In the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat, recriminations have flourished inside the Democratic Party with different factions blaming different policies or groups to explain the loss. Critics, however, describe a deeper structural problem with how the modern Democratic Party runs campaigns, which lines the pockets of party insiders, bloats campaign budgets and boxes out influences from outside party elites.

The Harris campaign broke campaign finance records, raising nearly a billion dollars, but ending the race $20 million in debt, spending millions on consultants and hundreds of millions of dollars on paid media.

While most political strategists agree that some spending on paid media is necessary to win a campaign in 2024, Faiz Shakir, a senior advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told Salon that the Harris campaign's spending profile is indicative of a structural issue with how the Democratic Party approaches paid media and political strategy. 

According to Shakir, Democratic strategists often see cutting a new 30-second ad as a sort of cure-all to a campaign’s problems and a way for campaigns to address a weakness without re-evaluating the message or stances they’ve taken. “There’s no room you walk into in which saying we should run an ad sounds like bad advice," he said. 

“The 30-second ad being pushed by media consultants is often seen as the easiest way to solve a problem, even if it won’t solve that problem,” Shakir told Salon. “The bigger problem to me is when there is a flaw or problem in the campaign it often wrongly becomes understood that there is a 30-second ad that can cure it. If we have a problem with Latino men, or young people or working-class people in Pennsylvania, how about another 30-second ad for that?”

Shakir summed up the issue saying that “there is often a product problem and not a sales problem” with Democratic campaigns. However, there is another side to the problem with paid media, in Shakir’s view. At every step in the process of making an ad, everyone is taking their cut.

“The opportunity to make money off of the firm that has created 30-second ads and the person who has placed the ads is ripe for abuse because there are hundreds of millions of dollars going into it and everyone is taking their skim,” Shakir said. “There’s a huge escalation every step of the way because of a skim at every level.” 

According to Shakir, it doesn’t have to work this way but media firms and campaigns often push for more expensive production strategies like more shoots, or oversaturating airwaves, because it’s an opportunity for everyone to get paid. In some cases, Shakir said, even senior campaign staff will get a cut of ad spending.

This way of doing paid media where the cost escalates at every step of the process is how campaigns end up like Harris’, spending upwards of $690 million on paid media. According to an analysis by The Times, outside groups supporting Harris spent even more on paid media, $2.5 billion.

President-elect Donald Trump trolled Harris' campaign about its exorbitant ad spending after his victory tweeting that "I am very surprised that the Democrats, who fought a hard and valiant fight in the 2020 Presidential Election, raising a record amount of money, didn’t have lots of $’s left over."

“Now they are being squeezed by vendors and others. Whatever we can do to help them during this difficult period, I would strongly recommend we, as a Party and for the sake of desperately needed UNITY, do,” Trump tweeted. “We have a lot of money left over in that our biggest asset in the campaign was 'Earned Media,' and that doesn’t cost very much. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"

Reviewing the ad spending from the Harris campaign, it’s clear that the bulk of the money was funneled through firms run or owned by Democratic Party insiders. For example, Media Buying and Analytics LLC, received upwards of $281 million for media production and ad buys from the Harris campaign in the 2024 cycle and is owned by Canal Media Partners, according to Business Insider, a firm that has worked with hundreds of Democratic campaigns and was founded by Bobby Khan, who has been in and out of Democratic politics since the early 1990s.

Many of the FEC filings documenting payments from the Harris campaign to Media Buying and Analytics lump together media production and buying, meaning it’s impossible to distinguish how much the firm is being paid to create media for the campaign versus how much it is spending on air time and what sort of commission the firm is making on those ad buys.

Other big Democratic firms like Gambit Strategies LLC and Bully Pulpit LLC also made out handsomely, receiving more than $122 million and $101 million in disbursements from the Harris campaign respectively. Gambit Strategies was founded by Megan Clasen and Patrick McHugh, with Clasen coming out of Hillary Clinton’s campaigns and McHugh having worked for a super PAC supporting former President Barack Obama’s re-election, Priorities USA.

In what might have foreshadowed the 2024 campaign, Priorities USA published 2021 a memo criticizing the bloat in ad spending in Democratic campaigns titled “How Democrats Can Optimize Media Spending And Stop Wasting Millions.”

One Democratic strategist, who worked on a campaign for the House this cycle also described a dynamic where media firms will try to convince candidates or campaign staff that the reason races are lost is because they got buried by paid media opposing them. While this is sometimes plausible, like in the New York primary against Democrat Jamaal Bowman, it also results in campaigns spending on paid media, even when a race isn’t competitive or when they're not going up against the deluge of spending against them, as Bowman did.

According to Shakir, however, the problems with the Democratic Party’s structure and the way it runs campaigns go beyond just media consultants and the party’s love of paid ads. The core issue, as Shakir puts it, is that the party political operations are a closed loop with well-off consultants, politicians and donors all taking advice from each other with little outside input.

“We have a working-class problem in the Democratic Party and when you have wealthy consultants talking to wealthy donors who are all living in an elite bubble, it can become detached from what messages will resonate with people who aren't in the elite bubble,” Shakir said. “You can be a good person with good character trying to do the right thing to try and help Kamala Harris win but when you are surrounded by monied interests you have to figure out how you don't become bubblized.”

Gabe Tobias, a veteran strategist who has worked on insurgent Democratic campaigns for candidates like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Rep. Cori Bush in Missouri, told Salon that he sees the influence of people like Reid Hoffman, billionaire founder of LinkedIn, as exemplary of this dynamic. 

