How the Business of Politics Became a Multi-Billion-Dollar Industry

When Richard Schlackman told his mother that he was going to pursue a career in direct mail, she thought he meant that he was getting a job with the U.S. Postal Service.

It was the 1970s and Schlackman was one of a few campaign operatives figuring out how to leverage new targeting methods to reach voters at their mailboxes. At the time, it was a relatively novel tactic – and not one that every campaign took seriously right away. Consultants “had to convince people that mail actually worked,” Schlackman recalled.

Like most campaign work back then, there were no how-to manuals or formal courses on the subject. Political consultants were a relatively small and exclusive group, and Schlackman said he stumbled into their ranks by “pure luck.”

“It was a primitive business back then,” Schlackman, a Democrat and one of the country’s premier direct mail consultants, told Campaigns & Elections in an interview. “It wasn’t that you grew up and went to school to become a campaign consultant. A lot of us just kind of fell into it and learned as we went.”

In the half-century since then, the campaign business has exploded into a multi-billion-dollar industry made up of a highly professionalized – and specialized – class of consultants, pollsters and campaign staffers. 

Interviews with more than a dozen campaign veterans paint a picture of an industry that has been shaped over the past four-plus decades by increasing professionalism, rapidly evolving technology and an ever-growing tidal wave of money. 

Some of those developments have changed the industry for the better, several practitioners argued. There’s more racial, gender and economic diversity in campaigns, committees and firms than there was even just a couple decades ago, and the business of politics has – at least in some ways – begun to step out of the proverbial smoke-filled room.

“The industry used to be a lot of inside baseball – it was about who you knew. You knew a guy who knew a guy and so you became a consultant or a campaign manager. That’s definitely changed,” said Paul Westcott, an executive vice president at the data firm L2. “It’s all part of the maturing of the industry.”

At the same time, new money has flooded into politics as campaigns became increasingly permanent fixtures of American life. Meanwhile, corporations and private equity firms have begun taking a new interest in the business of politics, seeing an advantage to working with a class of political professionals. 

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The American Association of Political Consultants – the industry’s trade group – was formed in 1969 by a small cohort of campaign gurus who had just begun to map out and define what it meant to be a political professional.

The term “political consultant” was newly minted and few understood what it actually meant. In a 1968 profile, The New York Times described Joseph Napolitan – who made his name on the presidential campaigns of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey – as “that newest American phenomenon, the professional campaign manager.”

A little more than a decade later, a consultant wasn’t just a luxury for the largest campaigns and committees, but an increasingly necessary asset for anyone who planned to do business in or around the political space, according to Michael Cohen, a longtime pollster and a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University.

“You want to know that your time and effort and your money matters — that it translates to votes or action,” Cohen said. “The people who are involved in campaigns want to know that what they’re doing is making a difference. So I think it kind of creates a need for more professionalism in the industry.”

The AAPC’s membership ballooned from just a few members at its founding in 1969 to around 600 by the mid-1980s. It now stands at more than 2,000. At the same time, academic programs in campaigning, like The George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, have multiplied to meet the demands of an increasingly specialized business sector.

“It starts with people becoming more professional as opposed to just coming up through the woodwork or through families or through local politics,” Cohen said. “Of course, people still come up that way. But there’s now this middle step, where you earn your stripes a little bit. You get trained – trained on technologies, trained on how to write press releases, how to get your message out.”

The shift to a more professionalized, specialized industry developed hand-in-hand with rapid advancements in technology, Cohen and other industry veterans said. The 1990s and early 2000s were defined by the debut of new tactics. The launch of the first presidential campaign websites during the 1996 election cycle. The Bush campaign’s microtargeting and list segmentation of church groups in 2004. Former President Barack Obama’s vaunted digital operation during his 2008 White House run. 

“Every couple years technology opens up. There’s no one big moment,” Wescott, the L2 executive, said. “Every generation has their different moments. But technology is what’s changed all this. It’s changed everything in the world, not just political consulting.” 

In today’s landscape, Obama’s once-lauded online operation – one of the first of its kind – looks quaint. Digital budgets now rival, or even exceed, the money spent on more traditional campaigning. The proliferation of social media sites, streaming services and smartphones has shaken up the media landscape that consultants and campaign workers operated in for decades. 

Jordan Lieberman, the CEO of Powers Interactive and a former publisher of C&E, said that the emergence of new tech has been a net positive for the industry. 

“Because of the addressability of media, the addressability of television, the addressability of data, you can reach any demographic you want now,” Lieberman said. “In the olden days, you would target a zip code or a household, and now you can target anyone on anything. And it makes us so much more powerful as an industry.” 

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Not all change has been for the best, several consultants said. The rise of the internet has forced the campaign industry to reckon with the spread of misinformation, a patchwork of social media policies and a fragmented media and entertainment environment that makes it harder to reach voters en masse.

Then there’s the money. Campaigns, committees and outside groups dropped nearly $16 billion during the 2024 election cycle, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit group that tracks campaign finance information. In 2016, by comparison, federal spending totalled just over $6.5 million. 

“The whole consulting class is a very big business,” said Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster and strategist who has worked on several presidential races. “And the whole consulting process has become a very big business. And I think that is unfortunate sometimes. I think candidates can lose who they are in all that money.”

The deluge of political money, Lake said, stems from a combination of lax government regulation, corporate influence and the political industry’s race for bigger and longer campaigns. 

The 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission paved the way for unlimited political spending by corporations and other outside groups. Private equity – sensing an opportunity in the massive sums of cash that flow into politics each election cycle – has begun buying stakes in consulting firms and even core pieces of campaign infrastructure. NGP VAN, the massive voter database used by most Democratic campaigns and committees, is now owned by the British venture capital firm Apax Partners.

“I would argue that it hasn’t been good for the industry,” Lake said. “There are big special interests and corporate special interests that have bought into way too many firms and the media.”

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There are still bright spots, Lake said. The industry has, overall, become more diverse and inclusive. Many who were once overlooked by or excluded from the business – people of color, women and members of the LGBTQ community, among them – have started to be brought into the fold. 

“The whole profession has gotten much, much more diverse, which is a good thing,” Lake said. “There were very few women in the field when I started, and certainly very few women-owned firms, so there’s been a lot of progress on that front.”

Domonique James, the CEO of the public affairs and communications firm Politics With a Purpose, got her start in the campaign world as a North Carolina-based field organizer for Obama’s 2012 reelection bid. She said that, in her time working in politics, she’s seen the field become more deliberate in how it approaches diversity.

“One thing I am proud of is that the industry in general has been more intentional about elevating diverse talent,” she told C&E. “And because of that, it’s slowly but surely bringing in new voices. Is some of it performative? Probably. But I think overall, it’s a good thing.”

Most practitioners who spoke with C&E said they’re optimistic about the business of politics. Nearly all conceded there are challenges for the industry – the rise of artificial intelligence, the ongoing influence of money in politics, an ever-changing media landscape. 

But then again, every generation of political professionals has faced their own unique set of issues, Lieberman said.

“However you want to look at it, the industry is bigger, more diverse, more industrious, more professional,” Lieberman said. “It’s much more inviting and welcoming of people who have historically been excluded from the profession.” 

This story appears in the commemorative 45th Anniversary print edition of Campaigns & Elections magazine.