Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), center, pictured on May 23, is among the progressive House members being challenged by primary opponents using campaign firms linked to former DCCC officials.
In 2019, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which exists to elect House Democrats, instituted what came to be known as the blacklist. Any vendor—a consultant, media placement firm, pollster, or provider of services to campaigns—who worked for a challenger to an incumbent House Democrat would be barred from working for the DCCC, and the DCCC would block them from an approved vendor list used to recommend firms to other campaigns.
While the blacklist was a blanket proposal, it was rather obviously targeted to progressive groups that had provided support to successful primary challengers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) in the previous cycle. The DCCC steers millions of dollars to vendors through independent expenditures and recommendations for frontline races; the ban threatened to bankrupt campaign firms for working with progressives.
For this reason, the blacklist was controversial, though some argued that it actually helped progressive campaigns build their own network of grassroots organizers that won several key campaigns in 2020. When Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) took over the DCCC in 2021 from Cheri Bustos (D-IL), he ended the ban, though Maloney did add, “No one should be looking for work around here if they want to go after one of our members at the same time.”
In the 2024 cycle, progressives are more the hunted than the hunters in primaries. Big-money lobbies for Israel and cryptocurrencies have poured millions of dollars into challengers to Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Cori Bush (D-MO). And those challengers, along with the key super PAC doing much of the spending, are using campaign firms that include high-ranking ex-DCCC officials, including four former executive directors, one of whom served during the 2019-2020 blacklist.
In other words, top officials from when the DCCC had either a formal or informal policy of banning campaign firms that work for primary challengers now help run firms that are working for primary challengers.
The firms contacted for this story that have engaged in this arrangement did not respond to queries from the Prospect.
LUCINDA GUINN WAS THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE DCCC in 2019 and 2020, when the blacklist became official policy. When she left after a less-than-stellar 2020 cycle for House Democrats, she became a partner in a consulting firm that is now called Ralston Lapp Guinn, which mostly did advertising for Democratic campaigns and the DCCC. (John Lapp, one of the other partners, was also a former DCCC executive director.)
Ralston Lapp Guinn is working for George Latimer, the challenger to Bowman in New York, sources familiar with the arrangement have told the Prospect. The campaign has not listed Ralston Lapp Guinn among its expenditures, which only date to March 31, before the campaign hit the airwaves with TV ads. Those forms were due last week and should appear at the Federal Election Commission site soon. The Latimer campaign did not respond to a request for comment about Ralston Lapp Guinn working for them.
Latimer, who has a double-digit lead over Bowman in polling conducted last week, has also benefited from at least $12.3 million in ads from the United Democracy Project (UDP), the AIPAC-affiliated super PAC that has become a major force in Democratic primary elections; pro-Israel groups are expected to spend $100 million this cycle. UDP has used MVAR Media for media production and placement, spending roughly $946,000 with the firm on the Latimer race. MVAR Media has also been used for media production and placement in an Illinois primary election earlier in the cycle, earning about $165,000.
The managing partner of MVAR Media is Jon Vogel, another former DCCC executive director. (Vogel is the “V” in MVAR.) He was also political director and independent expenditure director at various points for the committee.
In 2021, Guinn was replaced as DCCC executive director by Tim Persico, who’d previously advised the committee. Persico left in January 2023 after Maloney lost his own race in the 2022 cycle. He became a principal with GPS Impact, a media firm for Democratic campaigns. GPS Impact is working for Wesley Bell, the challenger to Rep. Cori Bush in the St. Louis area. Through March, GPS Impact has received $42,447 from the Bell campaign.
So that’s four former DCCC executive directors, working either directly for challengers to incumbent Democrats or for the leading independent expenditure campaign targeting incumbent Democrats. This was the kind of behavior that in previous years triggered a full ban on working with the DCCC or its frontline campaigns.
Other establishment firms have contributed to the effort to defeat incumbent House Democrats. As the Prospect has reported, Latimer’s campaign uses Global Strategy Group, which has been criticized in the past for working for Amazon during its union-busting campaign against warehouse workers. SKDKnickerbocker, which has done media production and placement for UDP campaigns backing Sara Kelly Elfreth in Maryland as well as Bell in Missouri, is a stalwart Democratic firm whose co-founder Anita Dunn is a top adviser to President Biden with significant influence in Washington.
Other firms working for UDP include Impact Research, which does polling work for Biden. Impact Research’s list of clients at its website (which includes the DCCC) does not include independent expenditure campaigns, but Federal Election Commission receipts show $338,700 collected in the 2024 cycle. DCCC vendors GQR and Mission Control have also worked for UDP this cycle.
In other contexts, vendors to the DCCC would shy away from working for entities that were openly challenging Democratic incumbents. The committee has not announced any vendor changes this year as a result of these firms working for primary challengers. A request for comment to the DCCC did not yield a response.
These firms are also taking money from the biggest source of Republican donor funds in Democratic races. Nearly half of all AIPAC donors giving directly to Democratic candidates like Latimer and Bell have some previous history of funding Republicans. UDP’s base of donors, primarily from Wall Street, have Republican donation histories as well, and $10.5 million of its war chest comes from AIPAC.
“It is shameless and unsurprising that the same leaders of the DCCC who created a blacklist to keep progressives out of Congress are now cashing checks from AIPAC’s Republican megadonors to run right-wing primaries against progressive incumbents,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, one of the remaining campaign organizations working for progressives. “As always, the Democratic establishment makes clear that their own rules don't apply to them, only to working-class people who want a voice in our democracy.”
