As the scope of the Democratic Party's 2024 election loss sunk in and the inevitable recriminations began, the so-called "consultant class" emerged as the most unifying target of blame for a party otherwise divided on ideology, policy and personal quarrels. In a forum sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee for the national chair race in January, nearly every candidate pledged to scrutinize the DNC's contracts with consultants, with the stated goal of pruning the organization of those who have for decades helped guide the party's leaders and candidates in an era marked by embarrassing defeats and narrow victories that fell short of expectations.
The winner of that race, Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chair Ken Martin, said at the time that “D.C. consultants” will “be gone when I’m there.” The DNC's contracts typically expire after each two-year election cycle, but many of them are then renewed as a matter of course; some consultants have even been on the DNC payroll since former President Barack Obama's first term. Now that he's been elected chair, Martin gets to decide whether to follow or break with that precedent. According to a DNC spokesperson, he intends to stand by his pledge, pending a close review of who on the payroll is worthy of staying or being thrown out.
“As DNC Chair, Ken Martin and his team will be going through every contract, line by line," Abhi Rahman, the DNC's national deputy communications director, told Salon. "There’s one criteria — are they helping us win elections and rebuild our credibility with working families?"
James Skoufis, a fierce critic of the Democratic Party's cozy relationship with those consultants, also ran for chair before dropping out and endorsing Martin. In an interview with Salon, he argued that Martin should be able to find plenty of waste and fraud, as winning elections and building credibility was not the criteria that has been used in the past.
"Many of these contracts, which can be seven or eight figures large, were not earned through honesty and value they bring to campaigns," Skoufis said. "They were instead earned via relationships within the DNC, for knowing a friend of a friend of a congressman, or another consultant, or the right people within the organization."
The use of the "D.C." label by Martin to characterize disfavored consultants evokes the image of a political swamp that can be found anywhere in the U.S., though its brackish waters are most thick where the federal government and swarms of lobbyists reside. Skoufis, who sometimes refers to those consultants as being part of the "cocktail circuit," defined them more specifically as mercenaries who earn lucrative contracts by "drifting from campaign to campaign, administration to administration, cable contract to cable contract, and advise the party’s political hub and candidates, and are often rewarded with more contracts and campaigns," even when the party loses.
For her 2024 campaign, former Vice President Kamala Harris spent hundreds of millions of dollars on consulting and media firms run by Democratic Party insiders, including those who worked for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's failed 2016 campaign. It all amounts to a giant waste of money, Skoufis said, because their advice, encapsulated by the Biden administration trying to persuade Americans that their perception of a difficult economy was not rooted in reality, is "totally removed from the desires, needs, and motivations of working class and middle-class voters."
In this criticism, Skoufis appears to share common ground with a number of consultants and staffers largely from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Those people, many of whom supported the insurgent campaigns of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and were once blacklisted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, are quick to distinguish themselves from the much-derided "consultant class."
"They exist largely to protect their own power and keep making money," Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, a group that supports progressive candidates, told Salon. "The party needs to pivot away from consultants who have conflicts of interest, who go around the revolving door to also work with corporations like Uber or McDonald's or Exxon Mobil or Goldman Sachs and represent their interests in the political world."
One Democratic Party-aligned polling firm that has consistently appeared on the DNC payroll, Global Strategy Group, was paid by Amazon in 2022 to help the company suppress a union election at a Staten Island warehouse. A GSG spokesperson says that the firm has since added language in its contracts "making it clear we would not do any work that opposes organizing efforts." Although the DNC publicly floated a proposal to ban party consultants from engaging in union-busting in response to backlash, they never clarified if the proposal was actually put into effect. Such a proposal would have, in theory, barred the DNC from paying $12 million to Wilmer Cutter Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, a law firm that advertises "union avoidance strategies," during the 2023-2024 cycle, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
It's not just those firms' corporate ties that have raised eyebrows. SKDK, another popular Democratic Party firm and a co-creation of former Biden senior adviser Anita Dunn, recently registered as foreign agents for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, even as the party is already facing widespread censure over its support for a country that has been accused of committing genocide.
The dominance of those consultants has become even more pronounced after the Supreme Court allowed unlimited outside spending on federal elections, Gabe Tobias, a veteran campaign strategist who worked on Ocasio-Cortez's 2018 campaign, told Salon.
"Political campaigns have become a really big industry, and like any other industry, you've got people and firms with a lot of power, and some who have less and want more. It doesn't look any different on the inside than working in the pharmaceutical industry or working in tech or something like that," Tobias said, adding that politicians "only need these kinds of consultants because you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on television ads, on mail or whatever other kinds of things that have only become a concept because we've allowed the unfettered influence of money in our political system."
The most recent failed presidential campaign provides an ideal case study for critics of business as usual. While Harris entered the campaign with some tentative appeals to economic populism and acknowledged that the cost of living was "still too high," she and her surrogates increasingly relied on well-worn arguments about Trump's authoritarian tendencies and bumbled over how tightly to embrace the Biden-era economy in the face of widespread discontent. By the fall, earlier proposals or promises to crack down on price gouging, expand the child tax credit and impose more taxes on the wealthy had been watered down, while rhetoric against moneyed elites gave way to more neutral appeals like "job creation" and "opportunities for the middle class" — much of this, apparently, at the direction of Harris advisers with corporate ties, according to reporting by the New York Times.
