I’ve always been a really good researcher, but a really bad consultant.
In the words of my first boss: “Kaz, you need to make (the client) feel good about it,” a lesson I basically never absorbed. As a former business partner said: “Kaz is great at the research; my job is to make sure the client feels good enough about us to actually read it,” to which I replied with total seriousness: “If they feel good about the research, I've done something wrong.” Still another consultant once said: “Any other researcher will let you off the hook with 80 percent accuracy. Kaz will fight you until it's 100 percent, and die on the hill for good measure,” to which I agreed.
I can’t read the room, whether in a global or immediate sense. Drop me in a fundraiser, and I will glue myself to a wall and stare at the crowd like they’re space aliens. My career imploded in 2019, after I got fired from a campaign for being on the losing end of an ugly office fight. I recently wrote my profession is dead, only to get hired doing exactly that. Knowing what’s happening before most other people is the primary skill of a political consultant, and lord, do I ever lack that.
Knowing what I know now, or more accurately, what I don’t know, one of my bigger mistakes was equating opposition research, a minor support specialty for pollsters, with crisis management, a public relations specialty for people who actually understand people.
To understand this dynamic, you need to understand some realities of life on a political campaign. As I often say, professional politics is Veep with more drinking. It superbly demonstrates the daily misery of campaigns. Everyone is overworked and underpaid, and changes jobs (voluntarily and otherwise) almost as often as they change clothes. Everyone screams at each other, insults each other, lies to each other’s faces. Nothing works, and what does work, doesn’t work like it should. The candidate/official is the worst part of the operation; at one point the president’s chief of staff says, “Yes, we all agree the White House would work much better without a president, but here we are.”
But at the same time, very few of the characters are outright villainous1. Most of them are genuinely trying to make the best of a maddening situation that is not ever, ever going to get better for any of them. And they fail, over and over. Mike the press secretary eventually leaves to teach community college, and he finally seems at least a little happy.
To be clear, I am not condemning any of the roles within a campaign, or even the fact that political professionals are often unpleasant to each other. God knows I’ve been the bad guy for no good reason enough times that I don’t have a moral leg to stand on. None of us created this horrible system, and most of us got into it because we want things to be better in one way or another. Absolutely none of us knew how stupid and terrible everything really is going into it.
What I’m saying here is that in an immediate sense, the goal of a political campaign is not to win an election, but just to keep everyone on the campaign feeling good enough about themselves to do their jobs till it’s over. And that was my really big whiff about opposition research.
Researchers are the killjoys of political campaigns. Everyone else on a campaign is focused on whatever is keeping them going, which understandably involves dunking on the other side and praising your own. But a researcher has to approximate objectivity: once your ad or press release hits the airwaves, it no longer matters how much you believed in yourself while writing it. Crafting attacks and fact checking copy is an early warning system: hey folks, just so you know, if you say that you will be disbelieved/criticized/mocked.
That is an important role, yes. And to be clear, it is often collaborative with public relations roles such as communications/media/mail. But the basic tension between “This is the perfect ad,” and “You can’t say that, you’re making things up,” means that it is never going to be a primary role. As useful as research is, it is also uncomfortable, and every time I assert my role, I’m pushing up against that.
Additionally, I can’t control the reception of the facts I look up, any more than a media consultant can make their perfect ad factual by force of will. I lost one of my first campaigns in business on my own not because the research was bad; there was plenty of it. It even tested well in our internal poll. But it turned out that some combination of how it was presented, and what the electorate wanted to hear to begin with, just didn’t connect with the electorate. Whether through ads or reporters, persuasion is a social process, not a factual one. Communications professionals traffic in making reporters feel good enough to write what they want to write; my work can supplement that, and it has absolutely made a crucial difference in many campaigns. But it has always been just that: a tool, to be used by someone who is good at using tools, and not a goal unto itself.
Let’s take a more concrete example that conveniently disparages a Republican: the Harris-Trump debate. On the technical merits I recognize, that debate should not have happened from the perspective of the Trump campaign.2 The candidate was clearly incensed by Biden’s withdrawal, and already making unforced errors in the press about it. He was a convicted felon, regardless of the campaign’s spin on it, going up against an experienced and photogenic prosecutor. The Democratic research and rapid response apparatus Harris inherited is very good, and its Republican equivalent is very bad. If you put your hand over “Clinton” in the 2016 debates, his performance was apocalyptic. It was the second debate, and Harris’ media team thus had fresh footage to analyze while coaching her; Trump had no such research advantage.
