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What is a "Republican strategy firm?" A consulting firm with the Republican party as one of their clients? What's the point of making "Republican" so prominent

• boomboomsubban 4y ago
  >What is a "Republican strategy firm?" A consulting firm that advertises itself as being "born from political campaigns" and being "right of center." Both things on the second slide of their homepage.
  • polyomino 4y ago
    >Stagwell, formerly The Stagwell Group, is a global marketing and communications group. Founded in 2015 by Mark Penn. >Penn was a chief strategist and pollster in the Hillary Clinton 2008 presidential campaign
    • giraffe_lady 4y ago
      hahaha amazing. This isn't contradictory at all tho. "I'm not saying she's a republican, I'm just saying the republicans think she's a republican."
    • boomboomsubban 4y ago
      And further in Mark Penn's Wikipedia article >Penn met with Trump in February and November 2019 to give him advice on his 2020 re-election strategy. The company claims to be right wing, why would you deny it?
      • polyomino 4y ago
        I'm not denying that they claim to be republican, but their actions do serve both parties. As such, I don't think their claim to be republican is particularly meaningful.
        • throwawaygh 4y ago
          He worked for D's in 2008 and the firm was founded in 2015 with primarily R political cleintelle. What's contradictory about a strategist who worked for Ds in 2008 and was working for Rs by 2016? Hell, there's a whole term describing the large set of people who made that shift in that exact time period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama%E2%80%93Trump_voters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama%E2%80%93Trump_voters
          • pessimizer 4y ago
            Clinton-people and Obama-people did not and do not like each other. This might be a better link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Unity_My_Ass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Unity_My_Ass
        • dailyrorschach 4y ago
          Also worth context here that Stagwell is set up like another major holding company. They own Targeted Victory (R) and SKDKnickerbocker (D) as their two pillars in DC/public affairs/campaign comms. They also own other non-political communications companies.
• vmception 4y ago
• nneonneo 4y ago
  > The Arlington, Va.-based firm advertises on its website that it brings “a right-of-center perspective to solve marketing challenges” and can deploy field teams “anywhere in the country within 48 hours.” The firm itself seems to advertise a “republican” outlook, and was also apparently founded initially as a strategy firm for the Republican Party.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Clubber 4y ago
  Yes, political division sells papers. I looked for the "opinion" label, which is used to justify this type of manipulation but didn't see one. It's an article manipulating you talking about how Facebook uses a company that the GOP uses (and probably Dems too) to manipulate you. I suspect it wouldn't mention that some of these articles this company uses to manipulate you are probably published in The Washington Post, but that's just "opinion," so it's ok to say.
  • ModernMech 4y ago
    First of all the word Republican does not even appear in the title of the wall piece. It appears in the first paragraph to characterize the firm, which is a fact and how they characterize themselves. The word Republican appears a total of 4 times in the entire price. I’m really failing to see manipulation or opinions. Can you point them out?
    • nmilo 4y ago
      Don't split hairs; it says "GOP", same thing. And words in the title and lead paragraph hold about 10x the weird.
    • Clubber 4y ago
      >Can you point them out? Sure, to me it reads like Facebook and the GOP are working hand in hand to defame poor startup TikTok. In reality, Facebook donates millions of dollars to the Democratic Party to ensure their operations and ... practices ... are safely legal and unregulated. https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/meta/totals?id=D000033563 https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/meta/totals?id=D000033563 I'm not certain how much different it would have made to the main thrust of the story to mention that it worked with a GOP firm. Based on the donations, I'm pretty sure they have used Democrat firms as well for similar purposes, if not this one. The author doesn't mention it, but assuming omission means it didn't happen isn't a safe assumption. Another point, not sure it's a realistic idea to paint TikTok as anything other than a data harvesting tool for the CCP. Seems like they would be similar to Kapersky in that it's just a spying / infiltration tool used by adversarial governments.
  • 4y ago
• tangue 4y ago
  From the article : "Launched as a Republican digital consulting firm by Zac Moffatt, a digital director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, Targeted Victory ... The firm is one of the biggest recipients of Republican campaign spending, earning more than $237 million in 2020, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. Its biggest payments came from national GOP congressional committees and America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC."
  • nmilo 4y ago
    So, yes, it is nothing more than a consulting firm with the Republican party as one of their clients. The other questions still stand: > What's the point of making "Republican" so prominent in the article? Is it just to use the negative connotation most WP readers have about the Republican party to malign Facebook a little more?
    • cortesoft 4y ago
      The consulting company markets itself as a Republican/conservative operation. If it was important enough for them to put it front and center on their own website, it makes sense to include that info in the article.
    • rchaud 4y ago
      Are you even bothering to read the article? > The firm is one of the biggest recipients of Republican campaign spending, earning more than $237 million in 2020, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. Its biggest payments came from national GOP congressional committees and America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC.
• alpha_squared 4y ago
  For companies that operate in the political sphere (strategists, consultancies, etc.), it is impractical to work in a bipartisan manner. Once you take on a client in one party, members of the other party distrust your services because they'll expect you're already politically aligned with their rivals and could disclose information to those rivals. So a <party> strategy firm likely means their clientele is exclusively of that party.
• bitwize 4y ago
  Absent sources that are explicitly conservative, American media are prone to reinforce the narrative that the Republican Party is bad and does bad things, any chance they can. I noticed this back in the late 2000s when I read newspapers about state politicians who were caught in corruption scandals. If the politician were a Republican, their party affiliation would be mentioned in the headline. If they were a Democrat, that fact would be mentioned in the article's continuation on a page farther back in the newspaper, if at all. I offer no judgement on whether this is right or wrong, but it is what is done.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• beaconstudios 4y ago
  If you check their website, they openly market themselves as primarily existing to serve advertising and PR roles for Republican campaigns. The CEO used to be the digital director for the Romney campaign. It seems reasonable to me to call them a Republican firm.
