{"id":1743856,"date":"2022-11-18T11:17:26","date_gmt":"2022-11-18T16:17:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1743856"},"modified":"2022-11-18T11:17:30","modified_gmt":"2022-11-18T16:17:30","slug":"the-gops-political-consultant-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-gops-political-consultant-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"The GOP\u2019s Political Consultant Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">10<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fthe-gops-political-consultant-problem%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1743856&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>If there\u2019s one thing the 2022 midterms made clear, it\u2019s that Democrats have a huge <a href=\"https:\/\/spectator.org\/it-isnt-time-to-care-who-the-republican-party-2024-nominee-is\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ground game advantage over Republicans<\/a>. Whether it\u2019s a month of harvesting (and curing)\u00a0ballots thanks to early voting, or going door-to-door filling out ballots for huge swaths of unlikely voters, Democrats know that <a href=\"https:\/\/theconservativetreehouse.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/09\/big-picture-2020-midterm-elections-highlights-distinct-difference-between-ballots-and-votes\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">turning out ballots is more important than turning out votes<\/a>. They don\u2019t have to rely on generating traditional Election Day enthusiasm through distributing campaign mailers or running TV ads. <\/p>\n<p>Republicans, however, still insist on investing the majority of their campaign funds into these antiquated (or pre-2020) methods. And they\u2019re showing no signs of stopping. Why? Blame the political consultant class.<\/p>\n<p>For years, millions of dollars in grassroots donations have gone to prop up GOP candidates, only to end up in the pockets of the political consultant class. Back during the 2012 presidential election, 10 of the consulting firms behind the effort to get Mitt Romney to the White House <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/story\/2014\/03\/revenge-of-the-republican-consultants-104712\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">grossed a combined $1 billion in the process<\/a>. In the 2014 election cycle, the same consultants reaped more than $19.6 billion.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBig money campaign consultants on the GOP side are in the business of losing,\u201d former Kansas Congressman Tim Huelskamp told The Federalist. \u201cInvesting in the ground game makes campaign consultants almost no money \u2014 arguably it costs them money. On the other hand, hundreds of millions of ads put 10-15 percent of that total in hand of the media buyers\/consultants \u2013 and upwards of 30-50 percent of campaign mailers typically are profit.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>In the 2020 election cycle, for example, four Republican House candidates in dead-end campaigns <a href=\"https:\/\/www.axios.com\/2021\/03\/04\/republican-consultant-campaign-donations\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">raised over $42 million<\/a> combined but drew less than 30 percent of the vote in each of their races. A lot of that money went to pay consultants.<\/p>\n<p>Republican House candidate Kimberly Klacik raised more than $8 million in her bid to oust the popular Democratic incumbent. A single consulting firm <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/local\/md-politics\/klacik-gop-campaign-donations\/2021\/03\/02\/76300fde-7077-11eb-85fa-e0ccb3660358_story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">took almost half of it<\/a>, and Klacik <a href=\"https:\/\/www.axios.com\/2021\/03\/04\/republican-consultant-campaign-donations\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lost<\/a> her race by almost 50 points.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen the incentive is on the money-making, it\u2019s time for Republicans to reexamine this consultant class establishment that\u2019s been running Republican Party politics,\u201d Huelskamp said.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/axiomstrategies.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Axiom<\/a>, one of the top GOP consulting firms, grossed nearly $50 million this past federal election cycle \u2014 despite having a success rate of only 55 percent in both the primaries and the general \u2014 per the FEC.<\/p>\n<p>In just one example, in Arizona\u2019s Republican primary for U.S. Senate, Blake Masters defeated Jim Lamon by a resounding 12 points \u2014 after Lamon spent $13,829,274 on Axiom. <\/p>\n<p>On the local level, Republican Lauren Davis ran for county judge in Dallas County, Texas. After spending more than <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dallascounty.org\/government\/campaign-finance\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">$1 million<\/a> \u2014 roughly $600,000 of which went to Axiom \u2014 <a href=\"https:\/\/ballotpedia.org\/Lauren_Davis_(Texas)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">she lost by 25 points<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>Such bleak numbers are simply ignored by the political consulting class, which functions as a revolving door between congressional staff, GOP leadership PACs, and media consultants. Any Republican seeking higher office is immediately told which consulting firms and strategists he should hire<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Republicans must stop relying on the establishment-backed consulting class that&#8217;s addicted to losing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1130,"featured_media":1743859,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1743856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1743856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1130"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1743856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1743856\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1743859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1743856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1743856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1743856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}