Firm leaders are facing pressure to make staffing decisions for 2025 and beyond. The reason: Candidates are already interviewing consultants for campaigns they’ll launch in the next 24 months.
That has prompted a small flurry of new hires, promotions and firm openings in January, which has typically been a period when practitioners shifted focus to public affairs business as opposed to candidate campaigns.
One practitioner making a move: Jai Chabria, a long-time Ohio-based campaign professional who was promoted to partner at MAD Global Strategy.
“I personally already have started having conversations with several candidates,” said Chabria, who served as chief strategist and general consultant on Vice President-elect JD Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign.
“In this business, the one commodity that you can’t ever get back is time. So it’s never too early to start having those conversations.”
President-elect Trump hasn’t been inaugurated yet, but Chabria said the lessons from his campaign are clear for any of the candidates planning efforts in this off year or next. “It’s efficiency,” he said, noting how the Trump-Vance campaign was able to pull off a resounding win while being significantly outspent by the Democratic ticket.
“It was actually an incredibly disciplined campaign,” Chabria said. “They didn’t actually waste the resources they had because they were outspent on every facet of the campaign. And it didn’t really matter because of the discipline.”
It wasn’t just fiscal discipline that future GOP campaigns should take from the Trump-Vance effort. Their messaging discipline was also textbook, according to Chabria. “They were vastly outspent on TV, but they had a message that was more in tune with where voters were.”
Trump and Vance also made podcast appearances and appeared authentic and comfortable addressing topics beyond their stump speeches. That authenticity paired with message discipline is another lesson from ’24, said Chabria.
Podcasts were “a very comfortable setting for them to talk about things that people cared about. That authenticity is a really critical piece of it.”
But as a GC, Chabria also sees areas on campaigns where leaders can cut back or create greater efficiencies. “My colleagues probably won’t want me to talk about that and won’t want me to say it, but there’s a lot of money spent on grassroots efforts where it’s not nearly as impactful as it was 15 years ago,” he said. “And we’ve seen evidence of that all throughout the country.”
He added: “When I’m a GC, I try to be an honest broker for my candidates and try to actually figure out what’s going to move the needle for them with the budgets they have, rather than just try to put more on. And I think that’s really an important thing for candidates to try to figure out.”
