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.