information is a commodity, bought and resold by list brokers who profit not by cultivating you as a reliable member of the party but by churning through you. You are worth more exhausted across 15 campaigns than nurtured by one.

This model selects for vulnerability. A 79-year-old Kansas resident was charged up to 352 times in a single day, and 45,331 times since 2018, for a total of $153,856. A 76-year-old in Connecticut donated 22,335 times for $62,580. There are thousands of cases like these in the FEC records—elderly donors charged dozens or hundreds of times a day by the PACs and candidates spamming them. Federal regulators list “abnormally frequent” transfers by an older customer as a red flag for elder financial exploitation and tell banks to watch for it. In political fundraising, it is now the business model.

The Cure for What Ails You Whatever survives the fundraising machine enters the second extraction: media consulting. Political media consultants take a placement commission, typically 10 to 15 percent, on every dollar of advertising they place. When accounting for production costs, retainer fees, and other costs, the average percentage going to media consulting firms is actually more like 30 percent.

This media consulting structure comes from a bygone era of commercial advertising. Under the old-school commission model, a company like Coca-Cola hired an ad agency, and the agency would take home a percentage of Coca-Cola’s ad spending as a commission. This created an obvious conflict of interest: The ad agency had an incentive to encourage more ad spending, regardless of its effectiveness. For this reason, commercial advertisers abandoned the commission model decades ago in favor of flat fees and retainers.

Where commissions still exist in commercial advertising, they’re tied to the impact of direct ad exposure on “conversions”—but in politics, no one can prove that an ad moved specific votes.

But political campaign ad buys never modernized. Consulting firm income rises with spending, not with success. A consultant who places $20 million in ineffective ads earns twice as much as one who places $10 million in highly effective ads. The incentive is to maximize spending, not win elections.

The first modern campaign consultant in American history was Mark Hanna, who managed William McKinley’s 1896 presidential campaign. Hanna identified the moneyed interests whose fortunes were riding on the ballot and asked for a quarter of a percent of their assets. This raised $3.5 million, nine times what his opponent William Jennings Bryan had raised. Much of this haul was spent printing hundreds of millions of pamphlets, for an electorate of fewer than 20 million people.

Hanna’s contemporaries were not impressed. Theodore Roosevelt quipped that Hanna “advertised McKinley as if he were a patent medicine!”Patent medicines were cure-all tonics of that era, hawked on testimonial and repetition because no clinical evidence of their effectiveness existed. The industry gave rise to the phrase “snake oil,” and the comparison was applied to political consulting from the get-go. In Hanna’s day, the candidate was the patent medicine being peddled to voters.

Today, the consulting class has found a better mark. The snake oil is the advertising itself, and they’re selling it to the campaigns. In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which eventually required medicine to prove efficacy before it could be sold. Political advertising never faced that requirement. It has operated for over a century on the sales pitch of the patent medicine era without ever having to prove it works.

That hasn’t stopped political scientists from studying the effectiveness of campaign ads. Few questions in our academic discipline have been tested as often or as carefully, and the studies have produced one of the most robust sets of findings in the field: Political ads have essentially zero persuasive effect in general elections. The conclusion is among the least controversial statements a political scientist can make, and among the least known outside the profession. A major study conducted 59 randomized experiments on 34,000 voters during the 2016 election cycle, testing 49 real ads from real races. The average effect on vote choice was 0.7 percentage points, and even that was not statistically distinguishable from zero.

The researchers couldn’t rule out that the ads did nothing at all. But the study was designed to test the industry’s fallback claim that ads work under the right conditions. Did it matter if the viewer was a partisan or an independent? If they lived in a battleground state? None of it seemed to matter. Another meta-analysis of 49 field experiments reached the same conclusion that campaign ads and even more personal voter contact had no discernible effect on vote shares.

But what about online advertising? A massive 2020 randomized controlled trial involving over 60,000 Facebook and Instagram users found that removing all political ads from users’ feeds had “no measurable impact” on attitudes or voting. If digital ads had meaningful effects, a study this large would have detected them.

