Fire the Consultants

The Democratic Party will win this fall in spite of the consultants, not because of them

I am an OG hater of the Democratic party consultant class. Hovering somewhere between useless and completely out of touch, the party's consultants are obsessed with charts, technology, and polling rather than persuading voters.

Earlier this week, a video of Maine Senate candidate Troy Jackson went viral on the bad website (I know, I know). The video featured Jackson reacting to someone off camera mentioning Susan Collins' TV ad spend while sipping on a boba tea. It was meant to show that the candidate was unbothered, but instead it came across as very odd.

In a previous life, Jackson was a logger in northern Maine. Despite being president of the State Senate for 6 years, his logger identity is almost always mentioned in all of his own videos. But in what world does a Maine logger ever be caught dead sipping boba tea?

Now don't get me wrong, there are boba tea places in Maine. I used to work in downtown Portland and there were several within walking distance back then, but it strikes me as odd that someone on Jackson's campaign thought it was a good idea to pair boba tea with a candidate trying to burnish his credentials as a blue collar logging man.

The boba tea video trend was initially a Tik Tok trend several years ago, and Raphael Warnock famously produced his own organic boba themed video that received praise for taking advantage of an internet trend. But the boba tea trend hasn't been a thing in years now.

And I can't stress enough, Maine is the whitest and oldest state in the union. Your candidate is a former logger. What are you doing??

According to a great deep dive written by Rebecca Traister for New York Magazine, Jackson's initially populist campaign has been hijacked by a group of out of state consultants. The consultants have kept the candidate away from contact with Maine voters, instead opting for high dollar out of state fundraisers and hokey, mismatched bits like the boba tea ad. Of the 30 days of September, Jackson was out of state for 14 of them, mostly attending big dollar fundraisers.

After the previous candidate, Graham Platner, swept through the Democratic primaries on an anti-Israel platform, Jackson's consultants hired Impact Research, one of AIPAC's leading polling firms, to run polling for the campaign.

According to Traister, Jackson has surrounded himself with a core group of Democratic party consultants who have a track record for losing elections. Communications Director Dan Gottlieb's only previous candidate work (according to his LinkedIn) was with Colin Allred, who got blown out last election cycle by Ted Cruz.