Pack Animals

This chapter focuses on how the Republican Party’s band of political operatives navigated the rise of Donald Trump. Political operatives are the professional campaign consultants, pollsters, media experts, fundraisers, and staffers who make a living by providing key services to their party and its candidates. Unlike the GOP national security experts or the conservative movement’s intelligentsia, Republican operatives who were publicly Never Trump cut against the grain of their professional network. Despite near-universal, albeit largely silent, opposition to Trump initially, most operatives dutifully fell in line once he became the presumptive nominee. Yet the small minority within the political operative world that refused to make their peace with him emerged as one of the brightest constellations in the Never Trump universe.

Pushing Citizens Aside

Democracy has always been an experiment in institutional design. From ancient Athens to the modern jury, democratic governance abounds with attempts to introduce citizens into governing processes. As chapter 2 shows, many of these institutional innovations, however, have been replaced with replicas that do little to empower the public. Even elite institutions designed for deliberative discussions, such as legislatures, have become beholden to partisan politics that result in a line-up of speakers with no listeners. Elections have suffered a similar fate with moneyed rhetoric and media behemoths focused on profit displacing informed discussion among citizens. The problem is exacerbated by the rising power of campaign consultants motivated to win at all costs and, most recently, the exceptional disregard for facts in recent populist campaigns, such as that of Donald Trump in 2016.

Inner Workings of Modern Campaigns

Major political campaigns, everything from big-city mayoral contests to presidential campaigns, rely on a battery of professional campaign consultants and operatives. Without these professionals, candidates would have a very difficult time navigating through the landmines and pitfalls of campaigns.

The Kennedy/Lombardi School

This chapter explores a range of responses to professional football as a cultural force: campaign consultants compared their efforts to playing the game and tallied won-lost records; politicians referred offhandedly to game plans and fourth quarters; journalists pondered what socially engaged sportswriting should cover and how to critique or resist the cultural/political dynamo that the NFL had constructed. The interconnections and affinities between football and politics provoked a huge, not always coherent range of attempts to grapple with this new culture. This new language did not simply pit left against right. Instead, the kinds of spectacle embodied in the new politics and football moved in multiple directions, empowering many different contestants to make themselves heard

What (or Who) Makes Campaigns Negative?

Previous work on negative political advertising focuses on candidate characteristics and electoral circumstances; it reveals inconsistencies in the effects of party, incumbency, gender, and competitiveness. I argue that one important set of variables has been excluded: the consulting firms who produce candidate advertising may influence negativity. I explain variation in attack ads and negativity across campaigns for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2002 and 2004, finding that particular consulting firms run more negative campaigns, regardless of electoral circumstances. Idiosyncratic preferences of campaign consultants thus influence the character of campaigns.

Political Consultants in U.S. Congressional Elections By Stephen K. Medvic. Columbus: Ohio State University, 2001. 224p. $50.00 cloth.

Political consultants have become an omnipresent part of the election landscape. Almost no prominent campaign emerges without a group of paid advisors who raise money, poll, design ads, and craft messages for the candidate. Yet despite the extensive visibility of campaign consultants, few empirical studies exist that attempt to measure the impact of this important player in American elections.