The strongest evidence that campaign ads have any effect at all comes from the campaigns’ proprietary data. A team of researchers obtained the complete archive of ad experiments that Democratic campaigns ran through a commercial testing platform in 2018 and 2020, more than 600 real ads tried on half a million people. The ads did move survey responses in the minutes after viewing, by a point or two. But think about how favorable those conditions are. The respondent had just watched the ad with full attention. How many political ads leave an impression that lasts hours, let alone until Election Day?

You may have suspected as much after 2024, when Democrats vastly outraised and outspent Republicans and lost anyway. It’s not that money doesn’t matter at all; it’s influential in primaries, and we are not suggesting that candidates should enter the general with an empty war chest. But the party has to weigh what campaign spending actually buys against what it costs. And the costs are severe. To raise the money, the party resorts to fundraising tactics that enrage and badger many of its own supporters.

To court the mega-donors, it softens its positions and shelters insiders from accountability. To spend the money, it funnels billions through a consulting class that takes a cut whether the ads work or not. And in the end, the ads mostly don’t work. The entire apparatus yields a product with little to no measurable effect on general election outcomes.

This raises an obvious question. If money doesn’t win elections, why do candidates debase themselves groveling for five-dollar donations? First, it’s a classic collective action problem: Candidates and leaders want to maximize their own fundraising, even if it harms the party’s long-term goals, because it increases their power within the party apparatus. Second, the consultant class is persuasive. Billions in ad buys justify the aggressive fundraising, the aggressive fundraising fuels the ad buys, and both generate fees. It’s a perfect circle of consultant profit.

The Good, the Bad, and the Generationally Wealthy These are strong claims, and they’re worth testing against the data. We assembled every contested U.S. House and Senate race from 2012 through 2024, roughly 2,600 Democratic campaigns, along with the vendor payments each one reported to the FEC. That allows two tests. The first asks whether campaigns that spend more on consultants win more. The second asks whether consultants who win more votes get paid more.

The consultant class sells its services on the promise that its expertise helps win elections. Consider the swing districts, where that expertise is supposed to matter most. For each election since 2012, we took the 10 highest-spending Democrats running in House districts where the presidential vote had split nearly evenly. These campaigns spent a median of more than $7 million, most of it on consultants. They did no better than the other Democrats running in the same kinds of districts, who spent less than half as much on consultants.

What moved the big spenders’ results was the national waves, not how much they paid to consultants. And among the big spenders, the campaigns that gave consultants the largest share of their budgets won at exactly the same rate as the ones that spent more on staff and other expenses.

The second test turns the question around. Most professional services are hard to grade. Elections are not. Every consultant’s clients win or lose in public, on the same night. If any market could reward good work and punish bad, it is this one. Firms whose clients beat expectations should gain business the next cycle, and firms whose clients collapsed should lose it. We measured each firm’s track record in one election, how far its candidates ran ahead of or behind what their districts would have predicted, and compared it with the firm’s revenue growth in the next.

There is no relationship. A firm’s performance in one cycle has no bearing on its billings in the next, and the pattern holds for media firms and fundraising firms alike.

It’s all the more head-spinning to learn how richly this failure pays. When the Democratic National Committee released its autopsy of the 2024 defeat, it omitted a chapter that warned “too many people … have become generationally wealthy off politics and drive too much of the decision-making within the ecosystem,” a system its author called “inflexible and self-enriching.”The FEC records put this in dollar terms. Over the past decade, Democratic candidates and committees have paid more than $5.9 billion for fundraising services, an industry that has more than quadrupled since 2016.

The DNC itself spent 17 cents on fundraising for every dollar it raised from individuals in 2006 and is on track to spend over 50 cents this cycle. It raised about as much from individuals in 2022 as in 2010 but spent twice as much to do it. The committee’s well-publicized cash problems this cycle have coincided with massive and growing payments to its fundraising vendors.

Then comes the media consultant’s cut. From 2012 through 2024, Democrats paid media consultants about $5.8 billion, and their cut of 15 to 30 percent comes in between $1 billion to $2 billion, taken for placing ads that move few votes. If you, like many analysts, are concerned about an AI bubble, we’d like to introduce you to the Democratic consulting industry.

