A candidate for new head of the DCCC, Sean Patrick Maloney, is promising a major overhaul of the House Demococratic campaign apparatus.
He is claiming that it is inefficient, ineffective, and technologically moribund.
He may be sincere, but inefficiency is money in the pockets on the consultants, who cycle through the Democratic Party establishment’s (There is no Democratic Party establishment) functionary positions, so anything that he tries will be fought tooth and nail by the staff:
The polling is antiquated. Money is being frittered. Diversity is lacking. And digital outreach lags far behind the times.
These are the warnings from Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, a four-term New York Democrat who’s vying to lead the party’s campaign arm in the next Congress.
Democrats are expecting a tough environment in the 2022 midterms, and Maloney’s message is a foreboding one: Modernize the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), he says, or President-elect Joe Biden will be battling a House under Republican control come 2023.
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To move the party into the future, Maloney is vowing to listen to younger progressives when it comes to social media and digital outreach; to shift away from “stuffy old traditional crappy polling” and adopt community-based focus groups; and to reject the idea that big fundraising hauls are synonymous with election success — a formula that didn’t play out this year, when Democrats raised historic amounts of campaign cash but still lost House seats.
“When I look at the amount of money that the major committees on both sides and independent groups deployed this cycle, I think there must be a big room in Washington somewhere where they bring big bags of money and burn it. Because I don’t know what the hell anybody got out of it,” Maloney said.
The consultants get their kid’s tuition to tony private schools out of it.
“We have been seduced by this notion that big money and big TV wins elections, and I just don’t see the evidence for that,” he added.
The consultants get a proportion of the ad buy, so the consultants go for the most expensive media buys possible. KA-CHING!!!
Maloney will square off with Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-Calif.) in an internal, secret-ballot election that will decide who becomes the next DCCC chairman. That vote is scheduled after Thanksgiving.
Cárdenas, 57, who’s run the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s (CHC) campaign arm Bold PAC for the past six years, has pitched himself as a proven fundraiser and someone who can help Democrats make up lost ground with the tens of thousands of Hispanic voters who backed President Trump this year in places like Texas and Florida.
Well, we know who the consultants will support.