The latest round of Democratic Party recriminations is in.
The finger, this time, is pointed at Future Forward, the top super PAC that backed Vice President Kamala Harris’ doomed election campaign.
A dozen Democratic operatives and donors familiar with the PAC’s operations spoke to The Wall Street Journal, alleging the “‘Wizard of Oz’-like operation” that raised nearly $1 billion rejected outside feedback, ignored warnings that Harris’s support with voters of color was slipping, and resisted running negative ads targeting President-elect Donald Trump.
“That was a fundamental mistake,” one Democrat told the newspaper, of Future Forward’s hesitance to go negative. “The Trump campaign was able to repair Trump’s image with the electorate.”
Instead, the PAC spent roughly $400 million on “contrast” ads, the Journal reported, a significant portion of which were focused on saying Trump would give tax cuts to the rich.
Run by a group of former Obama campaign aides and backed by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Future Forward pitched itself as an analytics-savvy shop that followed the numbers from millions of surveys it ran, as well as dozens of focus groups.
This, the Journal reported, led to Future Forward producing 20 ads for every one that actually made it to air.
“It was Billy Beane’s ‘Moneyball’ without Billy Beane,” a Democrat told the Journal.
Future Forward also reportedly kept its powder dry for too long, concentrating its behemoth ad spending in the final weeks of the campaign.
Its own internal research and some academic studies suggested the impact of ads fades over time, but while that theory was allowed to play out Democrats on the ground were crying for help.
Quentin James, president of Collective PAC, which advocates for Black representation in politics, told the Journal he warned Future Forward that they needed to reach out to voters of color earlier and beyond traditional media.
“That’s what’s frustrating—the gaslighting,” he said, noting he was brushed off with the claim that the PAC’s analytics told them their strategy was doing just fine. “Why are the red flags we are raising not coming up in your testing, or is it you are ignoring them?”
Future Forward gave Collective PAC $250,000 to the beginning of October.
“The thing I’m really concerned about moving forward in Democratic politics is who gets to decide what the strategy is if we have a billion dollars?” James said.
Officials with Future Forward officials told the Journal they stood by their decision-making, which they believed was based on sound testing.