The Bad Advice Machine Campaign managers, strategists, and consultants are rarely, if ever, hired based on their win-loss records. They’re mostly hired for their network. Can they get the DCCC on the phone? Do they have a direct line to super PAC board members? Can they secure list-sharing agreements with ActBlue vendors? Do they have a working relationship with party leadership? Do they get invited on cable news? As our analysis shows, the entire process has little to do with winning or losing elections.

One thing the consultants excel at is making their educated guesswork look like science. For consultants who win big contracts and then lose elections, a scientific-sounding justification for their strategy’s effectiveness is especially crucial. There are a few telltale signs of consultant class pseudoscience: high confidence, no room for uncertainty, and all-too-easy answers to difficult political questions, which usually advise the party establishment and large donors to do what they already wanted to do.

A confluence of trends—including social media, the nationalization of political attention, polling, data journalism, and prediction markets—has made political pseudoscience an easy sell. As a result, we are awash with numbers. Political consultants, pundits, strategists, and party operatives seem increasingly unable to make an argument without them. A campaign should spend more on television because the model predicts a three-point persuasion effect. A candidate should abandon an issue because the cross-tabs show that it performs poorly among independents.

A particular message is “validated” because it tested eight points better in a focus group. A candidate is “electable” because a proprietary model gives her a 63 percent probability of winning. A donor should give another $5 million because the data shows that the investment will produce a particular return. A survey experiment that randomly shows different Democratic policy positions on your computer screen is evidence enough that a Democratic candidate can dramatically shift the results of an election if she simply “replac[es] racial preferences in small business loans with preferences for low-income applicants” (this is a real example). Everything has a number, and thus everything sounds scientific.

Political advice used to be openly understood as judgment. Today’s strategist says his consulting firm’s proprietary statistical model shows a 7.4 percentage point advantage of nominating one candidate over another. How he arrived at that number is a mystery to politicians and political scientists alike. But the veneer of precision makes it harder to push back. A candidate can argue with a hunch but not with a model she can’t see inside.

Beyond overclaiming based on flimsy numeric evidence, the other element in justifying all this political snake oil is distress. The consulting class thrives on perpetual crisis. In the world of crisis, Democratic Party politics is not the steady project of organizing and mobilizing Americans into a common project in an uncertain and volatile political environment. Instead, every election requires a massive intervention of new, top-down strategy, which, of course, justifies more consultant contracts.

Consider the “crises” for the Democratic Party in the 2024 election. Gen Z was suddenly “the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years,” according to a prominent Democratic pollster. Other leading strategists proclaimed that increasing voter turnout is now bad for Democrats, a piece of advice so reckless it’s hard to distinguish from sabotage. One New York Times column on how “Democrats Have A ‘Massive Blind Spot When It Comes To Male Issues’” touted the fact that the percentage of men who believe “society has become too soft and feminine” increased from 50 percent in 2016 to 52 percent a decade later, a change within the survey’s margin of error.

These supposed realignments have since dramatically reversed. Gen Z, male, and Latino Americans turned against Trump once they saw Republican economic policy raising the cost of living, mass deportation requiring secret police to abduct noncriminal immigrants and sometimes U.S. citizens from their families, and Republican foreign policy very much not, as JD Vance repeatedly claimed in 2024, put an end to endless war. With Trump underwater with independents by over 50 points in 2026, it would be criminally negligent for Democrats to follow advice to keep voter turnout low.

But the overclaims of urgency are the strategist equivalent of the spam fundraising texts: Do what I say, or we perish.

The consultant class’s solution du jour is that Democrats must become more centrist. And fast. To fail to be centrist right now is to cede the republic to corrupt authoritarians. Whether it’s from political consulting firms or pundits, traditional and social media are awash with proclamations that Democrats are too far left, and that moderation is the key to victory. In one example, The New York Times editorial board published a statistical piece that we showed to be based on a statistical illusion.

Academic research on this question tends to find pretty substantial benefits of moderation—but only in the eras before Trump. With Trump dominating politics in an era of populist sentiment, low trust in traditional institutions, new forms of social media, high polarization, and global crises like Covid, academic studies have converged on small or near-zero benefits of moderation. We can’t speak for all academic researchers, but for us, this is a moment to emphasize uncertainty.

