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WelcomeFest Wants Politicians Who Choose to Believe in Nothing
If the secret to winning elections is to believe in nothing at all except what focus groups approve of, then Future Forward should have been the most successful campaign operation in American history.
The biggest outside spending arm in the 2024 election cycle, Future Forward raised across its super PAC and nonprofits a staggering $950 million, easily the most of any outside political organization in the last election, and almost certainly the most ever. The group appeared completely out of nowhere in 2020; Biden political maven Anita Dunn initially worried they were a new pro-Trump super PAC. But its funding base of Silicon Valley donors like Bill Gates and Reid Hoffman supported Democrats. And four years later, it was established enough to be the primary outside advertising force for Kamala Harris.
Future Forward was “probably the most analytics- and evidence-driven PAC I’ve ever seen,” a veteran of Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign told The New York Times. It promised “a ‘Moneyball’ method to political advertising,” in which thousands of messages would be tested in over ten million voter surveys and dozens of rounds of successive focus groups, to find exactly what combination of words, sounds, colors, and shapes elicited precisely the emotional response desired of the widest possible quantum of potential voters, cross-referenced by every demographic category, to once and for all solve politics.
In 2024, Future Forward solicited hundreds of ads for Harris from dozens of Democratic ad makers, then whittled them down to produce those it found the most effective. In charge of the whittling process—and thus, the methodology for whether an ad was “effective” or not—was consulting firm Blue Rose Research, run by David Shor, the ever-ascendant pollster with Sam Bankman-Fried ties. Shor is the key theorist behind “popularism,” the idea that Democrats should exclusively talk about the parts of their agenda that poll well.
The biggest outside spending arm in the 2024 election cycle, Future Forward raised across its super PAC and nonprofits a staggering $950 million, easily the most of any outside political organization in the last election, and almost certainly the most ever. The group appeared completely out of nowhere in 2020; Biden political maven Anita Dunn initially worried they were a new pro-Trump super PAC. But its funding base of Silicon Valley donors like Bill Gates and Reid Hoffman supported Democrats. And four years later, it was established enough to be the primary outside advertising force for Kamala Harris.
Future Forward was “probably the most analytics- and evidence-driven PAC I’ve ever seen,” a veteran of Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign told The New York Times. It promised “a ‘Moneyball’ method to political advertising,” in which thousands of messages would be tested in over ten million voter surveys and dozens of rounds of successive focus groups, to find exactly what combination of words, sounds, colors, and shapes elicited precisely the emotional response desired of the widest possible quantum of potential voters, cross-referenced by every demographic category, to once and for all solve politics.
In 2024, Future Forward solicited hundreds of ads for Harris from dozens of Democratic ad makers, then whittled them down to produce those it found the most effective. In charge of the whittling process—and thus, the methodology for whether an ad was “effective” or not—was consulting firm Blue Rose Research, run by David Shor, the ever-ascendant pollster with Sam Bankman-Fried ties. Shor is the key theorist behind “popularism,” the idea that Democrats should exclusively talk about the parts of their agenda that poll well.
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-06-10-welcomefest-wants-politicians-who-choose-to-believe-in-nothing/