• spywaregorilla 4y ago
  https://targetedvictory.com/team/ https://targetedvictory.com/team/ 12 matches for republican 1 match for conservative 0 matches for democrat It's a firm comprised of former republican political talent. Maybe you're just as willing to fan the flames of political war as those you accuse? They also seem to be into crypto.
• s28l 4y ago
  Most political consulting firms do the majority of their work for a single party, so they can reasonably be identified as either "Republican" or "Democratic". Some non-nefarious reasons why this clustering tends to occur: * The firms are the next career stepping stone for campaign workers. If you have worked on half a dozen Democratic campaigns, you presumably believe in the cause and are unlikely to want to start working on Republican campaigns where you disagree with the candidate. (Maybe you won't be as good at working on GOP campaigns either). * If you are a politician, you are unlikely to be too excited to hire the firm that in the last election cycle wrote an ad trashing some of the positions you old. You are also more likely to get referred to a firm by a politician from the same party as you. You might have firms that work with both parties, but they are likely to be working with centrist candidates from those parties. So if this is a strategy firm that has mostly done political work for Republican candidates and causes, it seems perfectly reasonable to call it a "Republican strategy firm"
• whimsicalism 4y ago
  Having worked im the political data space, most usually the firm os closely associated with a given party, revolving door, etc.
• testbjjl 4y ago
  > What's the point of making "Republican" so prominent in the article? Is it just to use the negative connotation most WP readers have about the Republican party to malign Facebook a little more? A person self identifies with a party that has questionable (/s) practices in a democracy and they’re being maligned. Jokes are funny because they have truth.
  • Clubber 4y ago
    >a party that has questionable (/s) practices If you don't see that in both predominant US parties, you probably aren't looking. Of course Facebook pays the Democratic Party millions a year to look the other way. Can't have good privacy laws, ya know. https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/meta/totals?id=D000033563 https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/meta/totals?id=D000033563
    • testbjjl 4y ago
      Is this one of those, election was rigged (on the same ballots my other candidates won) perspectives?
• woodruffw 4y ago
  > as if there's any meaning to it other than to malign Facebook. I don't think this is malignment, per se: Facebook makes a big show of being a progressive company (internally) with a nominally neutral political outlook. Hiring a Republican strategy firm undermines that image: it demonstrates that, push come to shove, Facebook's commitment to these things is primarily a facade intended to deflect criticism.
  • dfxm12 4y ago
    Facebook makes a big show of being a progressive company (internally) with a nominally neutral political outlook. Ask any progressive, they will say there's nothing politically neutral about preventing unionization: https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/facebook-workplace-unionize/ https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/facebook-workplace-union... I also don't think people are falling for rainbow capitalism internally or not. I think people generally understand that it is just a show and the only color on the rainbow they care about is green.
    • woodruffw 4y ago
      We’re in agreement. The point I was making is that it isn’t “malignment” because it clearly is in line with Facebook’s actual values.
• temp8964 4y ago
  Lots of comments to this miss the point. If another tech company uses a “Democrat strategy firm”, the report won’t mention it, or even put it in the title.
  • snowwrestler 4y ago
    Every article about Mark Penn’s work for Microsoft mentioned that he was a Democratic strategist at the time.
    • temp8964 4y ago
      Yes. That’s exactly the same.
• throwawaygh 4y ago
  > A consulting firm with the Republican party as one of their clients? Political consulting firms -- especially those that specialize in strategy, oppo, or ads -- are very often partisan-aligned. That's how the biz works.
• scotuswroteus 4y ago
  "Spectating an op-ed war" is a super weird way of saying "negative opinion about Facebook." Opeds are for reading. WP is a left leaning outlet. No war is going on here, and reading an oped isn't spectating a war.
• baryphonic 4y ago
  My guess would be that Facebook hired a GOP firm for two reasons. 1) The national mood is leaning significantly toward the GOP, with major Republican gains likely in both the House and Senate (potentially supermajorities in both chambers). Democrats are so weak right now that they can't get anything done, so may as well follow the trends. TikTok isn't going to kill Facebook in nine months, so they can hold out till a Republican Congress in January. 2) The messaging is aligned with recent Republican victories or even just Democrat losses. The election in Virginia and the recall of the SF school board both highlight that Dems appear tone-dead with respect to protecting kids. (Even in FL, the Dems and media have essentially lied by maligning the new law restricting public schools from exposing K-through-3 students to sexual content as a bill banning anyone from saying the word "gay." This dishonesty is only necessary and effective because Democrats are exceptionally weak at protecting kids.) I doubt the use of a GOP firm reflects anything beyond a desire to persuade Republican voters and lawmakers.
• pessimizer 4y ago
  The US doesn't have real political parties with memberships, so a more realistic view of them is that they are central coordinators of, and lobbyists on the behalf of, huge networks of consultants. Having a political career means shifting between consulting companies strongly associated with political parties, direct party employment, campaign employment, government employment when your party is in power, "think tanks," "journalism," and employment as a lobbyist for government contractors or industries with a legislative agenda. Journalists drop the keyfabe when they're speaking casually, sometimes accidentally. They do go out of their way to do so when the subject is associated with a party their employer doesn't approve of. Including the truth about party association doesn't make a story more or less truthful. The problem is when they leave it out, or create an association out of whole cloth to fit a narrative.