We’re in a new, volatile era in American politics, and many of the old rules don’t seem to apply. We don’t know exactly what to do, and neither does the consultant class. The difference is, we’re allowed, and willing, to say that out loud.

The strategy consultants want you to believe their focus is squarely on winning elections. Read the mission statements and “About” pages of any big-money Democratic-supporting PAC like The Bench or Majority Democrats, and you’ll see what looks like a single-minded focus on “know[ing] how to win,” “winning tough races,” and figuring out how to “win and sustain Democratic majorities.”WelcomePAC literally titles its manifesto “Deciding to Win.”

But you can anticipate what we’re going to say here: The incentives are not aligned. The consultants’ key constituency is not voters but the campaigns, donors, and party elites that provide them contracts. Their advice has to satisfy those relationships, not win elections. If it were really about popularity, the advice would mean sometimes shifting rightward and sometimes shifting leftward. Given these incentives, snake oil strategy advice abounds.

There are two additional tells as to whether a political consultant is selling snake oil. The first is how selective the consultants are with which policies to emphasize. Strategists demanded silence on abolishing ICE when it polled relatively poorly, but they still advise “Don’t Abolish It” even though doing so has become popular. The Abundance agenda—a set of mostly good policy ideas, but not especially popular ones—suddenly captures the attention of Democratic elites, while more popular policies that the Abundance faction opposes, like moratoriums on data centers, have to be forced onto the agenda.

Maybe party leaders and the consultant class sincerely think that continuing the status quo U.S. policy on Israel or data centers is the morally righteous position. It’s actually quite fair for Democratic consultants and leaders to advocate for unpopular policies that they think are good for the country, just as it’s fair for activists to do the same on climate change, transgender rights, abolishing prisons, or any other position that the consultant class has deemed “toxic.”As we’ve repeated throughout this piece, all political parties in democracies must perform this kind of balancing act.

What we’re saying is that the consultants can’t have it both ways. You can’t sell yourself as laser-focused on winning elections at all costs and then hide the ball on some issues in order to please certain funders or power players in the party.

The final tell is the consultant class’s selective attention to corruption, oligarchy, and inside dealing. The question of whether Democratic candidates should tack left or right on a given issue is neither new nor out of the ordinary. Parties have always faced these trade-offs. But according to many strategists, there is no similar trade-off when it comes to corruption.

The Democratic Party brand suffers when its politicians, leaders, and operatives engage in real or perceived corruption. These are cases where individuals’ personal incentives for power and enrichment clash with the collective needs of the party, and, unlike sacrificing an issue near and dear to a Democratic faction, ending corruption would be costly only for the perpetrators. A record 89 percent of Americans (including 91 percent of Democrats and 90 percent of independents) now say corruption is widespread in government, according to Gallup, the highest level of perceived corruption in any advanced economy. If the strategy shops followed the polling, as they say they do, corruption would sit at the top of every memo.

Searchlight Institute has polled the question directly. Seventy-one percent said the typical politician is likely corrupt, and every anti-corruption reform Searchlight tested drew majority support. But Searchlight’s policy recommendations lead with weak tea: drug testing for elected officials, public reporting of members’ work hours, a mandatory annual town hall, and a procedure for removing members in mental decline.

These reforms are fine on their own, but it’s unclear how any of them would address voters’ concerns about graft, bribery, or undue influence by wealthy donors. The recommendations don’t even mention super PACs, mega-donors, or campaign finance, and none of the nine reforms Searchlight tested addresses them. Yet Searchlight’s own surveys found that 71 percent of voters say large donors have too much influence over Congress, and 80 percent call it corruption.

WelcomePAC’s manifesto, “Deciding to Win,” similarly instructs Democrats to lean “into critiques of political corruption and the outsize power of lobbyists, corporations, and the ultra-wealthy.”We agree, and said as much. The source of corruption that voters name most often, in poll after poll, is the influence of big donors. But both groups talk about anti-corruption reforms while conspicuously skirting around the issue of money in politics.

