I’ve spent much of the time since the 2024 election devouring every report on what went wrong. So when I saw the Blue by 2032 report, I dove right in. For those who don’t know what it is, while the DNC appears to have disavowed the project, Blue by 2032 is the result of the DNC’s post-election analysis - and specifically Paul Rivera’s work. It’s all available online now, and I encourage folks to download and read it.
Full Disclosure: I’ve known Paul Rivera for over twenty years, and he isn’t the character much of the coverage has made him out to be these past few months. He’s smart, strategic, and cares deeply about this party. I’ve known Ken Martin just as long, and of course, he does, too. I don’t know what happened between them, but I care about the work they’ve done to learn what happened and how we can do better.
At 560+ pages long, there is a lot to digest in it. I don’t pretend to have finished it all yet. But my cursory read led me to a few specific things I was looking for, and I was glad to see them included. The accountability this report is asking for doesn’t exist in this industry for any of us. That’s what I want to help fix. At GAIN Power, we’re building real answers to questions like that one — and looking for partners and leaders who want to help build it with us.
The report raises many issues that should alarm everyone who cares about our party. It also lays out a real set of recommendations, and it deserves to be read in full, not skimmed for the parts that made headlines.
I’ve focused my attention on the pieces we might help implement: what they say about consultants, training, and staff talent. That’s the corner we know best — and the one that is aligned with our mission at GAIN Power. Today I’m focused on consultants. I’m also a political consultant. A proud one who always wants to be better. And I know we have many problems in our community that need to be improved. We have to be part of fixing it - but let’s be honest, we’ll won’t self-regulate unless forced. So this must be a community effort. If the organizations hiring consultants don’t take a leading role in reform, change will never happen either.
Nearly two-thirds of all Democratic candidate spending moved through just 30 firms. More than 75% of independent-expenditure spending moved through 10. That’s not a fringe complaint. That’s the shape of the entire market. His own recommendation to party leadership is to broaden and diversify the strategist ecosystem — too much money and judgment sitting with too few people, for too long, for anyone to keep calling it normal.
Always spot on, Amanda Litman got at the same problem from a completely different angle, and it’s worth reading her July post alongside Rivera’s numbers. She answered a question so many ask:
Her main point is that no one is held accountable — not donors, not candidates, not committees, and certainly not the consultants. Maine’s Senate race was her occasion for writing it — a strategist’s theory of the case, unaccountable to anyone, that collapsed in public with control of the Senate on the line — but the piece is bigger than that one race, and so is the pattern.
That’s not a knock on any individual person. Litman’s right that most consultants aren’t grifters, and I’d go further: they are some of the sharpest, most talented people I know who are in this business, doing work they believe in for causes they care about. I’ve spent almost three decades in it myself. This isn’t outside commentary. It’s the view from inside a system I’ve participated in, profited from, and want to change.
I’ll say this plainly: I love this work. I love campaigns, I love the people who do it well, I love the moments when it actually helps someone good win. And so much about how this industry actually operates is genuinely awful. Both things are true at once, and pretending otherwise is part of how we got here.
The problem isn’t just some people. There is no organization or site in this industry that tells you, before you hire someone, whether they’re good at the job, what their reputation is like, and whether they perform and deliver. This isn’t just about win-loss records. It is about what they charge and how they charge, what they really do, whether they went where they promised, and so much more. This is about much more than media buy — it is about fundraising tools, data, technology, organizing, and communications. There is no place to find all the consultant marketing campaigns and services, to see who they have worked for, and to compare them to one another in any way.
Consultants become celebrities when candidates win. Candidates and campaign staff take the blame when they lose. Neither tells you enough about what actually happened, what worked, or what a future campaign should do differently. The result is an accountability system built on reputation instead of evidence.
I heard a version of the same thing again, more recently, from an entirely different angle. Movement Voter Project ran a session on this at Netroots Nation this year, based on more than 100 conversations they’d had across the Democratic ecosystem. What stood out to me wasn’t any single number. It was how many people they’d talked to who just want the culture around consultants to actually change — less patronage, more honesty about fees and performance, real consequences when someone doesn’t deliver or doesn’t act in good faith. Three different sources. Three different methods. Same conclusion.
It’s tempting to make this about one party committee, one staffer, one bad hire. It’s bigger than that, and honestly, that’s the more useful way to think about it, because it means there’s something real to build instead of someone to blame.
The DNC has real leverage over the vendors it hires directly. So does every other party committee, every PAC, every union, every foundation writing checks to consultants right now. None of them can fix this alone, because the problem doesn’t live inside any one of their contracts — it lives in the informal referral networks, the retainer structures, and the total absence of anywhere to check a firm’s actual track record before you sign, that Litman, Rivera, and MVP are all independently describing. A code that any single committee adopts binds only the people spending that committee’s money. The rest of the ecosystem — which, per Rivera’s own numbers, is most of it — just keeps operating exactly the way it always has.
I don’t think reforms will work because everyone suddenly gets persuaded to be more ethical. Litman’s right that the incentive structure is what has to change, not people’s character. That takes actual infrastructure: a place to check a firm’s record before you hire them, standards firms and their clients build together instead of standards imposed from outside, and real consequences that follow a firm from one cycle into the next instead of disappearing the day after the election, the way they have for every consultant who worked 2024.
That instinct — to actually sit down after an election and ask what happened, honestly, while it’s still fresh — isn’t unique to Rivera’s report. It’s the same instinct behind RootsCamp, the movement’s own post-election debrief, which has anchored this work since 2006 and which GAIN Power and Global GAIN brought back in 2025 after it had gone dark: the room where the people who just ran a campaign teach the people about to run the next one what actually worked, win, lose, or draw. RootsCamp exists because those lessons — organizing, digital, field, comms, and yes, who campaigns hired and how it actually went — evaporate every single cycle unless somebody builds a room for them to land in. Different format, same instinct: institutional memory that survives past election day.
We’re on a mission to do ROOTSCAMP (s) again - and to talk more seriously about programmatically addressing the consultant class/consultant industrial complex, whatever you want to call it. We have ideas and want to hear from others.
The Atlas Project once provided research and resources that strengthened our entire political ecosystem. We should bring back something with that ambition: a trusted, shared source of campaign intelligence, not another report that sits online untouched like a book gathering dust on a shelf. Every election should leave behind knowledge that makes the next campaign stronger.
This is part of a project we’ve been building at GAIN Power. More details on it live here. For now, the first piece of it — a real, searchable place to see who you’re actually hiring will be live by election day. It won’t change anything for the midterms, but it will be a place to capture who worked for whom and how they performed.
We’d love your feedback on this and more of our professional development programs today.
Litman ended her piece by saying consultants shouldn’t be the driving force behind our campaigns, and candidates should be the ones with the backbone. I’d add one thing to that: nobody gets to have real accountability without somewhere real to be accountable to. Right now, that place doesn’t exist. We’re building it. If this speaks to you:
The midterms are just two and a half months out, and the next presidential race starts almost the moment they’re over. I believe we can do hard things, and before we enter another multibillion-dollar cycle with so much at stake, we must.
If this is a problem you think about too — whether you’re a consultant, candidate, campaign manager, or just someone who wants this industry to work better — I want to hear from you. We’re still shaping this. Reply to this post, join our new Slack channel, or reach out directly; this works better built with us, not just for us.
We need more spaces to talk about these issues out loud, instead of only at happy hours and in DMs. We won’t solve any of this perfectly, and I don’t think anyone could. But it’s a start, and a start is more than this industry has had in a long time.
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