Last week on the phone with my partner Marie, I faced a long-overdue reality: I’m unemployed. Not underemployed or thin on clients, but the worst kind of jobless: self-employed, with no health coverage or access to unemployment benefits. Realistically, the field in which I’ve worked for almost two decades no longer provides income.
I was a Democratic opposition researcher for 18 years. I was part of Democrats retaking Congress in 2006, and I’ve elected mayors in several major cities. I’ve forgotten how many headlines my work has created, and how many campaigns I’ve been on. I’ve been quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Politico. And at this moment, in June of an even-numbered year, when people like me are supposed to make most of our money for the entire two-year election cycle, I have zero(0) active clients.
Opposition research is dead. I should have admitted it years ago, but pride and hope held me back, and I’m paying for it now.
People outside professional politics may have a hard time believing me. You can’t touch political news without a tsunami of negative information about many politicians, especially on social media. But almost none of that came from an opposition researcher, and it shows: a lot of the claims are false, or so distorted they may as well be. These days there’s no penalty for throwing up unverified claims on social media, either to raise money for a scam super PAC or just for fun. You don’t need an opposition researcher for that; all it costs is a social media account.
My job wasn’t about digging up dirt, but about the credibility and staying power of that dirt. I’ve spent far more time arguing with media consultants about what a campaign can not say than coming up with what it should say. The work is boring, not glamorous. It’s reading thousands of news clips, making dozens of spreadsheets, and visiting courthouses for real estate documents that put normal people to sleep. The end result isn’t a tweet, but bullet points that pollsters exhaustively test, and ultimately wind up in front of a tiny, hyper-targeted slice of the electorate (think less than five percent).1
Professionalized opposition research peaked between 2003 and 2008. Under Karl Rove’s direction, Republican research scaled up to unheard-of proportions. It was overseen by lawyers, and organized from the presidency all the way down to judicial elections in Mississippi.2 A whole generation of Democrats stayed shell shocked over Bush’s 2004 re-election with the “Swift Boating” Democratic nominee John Kerry received.
Starting in 2006, Democrats hit back with their own operations.3 Under the direction of then-Congressman and eventual Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, Democratic opposition researchers got a surge of funding and attention. Every credible research firm got a share of the business. The results splashed all over the headlines: the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, the Mark Foley page harassment scandal, and dozens of other scandal boomlets catapulted Democrats back into power in the House and Senate. In 2008 the Obama wave was so huge that I started my own firm with clients my former boss couldn’t pick up. I grossed over a half million dollars that cycle, out of an office on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago.
If only I’d known that would be the high water mark.
A lot of Democrats point at Trump as the moment where it all went wrong. To this day, I point at the 2010 midterms. As Ta-Nehisi Coates famously observed, Americans were ready to vote for a black president, but not to have a black president. And the Citizens United Supreme Court decision introduced avalanches of conservative money, spending so much on ads that station managers wouldn’t take them down even if they outright lied. It didn’t matter how good my attacks were, or what Republicans made up. All that mattered was that white senior citizens were a lot more angry and racist than the patchwork quilt of Democratic factions were happy.
It got worse with every subsequent election. The electoral obliteration of moderate and conservative Democrats meant there was little reason for party committees to finance private research operations. And as Democrats caught up to the post-Citizens United reality, they consolidated operations. Washington parties and super PACs like American Bridge steadily took over research operations. The only route to federal campaigns was in primaries, which meant a worsening reputation with incumbent-focused committees.
Worst of all, the cost of research crashed, even while spending on other political specialties skyrocketed. Why pay for what you can get for free, even if it’s from entry-level staff? By 2014 I couldn’t afford a separate office or staff. By 2016, I couldn’t afford a Lexis-Nexis subscription, the lifeblood of opposition researchers. Pressure for cheap or even free services became ludicrous: the campaign of a certain former mayor of Chicago once asked me assist a competitor to update old research I myself had written.
One by one, my colleagues dropped out of the game. Both my first and last business partners left politics for higher education. Most of my colleagues who have stayed have shifted into other fields, like polling or direct mail. And I did try to follow them: I first started applying to non-political jobs all the way back in 2010. By 2018 I sent out dozens of applications a year. By 2023 it was more like hundreds.
But I could have done a lot better.
You don’t spend 14 years doing your level best to get out of an industry and fail. Part of it was that I was self employed, which stinks on a resume every year it stays. My traumatic first marriage, divorce, and subsequent bankruptcy didn’t help either. Nor did my alcoholism, or my unacknowledged PTSD, or being on the autism spectrum in a no-regulation, hyper-capitalist popularity contest. I made plenty of enemies for no good reason, and precious few friends.
But I also didn’t try like I should have. I kept blasting out cookie cutter applications that went nowhere, all while hoping that the next big client would finally be my jump from politics to a government job, or that I’d finally land a big institutional client, or that someone somewhere would dig me out of the hole I’d dug.
And then there were no more clients. This is the worst election cycle I or any of my colleagues have ever seen. No one is buying research, and no one is hiring researchers. Over the holidays when I was staring a broke Christmas in the eye, I reached out to a former partner and learned they’d foregone taking a salary for months.
The hell of it is I can’t even say if Democrats are wrong to toss my profession to the wind. Like many others, I worked against Trump in 2016. I was proud of the work, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but racism and an electoral system that should have died with the American Civil War. What’s the point of a long career exposing Republican misdeeds, when the biggest one rode all the way to the White House? He might even get elected straight from jail this year.
I wanted my work to matter, and I clutched onto it for years while it slid through my fingers. It hurt too much to admit I got in at the top of the wave, only to crash down and tread water. It hurt too much to walk away from the righteousness that kept me going when I had no other reason to live. And it hurt too much to give up on the truth.
But it’s not my call what matters and what doesn’t. There never was anything good or bad about my job. It was just a profession I joined during a small wave of popular attention and money in one political party. The wave is over now, and no amount of hustle that will change that, nor electoral win.
I can only say what matters to me. And after a relapse, a bankruptcy, and two divorces, the only thing that matters to me is stopping this cycle of hope and disappointment. My children deserve better, my partners deserve better, and I definitely deserve better.
Better isn’t pretty. It’s going on food stamps to feed my kids, taking temp jobs to scrape together rent, and through it all finding a sustainable specialty and job to rebuild my ruined finances. It fucking sucks, and the only thing that sucks worse is not doing it.
I’ll take any opposition research work that comes my way, in the same sense I’ll take any work that comes my way at this point. But it’s not a job anymore. It’s time to take the advice I’ve given to aspiring researchers for years, and just walk away.
The vast majority of what most people think is campaign politics is just infotainment. If it’s generating online engagement, it’s probably not affecting votes at all, including that One Simple Thing you swear on your mother’s life is a game changer.
I should know; a Mississippi Democrat paid me to discredit their prosecution in the wake of Rove’s success
And not just in research. Bush ‘04 pioneered the use of “big data” in voter outreach, but by 2008 Democrats were perfecting it. Karl Rove pioneered his famous “72 hour plan” of pre-election voter contract, but over the next decade Democrats locked down early and mail voting outreach so much that Trump tried to shut down the US Post Office to stop it.