New York offers a third. When Eric Adams, indicted for bribery, wire fraud, and accepting illegal foreign campaign donations, became unviable, the operatives and donors around him had to draw a new hand. They played Andrew Cuomo, a human royal flush of scandals whose record includes sexual harassment findings, a federal criminal probe into whether he lied to Congress about his administration’s undercount of Covid nursing home deaths, the misuse of state resources to promote his book, an anti-corruption commission he shut down after it began investigating his donors, and an inner circle prosecuted for bribery and bid-rigging.

Fix the City, the super PAC that carried Cuomo, was run day-to-day by Adams’s former chief of external affairs, and it raised $28 million, the most ever by a PAC in a single New York election, including money from Michael Bloomberg and Bill Ackman, to stop Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani had consultants, too. But he raised so much grassroots energy that once he reached the public-financing cap, instead of capitalizing on the moment by founding a Super PAC, he told donors to stop giving and volunteer—the one thing a candidate can do that pays a consultant nothing.

One establishment-aligned firm called him “one of the most unpopular Democrats in the country.”This was a stretch at the time; its own poll showed only 35 percent of respondents rating him unfavorably, a smaller share than for any other Democrat. But it’s especially off as a prediction. YouGov’s current ratings have Mamdani as one of the most popular Democrats in the country, ahead of Booker, Buttigieg, Newsom, Shapiro, and Jeffries.

The pattern reaches the top of the party. When Trump pardoned Representative Henry Cuellar, indicted on bribery and money-laundering charges to which two co-conspirators had agreed to plead guilty, Hakeem Jeffries called it “exactly the right outcome,” said the indictment “was very thin to begin with,” and predicted the Supreme Court would have dismissed the charges anyway. Eight days later, House Democrats restored Cuellar to his leadership post on the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee.

Leaders defend their members, and no consultant made Jeffries do it. But the same leader has since added a line to his stump speech promising to “hold the crooks accountable,” and the advice industry that poll-tests every other sentence a Democrat says did not flag the contradiction. No faction of the base benefits from this. No swing voter is won. It costs the party the one thing it cannot afford to lose against an authoritarian opponent, which is the credibility to call corruption what it is.

Clean House All factions of the Democratic Party—left, center, and everywhere in between—will continue to fight over the party’s direction. That fight is healthy. What no faction benefits from is an extraction machine that drains the party’s resources, alienates its supporters, and forfeits its moral authority. Every wing of the party should be able to unite around ending it.

The reforms are not complicated. Ban the predatory fundraising vendors whose business model depends on deceiving elderly donors (again, they deny this). End the commission model for media buying in favor of flat fees, so that the people placing the ads don’t have a financial stake in placing more of them. Set pricing rules for qualified vendors that serve the party’s interests, not the consultants’. Negotiate standard rates with vetted vendors, publish what they charge and metrics on their past performance so campaigns can compare, and cap fees and markups.

Furthermore, implement strict conflict-of-interest rules that prevent consultants from holding positions of power in the party infrastructure or engaging in strategic decisions from which they stand to profit.

All this can be accomplished through internal party rules. It would require no legislation or constitutional amendment, nor any Republican buy-in. Whataboutism is no excuse; when fighting against a corrupt and authoritarian coalition, it’s all the more important to distinguish oneself as the clean party.

None of this should be controversial. Financial advisers are legally required to act in their clients’ best interests. Doctors cannot take payments from drug companies for prescribing their products. Lawyers face disbarment for self-dealing. In virtually every profession where someone is trusted to act on another’s behalf, there are rules preventing the advisers from enriching themselves at the client’s expense. The glaring exception is political consultants, who operate without such obligation. They are among the last trusted advisers in American public life, and the party they advise is paying the price.

The Democratic Party does not need to reinvent the wheel; it just needs to hold its vendors to the same basic standard that governs every financial adviser, doctor, and attorney in the country.

It all comes back to the fundraising pitch. You were told the country was on the line and everyone had to step up. We’re arguing that “everyone” includes the people who took your money. You stepped up. Now it’s their turn.