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The 2024 American Election, Part III

WHAT DOES ONE BILLION dollars buy you? A fleet of around 33 Dassault Falcon 7Xs, the same model of swish private jet Taylor Swift uses to hopscotch her way through the embers of the biosphere. A few weeks ago, you could’ve bailed out Alex Jones and Infowars from the Sandy Hook settlement by purchasing twenty million bottles of Brain Force Ultra, the non-FDA-approved super-potion Jones will tell you is his “secret weapon for increased energy” (he’s gonna need it, in bankruptcy court). For one thousand million bucks, you could have your pick of elite media outlets. The Atlantic and the Washington Post could be got for cheap with enough cash leftover to make sure Jonathan Chait never writes anything ever again. Alternatively, you could spend 666,666 (no, really) relaxing and relieving days at the Diaper Spa for adult babies run by Dr Colleen Ann Murphy of Atkinson, New Hampshire. Wiser counsel would suggest you can shit yourself in the comfort of your own home. But why bother when you can do it on the world stage? For a bargain, a horrifying parade of celebrities can slime their way across the nation on your dime, hymning your modest praises, clucking together the coconuts that trailed your freefall from the tree. Or you could spend one billion dollars smoothing the path of Donald Trump to his second term as president of the United States.

In 2010, the crooked sages of the Supreme Court ruled that there would be no limit at all on who could give money to a political campaign, or how much. Elections should be bought. Spend the most, win the most. Around ninety percent of all House races since Citizens United have been won by the candidate with the biggest bulging sack of coin. Yet on November 5, Kamala Harris did not triumph by the same margin she raised. There is so much money swilling around now that it no longer means anything. For if cash talked, if it were the only quality we noticed, the vice president should’ve earned twice as many votes as Trump. It sets a good precedent that she didn’t, because her defeat implies that politics is about something more than how loudly your pockets jingle. It suggests that money only has value if it can purchase an idea worth believing in, an enemy worth hating, or a candidate worth more than the price of a refill for her Xanax prescription.

The ads, the strategy, the grist of a campaign appears secondary to making sure the nexus of consultants, media buyers, fundraisers, and pollsters get to skim their cream from the top.

A billion dollars. That’s how much the Harris campaign pulled in. “We had so much money,” said Bakari Sellers, one of her close allies, “it was hard to get it out the door.” Nice problem to have, that – the kind usually faced by the likes of Tony Soprano, or Barry Seal. Yet out the door it went in a gushing torrent. So quick, in fact, that the DNC is rumoured to be $20million in debt, and staffers lower down the ladder of prestige-and-influence-peddling are not getting paid. Boss Tweed would’ve made sure no palms went ungreased, but we are long past the golden years of a binding network of patronage that at least got you one hot dinner around Christmastime.

Small beans for an entrée. After helping Barack Obama coast to re-election in 2012, Jen O'Malley Dillon founded Precision Strategies, a PR shop with a liberal-ish bent (liberal-ish in the sense of having both the ACLU and mass polluters General Electric among its clients). Dillon chaired the Harris campaign, while Precision pocketed $112,924. Harris’ senior political adviser Megan Krausman Jones, meanwhile, logged $157,000 to MKJ Consulting. A minor fraction of the $23million the campaign and its affiliated political action committees spent on consultants, but a largesse all the same for knob-twiddling hacks who delivered their candidate exactly zero swing states.

Gambit Strategies (yes, its real name) did fairly well from the election, netting $122million. One of its founders is Patrick McHugh, an ex-DNC apparatchik who, like Dillon, worked for Obama’s re-election. McHugh is also a former executive director of Priorities USA, a PAC that spent this campaign handing out anywhere between five and fifteen grand a pop to social media ‘influencers’ who had about the same amount of success nudging the public as Taylor Swift did with her posts. Another marketing house called Bully Pulpit Interactive (again, its real name) counts Walmart and McDonald’s among its clients, and has long been a revolving door through which Obama administration comms directors and data flunkies pass when they’re done living off the public teat. For their excellent work this election cycle, they received $101million. BPI also gives us a glimpse at the kind of undigested mash that passes as the language of their trade:

Marketing is known for beautiful creative and highly accountable metrics. Communications is known for handling complex topics at speed. Today, delivering outcomes requires merging the best of both. We combine the disciplines of the future. We are strategists, data scientists, and artists. We come from politics, brands, and government. Some are loyal to airlines or the Eurostar — others to Zoom.

