It’s been less than a week since Jon Ossoff lost a perfectly winnable race in Georgia and spent over $25,000,000 of our money in doing so — gathering just under 150,000 votes for his, and our efforts.
What typically happens in Democratic races is already happening — we are moving on but we can’t. There was so much that happened in this race that are the pillars of why Democrats lose (and lose and lose and lose) and one of the primary ones is what is happening now and that’s not doing a complete, fair and independent review of the race.
What do we know? Well, we know that Mothership Strategies received approximately $4,000,000 for media, creative services and fees to do emails that were at best deceptive, if not outright fraudulent. (The campaign ended up with over $1,000,000 in the bank.)
We also know this is approximately the same amount in total that Handel spent to win.
We know that the campaign did horrifically bad commercials that were strategically poor with high production value. We need to know more about those commercials, what was spent and why.
We know that the campaign had over 170 people on the payroll and is claiming $12,000,000 in administrative expenses / salaries and the like.
We need to treat this like a business (and everyone who gave money deserves answers.)
And we need to think long and hard about this.
Here’s what we know about Keenan Pontini. He has a degree in public policy from the University of Michigan. He was woefully unprepared to run a campaign against the forces that he did. He lost a race in Michigan in November (Wait, wasn’t Michigan important?) and he just lost another race. How does that make him a rising star? Please share any analysis or thoughts with me — I am very very interested in doing a serious review of this campaign and why we failed.