One of those advisers, Karen Dunn, was serving as lead trial counsel for Google in a Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit at the same time she helped Harris prep for her debate against Trump; two others, Obama campaign alum David Plouffe and Harris' brother-in-law, Tony West, have seats on Uber's senior management team. West reportedly played a key role in convincing Harris to tailor her economic message to be more business-friendly and campaign more with surrogates who could ostensibly provide cross-party appeal, like billionaire Mark Cuban and former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney.
In the end, Harris continued the Democratic Party's trend of leaking low-income voters and failed to convert meaningful numbers of registered Republicans, earning less than 6% of the latter.
"People in the Harris campaign decided that maybe we're going to hit some people that we don't want to hit right now, we don't want to look so anti-corporate. That was clearly a dumb decision," Tobias said. "David Plouffe, Tony West, Jen O'Malley Dillon and the rest have been on podcasts giving 1,000 data points about why the decisions they made with the right ones, so you can't prove that they're secretly trying to help themselves get rich off other corporate clients. But they do have those clients too, right? It really belabors trust with voters who already don't trust Washington in general when these people are the ones with the most influence over the party."
Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist and former Harris senior adviser, pushed back on the notion that Harris didn't focus enough on economic issues, citing her proposals to expand Medicare and housing. But, in an interview with Salon, he also acknowledged that Democrats in general struggled with "talking like regular people" and moving beyond an excessively curated, focus group-verified approach to politics in large part because of a lack of class and geographical diversity among consultants.
"We have a ton of people who are highly educated in the Democratic Party that talk and think a particular way, and then we build campaigns that are over-reliant on that group," he said. "We won highly-educated people in this country and people who make over $100,000, but we're getting killed with working class people. And I don't think we're elevating enough working class people in the party, people who didn't go to college, people who have a different way of thinking about the world because they have a different lived experience."
The Democratic Party should be a big tent organization, Nellis said, and include both labor and corporate voices because "there aren't enough votes" if one goes too far in either direction. While that might represent a shift in the direction progressives want to see, many of them argue that it's not enough, since moneyed interests are in their essence opposed to any expansion of labor or consumer rights that might threaten their profits. The party's preference for consultants from well-heeled firms over union organizers or community activists, they say, is a symptom of a Democratic Party unwilling to break ties with the corporate world or eschew fundraising with billionaires, and the symptom will not go away until they cure the deeper sickness.
If the party rebuilt itself around "a mass base, labor and/or civil rights," as Tobias put it, there would be a stronger push within the DNC and other campaign committees to become something more than a "giant fundraising machine.
While commentators argue over how easily Democrats in general could have performed better with a different strategy and set of policies, Senate and House candidates across the country slightly outran the presidential ticket. Julie Merz, the DCCC's executive director, credited House Democrats' almost-enough performance with their expanded request-for-proposal process designed to "hire the best talent available" and bring "diverse voices to the decision-making table" who better understand or live in culturally diverse districts, where Democrats were stung in the last few election cycles by a shift in the Latino and Asian vote towards the GOP.
"The result was effective and authentic paid communication with voters, which will continue to be a key part of our strategy to win back the House in 2026," she told Salon.
Many Democrats viewed as establishment-friendly have insisted that individual candidates, their advisers and the party as a whole should not be blamed for the 2024 election results, pointing to governments around the world struggling to maintain their popularity in the post-COVID economy. While Germany's center-left coalition lost power this week, Canada's Liberals appeared to be on course for an electoral drubbing before recovering in the polls amid their response to U.S. tariffs. Other incumbent parties like Mexico's left-wing National Regeneration Movement didn't require an assist from Trump to successfully defy political headwinds.
Despite the success of progressive ballot measures in states that voted for Trump, some Democrats interpreted the 2024 election in the U.S. primarily as a call to move rightward on certain human rights issues or risk being tarred as "woke" by the right. That approach, Andrabi argues, is a grave mistake and yet another example of out-of-touch consultants either dramatically missing the point or doing anything to avoid offending their corporate connections.
"In election after election where Democrats lose, the establishment's first instinct is to punch down on not only just marginalized groups, but marginalized groups that it counts as its own base, or did at one point, and then wonder why those people don't want to vote for Democrats anymore," he said. "Throwing immigrants and trans kids under the bus and turning into a diet Republican Party is not the solution. You'll always be out-righted by them."
Andrabi, noting polls that showed a shift towards Trump over the economy rather than on identity and human rights, said that the objective for the Democratic Party should be to "unite these marginalized communities, be it immigrants, be it trans people and their families, be it working class people of all races, against the same handful of billionaires and corporations that are picking all of their pockets."
Martin, the newly-elected DNC chair, has signaled, if unevenly at times, that he too recognizes the need for a Democratic Party less beholden to its wealthiest donors and the consultants close to them. Even if Martin attempts to follow through, he does not control other key party committees like the DCCC and DSCC, which manage House and Senate races respectively, nor does he have direct say over what consultants individual candidates put on their payroll.
But his promise to review consultant contracts that have been normally regarded as a fait accompli is a good start, some observers say.
"The DNC is going to get the most attention even if it doesn't solve the problem on its own," Nellis said. "For better or for worse, Ken is the face of the Democratic Party, and I'm glad that he's stepping up for it. But it needs to happen at every level. It needs to happen at every party committee. It needs to happen on every campaign. We can't be playing running the same damn playbook that we've been running for the last 20 years at least."
