The Republican victories at the federal level in 2024 only papered over the cracks of the party’s outdated strategic approach to campaigns. That’s the conclusion of Wesley Donehue, founding partner at Push Digital, who this week announced he was stepping back from his leadership role at the firm to launch an innovation arm called Sandbox.
“Donald Trump ran a great campaign and a lot of people were able to ride his coattails, but there are still problems down ballot that people are ignoring,” said Donehue, who’s retaining the title of CEO but delegating day-to-day duties to Phil Vangelakos, a managing partner. “And if we don’t focus on it, we’re going to have a real problem in the future.”
Donehue hasn’t been the only practitioner on the right sounding the alarm over the party’s approach to campaigns. Michael Biundo, a partner at Ascent Strategic, raised a concern that local GOP committees were becoming organizations in name only.
“The group game, which was once handled by the party — state and/or federal — has been taken up by a fractured group of organizations that are disconnected and not working together,” Biundo wrote in a piece for C&E in October. “There are many people making money, but there isn’t a cohesive strategy. If we want to win consistently, we need to do better.”
Donehue also believes that the Republicans’ party infrastructure isn’t positioned for the current challenges candidates face reaching a diverse electorate in a fractured media environment. Because the leadership of the party’s campaign committees frequently changes over, he said, they have “no long-term vision beyond the election cycle.
“The only people that can really look at the future are companies,” he said. “Whether it’s Push, Targeted Victory, OnMessage, [FlexPoint Media], Axiom — they are the stabilizing force in the Republican Party because they’re the things that don’t end. They are there cycle to cycle to cycle.”
He added: “A business has to be the one looking at the future of the party. I own a business, I’m good at predicting what comes next, so why don’t I try to be the guy that’s looking at those things?”
In his new day-to-day, Donehue is looking to find solutions to what he calls the “big three” issues facing GOP campaigns.
“Low-dollar fundraising is the singular biggest problem we have to fix in the Republican party,” he said. “The second is our media strategy. We have these television firms that are trying to take digital — they’re not using data to hyper-target niche audiences. They’re implementing what I’m calling ‘lazy’ media strategy, which is, ‘Hey, we ran this TV ad in a DMA, let’s just slap it on digital too,’ talking to everybody as if they’re the same.
“The third thing that I’m freaked out about is just the liberal media. How is the Republican party going to work around it?”
He also believes the Republican side of the campaign industry needs to pay more attention to emerging artificial intelligence tools.
“How can we take their tools, use our developers, and gear them towards politics?” he said. “This next cycle, probably a third of the ads that you are going to see will use AI-based video.”
Going forward, Donehue sees Sandbox, a separate corporate entity under the Push Digital Group umbrella funded by revenue from 2024, as an incubator for ideas that “will fall under three buckets.”
“One will be a service that my current companies can provide. Two would be a product. If it’s a product, it’ll probably be spun out separately that the companies can use that we will also let other companies use. And the third thing would be spinning up actual separate companies under the PDG umbrella.”
