Because savvy consultants like the folks profiting from Marcus Flowers’ doomed campaign against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have figured out how to milk them dry.
Whatever else happens on Election Day next month, I can already name some of the biggest winners from this political cycle. They are the Democratic consultants milking the doomed congressional campaign of Marcus Flowers, a veteran who is running against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia’s 14th congressional district. As of the end of June, Flowers had raised $10.7 million compared to Greene’s $10.2 million, but don’t let that fool you. He’s going to lose the general election to her. In their respective party primaries, 103,000 Republicans voted (most for Greene) compared to just 27,000 Democrats. Redistricting after the 2020 elections, when Greene won her seat by more than 50%, made the district a tiny bit less red but it is still an overwhelmingly Republican seat, 69% to 31% according to a report by Princeton’s Gerrymandering Project..
No matter! Democratic donors, particularly the small givers who write $20 checks, hate Greene with a passion and they’re suckers for emotional appeals designed to convince them that Flowers has a chance. Almost 84% of the money Flowers has raised has come in amounts under $200, according to OpenSecrets.org. Just under $1.9 million has come in larger amounts. The smart money knows to stay away from him. So do local donors, who have amounted to less than one percent of all his itemized receipts, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. They know better too. The suckers get a constant flow of messages like these:
“We’re building something special here in Georgia,” one of those emails reads. Indeed, they are. The consultants behind his campaign are building a college fund for their kids, or a retirement nest egg, or a down payment on a ski lodge. Very special.
Who are the people profiting from this exploitation? One of them is Anne Lewis of Mission Wired (previously known as Anne Lewis Strategies) whose firm has received $700,000 from Flowers for direct mail fundraising since the beginning of last year through June 30, 2022. Catherine Herrick and Nathaniel Kronisch, the principals of Buying Time LLC, have made out like bandits, collecting $1,506,211 for paid advertising, which on a 15% commission means a rough payout of more than $200,000. Run the World, another digital advertising firm run by Heather Colburn (a former major gifts director for EMILY’s List), has been paid $1,260,000 so far. But none has pocketed more from Flowers’ excessively gullible campaign contributors than Bobby Kaple and Michael Carcaise of Blue Chip Strategies, a media and digital fundraising firm that has been paid more than $3,390,000 from the Flowers campaign.
That’s right, two-thirds of the money collected by Flowers has gone to just four firms.
It’s a cozy world these folks live in. For example, Lewis, who was the deputy executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, billed the DSCC $28.6 million in the 2020 cycle for her firm’s services.
Herrick, who ran paid media for the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign, was in charge of buying ads for the DNC in 2000 and 2004 and more recently in 2016 handled the giant Priorities USA PAC’s account. In 2020, Tom Steyer’s president campaign ran $186 million though Buying Time while Jon Ossoff spent $96 million on advertising through them. She’s also very good at working for doomed Democratic candidates, collecting $35 million for Amy McGrath’s extremely well-funded but never-gonna-happen campaign against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that cycle. (She’s also named in an FEC complaint filed by the rightwing Campaign Legal Center for allegedly violating campaign finance laws preventing independent campaign committees from coordinating with political candidates, placing something like an additional $7 million in ads for an outside group while her firm was also handling McGrath’s own broadcast ads.)
It seems though, that you don’t have to be hyper-connected in politics to cash in on the gullibility of small campaign donors. Kaple of Blue Chip Strategies styles himself as a political strategist and commentator on Twitter, and he does have some experience as a TV anchor and failed 2018 Congressional candidate. Carcaise, his partner, seems to have done some work related to medical malpractice in the past. But hey, now they’re the guys helping Marcus Flowers burn his name into the history books.
Unfortunately, thousands of ordinary grassroots Democrats are lighting their own money on fire to help light the way.
Want to give your money more wisely? Take a look at the recommendations made by BlueTent.us, which is keeping close track on congressional and state legislative races and can tell you which ones can actually benefit from a late infusion of cash.