From my professional perspective, there was no possible benefit for Trump, and immense risks. I’m far from the only person to say something along those lines about the debate; this is just the research perspective.3 Rather than a debate, Trump should have rejected debates entirely, and essentially ignored Harris for the remainder of the campaign. That would have minimized additional risk exposure while maximizing the risk that Harris would put a foot in her mouth, and drawn outsized condemnation from a press eager for a close horse race.
Many campaigns have successfully deployed that strategy over the years, which is how I came up with it. A pollster measures what people are thinking right now; an opposition researcher measures what happened the last time someone tried that. But that strategy requires a team that works very well together, and has reasonable control of the candidate. And when it happens, it is not driven by the researcher, but by the consultants closest to the candidate.4 In other words, everyone has to already feel pretty good about themselves. If not, there is zero chance that sort of unemotional, value-neutral assessment will find any purchase.
Picture the room of the Trump campaign’s senior staff. Set aside any distaste for the fact that they’re in the room to begin with, and accept that they are there for the moment and want to stay there. They want to believe that doing conventional campaign-y things will work, because if it doesn’t work, why in the hell are any of them still there? They’re telling themselves and the candidate that he can totally pull this off, that he’s got this, the debate will be a game changer and he’s gonna blow Harris away.
Now imagine one of them saying, in so many words: “Actually, our guy is too shitty to even show up on national television right now, let’s just hunker down and hope for the best.”
Yep, I’ve been that guy, more times than I care to count. Like I said, I’m a terrible consultant. I look at facts, and I look over at people, and I ask why the latter can’t be more like the former. In that terrible 2019 campaign, at one point I said the only significant thing the winner of the election would do would be to raise taxes by a billion dollars, and it just didn’t matter how anyone felt about it.
I was correct. I was also fired, not for that particular incident, but because when I lost my mind from stress and yelled at a colleague, I was already well established as The Asshole in the room. I had only myself to blame for it. I'm perfectly capable of keeping my head down, collecting a paycheck, and keeping a CYA file for when I am overruled. But I didn't accept that, and I wouldn't accept that I could only piss off my colleagues so much before no researcher became preferable to an intolerable one.
Because who wants to show up to a dingy office for 12+ hour days and 7 day weeks, just to hear that it’s all a fucking joke?
As it turned out, hunger was a great teacher where my colleagues’ warnings had fallen short. When I first reached out the firm I work for now, I wasn’t even asking for a job with them. I asked for help getting out of politics, saying: “I’m done picking fights and throwing bombs. I just want to feed my children.”
And now? I’m a researcher. I don’t belong in politics, and I really don’t belong in public relations. When I got into politics I didn’t understand how stupid and terrible it really is, and once I did, I was too embedded in a niche career track to easily leave. But since I’m still here, I may as well do my actual job, and not try to do anyone else’s. My opinions on how things should work are worth exactly as much as those of the voters I often disdain, and any rate I’m not being paid for my opinions. I’m paid to look things up, and the respect of my current employer and their money is more than enough for me.
The rest of it is someone else’s problem.
Facts, as a certain former president once said, are stubborn things. But it turns out humans are even more stubborn. We are social animals, and before anything else happens, we each of us have a need to feel good enough to keep doing what we’re doing. I certainly need it; I just find numbers and data soothing over ideological cheerleading because I'm autistic. Neurotypical Democrats tell themselves they'll go build high speed railroads by taxing unicorn farts; I tell myself I'll find that one simple fact that explains why nothing works and everyone is wrong. Both goals are equally self-serving and illusory, and both are deeply necessary to the people who have them. If we don’t feel good and have to keep going, we’ll turn to feeling bad enough instead, or making the bad feelings stop.
But as long as people are doing the voting, feelings are going to precede facts. And I have no one but myself to blame for ignoring that.
To be clear, Selena and Jonah Ryan are the two big exceptions, and the roles are superb.
My partner Marie is often bemused by my habit of rattling off what various terrible politicians should have done instead; I’m working on it.
And it is not the only valid perspective; it is also arguable that avoiding a debate would have led to equivalent negative coverage. I frankly don’t know how reporters feel or think, and I’ve given up trying to guess.
Almost always media, for the simple reason that media is the most expensive part of a campaign, and thus assumed to be the most valuable.