Mostly it seems they are loyal to the rake-off and the back-slap which makes the Democratic machine so lucrative a venture for anyone able to access its richer reaches. And that machine, since Citizens United, now spans a fanning constellation of PACs outside the campaign and the DNC which appear to be useful clearinghouses for dodgy money to pass into the hands of insiders.

Future Forward is the largest. Really it is two entities: a non-profit called Future Forward USA Action with no obligation to disclose any sums, and a PAC also helpfully called Future Forward. The latter raised a galling $900million during the 2024 campaign – in addition to the flat billion raised by Harris HQ. And like Dillon’s operation, it spread the cash around its own bosses. Here was a tasty $7.2million for GCJ Research, a firm named after Jon Fromowitz, Gaurav Shirole, and Chauncey McLean – each of them founders of Future Forward. McLean and Fromowitz together own PFB Media which took $524,606 in fees from that same Future Forward. Round and round it goes: each of these founders also work for Open Labs, which raked in $759,707. The ads, the strategy, the real grist of a campaign appears secondary to making sure the same nexus of consultants, media buyers, fundraisers, and pollsters get to skim their cream from the top.

Meanwhile, the Harris campaign coughed up $900,000 for a week’s splash on the Sphere in Las Vegas. In exchange, Nevada became only the state in the US that voted against Trump in the previous two elections yet voted for him in 2024. It also spent something like $2.5million building an elaborate set so Harris could have a chat with Oprah Winfrey in September. Oprah swears she didn’t pocket those bucks herself. Oh no, it only went to the production company she owns. Meanwhile Rahm Emmanuel is being touted as the next DNC chair despite (allegedly) using advance knowledge of trade deals in his capacity as ambassador to Japan to (allegedly) pocket six-figure sums from stock trades. If we’re getting Vietnam without the Great Society, it seems we’re also getting little Hope for no Change.

Two days after the election, Rebecca Solnit appeared in the Guardian to blame Americans for being American. This intellectual figurehead of The Resistance summoned her inner Brecht and suggested the Democrats should try electing a new people as this lot wasn’t fit for purpose. It was, Solnit wrote, “our mistake” to think “we lived in a better country than we do.” The “lost boys and Maga women,” you see, were gagging for “an authoritarian leader.” No one likes a loser, least of all one so petty. But this complaint about the character of conservatives – duped, biddable, hoodwinked – is never inverted. Because aren’t reliable, dependable, consistent voters for the Democratic party just as willing to swoon for the leader and reach reflexively for their wallets? Aren’t they in their poptimism and virtue and habitual patriotism the happy victims of a four-yearly shakedown? That billion dollars raised by Harris – and the extra billion raised by Future Forward – is your cash, and you have the right to withhold your consent until someone can tell you what it bought beyond bigger martini bills in the beltway.

We’ve been putting it off, but it’s time to finally ask: What is the Democratic party? Maybe once it was a political organisation, a mobilisation machine, a bastion of liberalism. Today, it is a closed-shop circus of pelf, pilfering, graft, grift, gratuity, and kickback. A mechanism for rich people to spread money around other rich people. A for-profit non-profit. A protection racket for elite benefit. A cartel to launder your cash. A propaganda bureau that can’t even manufacture consent for its own mediocrity. A self-justifying system that has no interests or instincts beyond its survival. One long human caterpillar of three-card tricksters, craven lobbyists, boondogglers, snobs, lanyards, and war criminals. Occasionally it contends for high office and even less occasionally wins it. The Democratic party exists to steal your money and give you nothing in return.

To be continued…