I Like A Man Who Knows What He Stands For, Even When I Don't Agree With Him

Or something else

In 2024, Future Forward solicited hundreds of ads for Harris from dozens of Democratic ad makers, then whittled them down to produce those it found the most effective. In charge of the whittling process—and thus, the methodology for whether an ad was “effective” or not—was consulting firm Blue Rose Research, run by David Shor, the ever-ascendant pollster with Sam Bankman-Fried ties. Shor is the key theorist behind “popularism,” the idea that Democrats should exclusively talk about the parts of their agenda that poll well.

Shor’s theory of politics, then, had at its disposal the largest pool of funds in the history of elections, raised to win the most consequential race in the history of elections. Controversially, the group plunged almost all of its record-breaking budget into ads and analytics, and almost nothing into door-to-door field campaigning. It produced message-testing surveys, conducted deep analytics, cross-referenced the trusted data, then backwards-engineered what it determined to be “popular,” in order to make its candidate appear supportive of whatever it was currently optimal to appear supportive of. The result was that the Democrats, and Harris in particular, displayed their best selves, with scientifically engineered precision, in the messages with the greatest financial backing in 2024.