“Reid Hoffman is emblematic of the problem of wealthy donors being the ones steering the party,” Tobias said. “He’s just a rich dude, why does he have so much of a say in what the party does?”

Hoffman was one of a few business moguls who seemed to have sway at the Harris campaign, attending meetings like “Business Leaders for Harris,” which featured both the billionaire and campaign staff like policy director Grace Landrieu and campaign deputy chief of staff Sergio Gonzalez, as reported by The American Prospect.

“Reid Hoffman needs to be a servant to a larger policy-making platform and not a decision maker in it,” Tobias said. “The scary part is that no one is. These wealthy donors are inserting themselves when they feel like it.”

Tobias described a dynamic where campaign staff and candidates are hesitant to publicly push back on the assertions of billionaire donors like Hoffman, even if the campaign doesn't intend to let them direct policy.

Tobias indicated that the apparent influence of the super-wealthy has a dual effect. It undermines the Democratic Party’s support from its traditional base by steering policy discussions away from economically populist ideas that go against the interest of the wealthy, while simultaneously helping support candidates who are charismatic but don’t come into politics with a consistent ideological framework. 

The influence of billionaires was directly early in Harris’ bid for the presidency when moguls like Mark Cuban warned the Harris campaign that a billionaire tax, for example, would be too aggressive, according to the Washington Post. Other business executives, like Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber and Harris’ brother-in-law, also served as advisors and, according to the Atlantic, helped steer the campaign away from criticism of corporate power.

In Tobias’ opinion, the Democratic Party needs to put forth candidates who either outright turn down business executives with divergent interests from working-class Americans or candidates who will at least force them into a position where they are not influencing policy or the campaign. He says the seats at the table currently occupied by people like West, Cuban and Hoffman should instead be occupied by people that, at the very least, represent popular constituencies, like the president of the AFL-CIO.

The problem, as Tobias puts it, is that Democratic campaigns have become reliant on the money of billionaires because years of attempting to appease wealthy donors via policy concessions have hollowed out the party’s base of support.

“There isn’t a base for them to easily turn out or mobilize around so they’re forced to rely on big money to help them win elections,” Tobias said.

Joe Radinovich, a veteran campaign strategist out of Minnesota, described another way in which donors influence policy and campaign decisions however, and one where they don’t even necessarily need to explicitly pressure a campaign to take certain positions.

Radinovich said that candidates and campaign staff are often forced into conversations with donors in the context of fundraisers because of the expenses of political campaigning, conversations which are longer and more in-depth than any conversation a candidate will have with average voters.

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There are also coalitional issues. In attempting to appeal to wealthier suburbanites, Democrats have steered messaging to cater to them, which often muddles the message the party is sending, sometimes at the cost of focusing on issues that may be more salient to the working class.

“There was the pre-Trump coalition, which was built on working-class people, and the post-Trump coalition, which was wealthier, college-educated people with concerns about democracy,” Radinovich said.

At the same time, the people running the campaigns are incentivized to make  “small ‘c’ conservative” decisions when designing campaign strategy, because, while their goal is to win the election, they also must, for the sake of their career, be able to explain all of their decisions in the event of a loss.

These “small ‘c’ conservative” choices might, for instance, include deciding to run a new 30-second ad or hiring consultants that have won campaigns in the past. The calculation, Radinovich said, often comes down to the fact that “they’re worried about their jobs and their future jobs.”

The Harris campaign did hire some familiar consulting groups, which are often also owned or staffed by Democratic Party insiders. All told, the Harris campaign alone spent nearly $13 million on consultants in the 2024 campaign, and the Harris campaign combined with the largest super PACS supporting her election effort spent around $23 million on consultants.

For example Precision Strategies, a firm founded by Jen O'Malley Dillon, the campaign chair for Biden and later Harris, also received some $112,924. David Plouffe, the campaign manager for Obama’s 2008 campaign who went on to work at the Chan Zuckerburg Initiative and Uber after leaving the White House, also serves as counsel at Precision Strategies. Plouffe later returned to politics, working on the Harris campaign.

Carla Frank LLC, a firm apparently named after longtime Biden aide Carla Frank, also received over $100,000, according to federal filings. MKJ Consulting, apparently named after the initials of one-time Harris aide Megan Krausman Jones, received $157,000 during the 2024 campaign. 

While these consultants and campaign strategies are sometimes enough to get Democrats elected, they don’t address the more fundamental problem with the Democratic brand, which Radinovich says has often gone unexamined, especially since President-elect Donald Trump first won in 2016.

 “To me, one of the takeaways from this large amount of spending on the Harris campaign is that the amount of media couldn’t overcome a brand issue,” Radinovich said. “Trump created a situation where there was a lot of reaction to him that benefited us and there wasn’t enough reflection on whether people liked us or just didn’t like him.” 

Some strategists who worked on the Harris campaign but wished to remain anonymous pushed back on the notion that she didn’t focus on economic issues and suggested that headwinds like inflation would make it difficult for any incumbent to win. They did, however, often agree that the Democratic Party has a brand problem that has been building for years, but which Harris stood little chance of solving in her 107-day campaign, a brand problem in that it's unclear what the central tent pole of the party is.

Shakir summed up the problem: “It’s the influence of money, which is absolutely a cancer.” 

“You have to be aware that the monied influence isn’t helping,” Shakir said. “There is a world where good monied influence might have been helping you but that’s just not where we’re at with the modern Democratic Party and modern Democratic consultants.”

Shakir did, however, offer a reason for optimism: Democrats across the ideological spectrum “from Blue Dog Democrats to the Bernie wing” are realizing that the needs of working-class people need to be in the driver's seat of future campaigns.