Overview

GOPreserve briefed us in a private room at Annabel's, which the founder, a man called Tucker, described as "a dry run for hospitality budget." The brief was simple: re-elect a state senator in Wisconsin who had been indicted on Tuesday and would, by the time we finished the engagement, be indicted twice more.

We agreed to handle digital and direct-mail. The total contract value was $1.9M, of which an unusually large proportion — roughly 38% — was allocated to "in-market field hospitality." We took rooms at the Pfister Hotel for the duration of the campaign and ran most of the day-to-day from the bar.

For voter targeting, we did not commission first-party research. We did not subscribe to a vendor like L2 or Aristotle. Instead, our junior strategist Marcus, who is on a graduate scheme, found a Telegram channel run by a 4chan poster called PorridgeKing7 who was selling regional voter spreadsheets for $400 a state. The data turned out to be 78% accurate, which is — and we say this with affection — better than the legal options.

How we ran the engagement

PorridgeKing7 was paid exclusively in Steam gift cards purchased through the campaign's office-supply allowance. The line item read "third-party data licensing — recurring." When the Wisconsin Election Commission asked us to substantiate the line item, we sent them a screenshot of a Discord channel and told them it was "a private intelligence terminal." They did not follow up.

Walt was, by his own admission, "going through a thing." Each of the three indictments triggered a fresh wave of fundraising emails, written by us, signed by him, and sent from a list we had bought twice. Total raised against the indictment cycle: $4.1M. Total spent on direct mail: $620k. Total spent on hospitality at the Pfister: $940k. Walt has not asked where the rest went, and we have not volunteered.

He won the seat by 312 votes. We were invited to the watch party, which was held at a restaurant Walt's brother owns. The bar tab ran to $11,400. We expensed it back to the campaign as "election-night sentiment monitoring."

What we did