A Medium article told the story of how a red Senate seat was flipped from red to blue. It was written by a political consulting firm, Middle Seat Consulting. This firm was managing the campaign to elect John Fetterman as Pennsylvania’s newest senator.
The article paints Pennsylvania as a red state. That is not quite true. Pennsylvania has had close senate elections for many years. Just because the Republicans have won more of the coin flips does not mean Pennsylvania is an easy win for the Republicans. Both parties move campaign resources into Pennsylvania from other parts of the country to win Pennsylvania elections. Even the Canadian media was fixated on this race.
The article points to the firm’s great achievement of how it moved the poll results of 49–49 to an election win of 51–47; i.e. a two percent swing. Almost as if Middle Seat Consulting had climbed Mt. Everest or turned a small pizza parlor into a national chain. For sure, many left-leaning political cheerleaders will claim this senate seat as a great victory, all thanks to Middle Seat Consulting.
But I say this article is just talk about self-promotion of a molehill. Should I mention that Republicans had a controversial candidate supported by a controversial former president? If Middle Seat was so great in changing public perception, should it not have reduced the Republican vote to 40%, taking this election out of coin-flip territory? Now that would have been an achievement!
The whole article is mostly marketing hype for Middle Seat Consulting to improve its profits in the next election cycle. For sure, it will charge higher fees next time. It may expand its operations into more campaigns. It could even work for the Republicans. Some of its professional workers can take their experience and reputation to another political consulting firm. With three or four election cycles, the principal people behind Middle Seat can comfortably retire. Their work is all about their self-interest, not the betterment of the USA!
At this point in this article, many readers will try to blame a lack of campaign finance regulations as the solution to this self-interest. While this should be a good topic for another discussion, I will agree that the USA has gone too crazy with how much money goes into election campaigns — and the explicit and implicit favors that come with these finances. The campaign finance advocates might look to Canada where there are more reasonable rules about campaign spending — and the Canadian political parties seem to be obeying those rules reasonably well. But this is not solving the problem this article is portraying. Let me explain with this example:
In 2015, Canada had a federal election. The Liberal Party hired an ad agency to create a series of very effective TV/social media commercials. These commercials turned the election from a projected Conservative majority government to a Liberal majority government. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been writing Canadian history for the past seven years — and he should be thanking the people who designed those commercials. They found the fickle people and flipped their neurons. This ad agency created a much bigger swing in Canada than Middle Seat Consulting did in Pennsylvania.
It really doesn’t matter whether the ad agency was paid $50,000 or $5,000,000. It has written Canadian history regardless of the fees it charged. In other words, having more sensible campaign finance rules did not take the influence away from manipulators of the media.
We need a new electoral system where the election experts hired by big money or by little money do not win elections.
Am I not right?
Published on Medium 2022
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