Kamala Harris ran a disastrous presidential campaign that cost a billion dollars – but the elites of the Swamp made out like bandits. It sounds like the political version of Wall Street villain Gordon Gekko raiding a company for its over-funded pension plan. Only, instead of working stiffs getting the shaft, it is all those trusting Democrat donors who desperately yearned to defeat the dreaded Donald Trump.
Decisively defeated Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris managed to blow through more than $1 billion in less than four months after replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the blue ticket. Yet the circle involved in this spending orgy is remarkably small. Just four firms closely associated with the party’s Swamp establishment gobbled up nearly $600 million of that bloated war chest, The Washington Free Beacon reported Nov. 25.
Given that it has now been revealed that internal Harris campaign polling never had her ahead of her Republican rival even as a friendly big-box media duplicitously promoted the notion of an excruciatingly close race, and with time to absorb the dismal results of Nov. 5, one question should be racing through the minds of all those who helped fund this debacle: Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
In It for the Money?
“Seventy percent of the [Harris] campaign’s known total spending flowed through four firms: Media Buying & Analytics, Gambit Strategies, Bully Pulpit Interactive, and Dupont Circle Strategies,” the Free Beacon observed.
Those four companies appear to share an overriding trait: They are helmed by well-connected veteran Democrat political insiders.
Media Buying & Analytics is owned by a company run by Bobby Kahn, who the Free Beacon details is “a longtime Democratic political activist who made his name running the gubernatorial campaigns of former Georgia Democratic governor Roy E. Barnes in 1998 and 2002. He was later elected chairman of the Democratic Party of Georgia.”
Media Buying & Analytics collected a whopping $281 million from the Harris campaign.
Megan Clasen, a founding partner of Gambit Strategies, has worked in media and advertising capacities for Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run, and Illinois Democrat Gov. JB Pritzker’s 2018 team, the paper notes. Another founding partner, Patrick McHugh, has “held senior roles at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and several Democratic campaigns.”
Gambit hauled in a $122 million windfall conducting media services for a media-shy Kamala Harris.
Bully Pulpit Interactive has used its Democrat political roots to forge out a role as a leading global marketing services corporation. The firm founded by former Barack Obama operative Andrew Bleeker today boasts big-brand clients such as General Mills, Goldman Sachs, McDonalds, the NCAA, golf’s PGA Tour and Walmart.
The Harris campaign paid BPI a cool $101 million.
The ownership of Dupont Circle Strategies is more murky, the Free Beacon states, yet “public records indicate” the company “could share ties with Chong and Koster, a [Washington,] DC-based Democratic consulting firm.” Chong and Koster has “worked closely” with the Democrat National Committee since 2016, the paper writes.
“[I]n late 2023, [Chong and Koster] performed some political strategy consulting for the Harris campaign,” the paper reports. “But the Harris campaign’s payments to Chong and Koster dried up in December 2023. The following month, in January 2024, Harris campaign dollars started flowing into the newly formed Dupont Circle Strategies by the millions for ad production and placement, FEC records show.”
Dupont Circle Strategies made more than $94 million on the Kamala cash bonanza.
The conclusion is inescapable: an awful lot of Democrat voters are devastated over Harris’s resounding loss while a select few blue power players are grinning from ear to ear.
Conned By Kamala?
Will progressives who gritted their teeth and reluctantly checked a box for 48-year Swamp veteran Joe Biden in 2020 and anointed-without-a-primary Kamala Harris in 2024 now stop to ponder how an intimate pack of political careerists monetized their anti-Trump zealotry? These were the people who were told repeatedly that they had to coalesce around the DNC establishment to keep “the greatest threat to democracy in American history” from “seizing power.”
One leading Democrat megadonor certainly feels burned. John Morgan, who made his fortune as a trial lawyer, told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo on Nov. 25 that all that money being shoveled into Team Kamala’s coffers fueled a feeding frenzy.
“All of a sudden, everybody’s got the keys to the candy store, ad buyers, talent consultants. There’s 100 days to do it, and the money started pouring in,” Morgan said.
A glance at Bully Pulpit Interactive’s website spells out how shallow these “media buys” could be. The firm touts its skill at harnessing social media influencers to boost client images. Fast food giant McDonald’s is a showcase example, as BPI says it uses “influencer communications” to “drive brand trust.”
“We drove persuasion-level frequencies, leading to broad-based gains both on favorability and on the perception that McDonald’s ‘serves food I feel good about eating,’” the company claims.
Kamala’s brand shelled out $100 million for buzz slang like this.
Did they think it would work? Did that ever matter? The internal polling told a grim story, yet millions of dollars were squandered on tacky endeavors such as projecting Harris’s face onto The Sphere, an enormous arena on the Las Vegas Strip.
Kamala Harris was the standard-bearer for what in time may be regarded as the most breathtakingly shallow presidential campaign in American history. But for a coterie of comfortable Democrats residing within the DNC orbit, there are a billion reasons and more not to feel the least bit ashamed about that.
