Season 1
Article 1 - Welcome To Permanent Campaign Mode
Article 2 - THE PLAYBOOK: A Torrent of Propaganda
Article 3 - The PAC Problem: How Ideological Kingmakers Took Over Primaries
Article 4 - How West Virginia Policy Actually Gets Made and Why Understanding this Machinery Matters
The System That Now Runs American Politics
Something fundamental shifted in American politics, and most people don’t realize it yet.
We’re not in a temporary crisis. We’re not dealing with an anomaly that will correct itself. We’re witnessing a structural reorganization of how political power operates—one that’s being driven by technology, enabled by law, and defended by inertia.
The old system is dead. We just haven’t fully absorbed what replaces it.
Let me explain what I mean, because this affects how you understand every race, every primary, every political story you see over the next five years.
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THE OLD SYSTEM (AND WHY IT PROTECTED YOU)
For most of American political history, there was a clear hierarchy:
Parties controlled messaging. If you ran as a Republican in a Republican district, the party apparatus helped you message. You didn’t have to build your own communication infrastructure. The party did that. Local party chairs, state party communications, national messaging—it was coordinated around you.
Parties protected members. If you were an incumbent with a voting record that could be attacked, the party mobilized resources to defend you. They couldn’t prevent primary challenges, but they could make those challenges expensive and difficult. An incumbent with party backing was genuinely hard to remove.
Parties coordinated strategy. The party decided which races were winnable, which candidates had the best shot, and where resources should flow. This sounds like centralized control (and it was), but it also meant that experienced, thoughtful people were protected long enough to develop actual expertise in governance.
Candidates competed primarily in general elections. Primaries existed, but they weren’t the existential threat they are now. You could usually survive a primary challenge if you had party backing. The real competition was in the general election, where party affiliation actually meant something and swing voters actually decided outcomes.
This system had real flaws. It was sometimes corrupt. It protected entrenched interests. It wasn’t particularly responsive to grassroots movements. All of that is fair criticism.
But it had one crucial feature: it created stability for people willing to do the work of actual representation.
If you were willing to serve your district, pay attention to local concerns, build relationships with constituents, and cast difficult votes with party backing, you could have a career. You could serve for years or decades. You could develop expertise. You could take positions that weren’t purely aligned with national ideological movements because you had local political protection.
The party’s interest in electing and protecting you aligned, at least roughly, with your interest in serving your district. You were a long-term investment. They wanted you to keep winning.
THE NEW SYSTEM (AND WHAT IT REPLACED)
Then several things happened simultaneously:
Citizens United and subsequent campaign finance decisions eliminated many restrictions on outside money. Wealthy individuals and organized groups could now spend unlimited amounts on independent campaigns. The law now permits something that was previously restricted: outside actors spending $8.7 million to defeat politicians in states where they don’t live and have no accountability.
Technology made targeting cheap and fast. You can now identify voters with surgical precision, send them different messages based on their demographics, and measure the impact in real-time. Organizing a million-voter outreach that used to take months now takes weeks. The cost per contact has dropped dramatically.
Media fragmented. There’s no longer a single local newscast that everyone watches, or a local newspaper that everyone reads. Instead, voters get information from social media, podcasts, targeted digital ads, and direct mail. It’s possible to reach specific voters with specific messages without that message being seen or discussed broadly. The public sphere fragmented into private spheres.
Parties weakened. For various reasons—demographic sorting, geographic polarization, internal divisions, donor consolidation—party infrastructure stopped being able to protect members the way it used to. Parties are still around, but they’re less able to rally resources to defend an incumbent against an outside attack.
Outside groups proliferated. Into the vacuum left by weakened parties came coordinated outside actors: PACs, advocacy groups, ideological organizations. These groups don’t answer to local voters. They’re not accountable to state or local party structures. They answer to donors. And they’re disciplined, well-funded, and strategically focused.
The combination of these factors created something genuinely new: outside actors with resources can now instantly identify vulnerable politicians, deploy targeted messaging against them in primary elections, and remove them before the general election even becomes relevant.
This isn’t an occasional tactic. It’s becoming the dominant strategy.
WHAT THIS ACTUALLY MEANS
The old system said: “You have a voting record. The party will defend you. You’re protected.”
The new system says: “You have a voting record. Someone will find the vote that can be reframed. They will spend six figures to tell primary voters that vote is disqualifying. You will be removed in a primary where you have no protection. Congratulations.”
The protection disappeared, but the vulnerability remained. In fact, the vulnerability got worse because your voting record became more exposed, more analyzed, more available for reframing.
Here’s what changed operationally:
Party affiliation became insufficient. Being a Republican in a Republican district used to mean something. Now it means you’re eligible to be primaried by someone more ideologically pure. Party label is still useful—it prevents you from being challenged from the other party—but it doesn’t protect you from being challenged within your party by an outside-funded actor.
Incumbency became a liability. Historically, incumbency was an advantage. You had name recognition, campaign infrastructure, relationships with donors. Now it’s often a liability because you have a voting record to defend. A blank slate candidate funded by an outside group can attack you for years of votes while maintaining the fiction of ideological purity because they’ve never voted on anything.
Institutional power became risky. If you rise in seniority in your legislative chamber, you accumulate a longer voting record. Every vote is a vulnerability. Higher office (state legislative leadership, congressional seats) means more votes to defend. Experienced legislators are now more vulnerable than less experienced ones, which is backwards from how it used to work.
Outside money became determinative. If you’re running without a PAC willing to spend $400,000 on your behalf, you’re at a disadvantage. This means politics is increasingly determined by which candidates attract outside backing rather than which candidates actually connect with voters or which candidates have the best ideas. The people with money to spend on campaigns are increasingly determining who gets to be a politician, not the voters of that district.
Primary elections became the real election. In safe districts and states, the primary is now where the outcome is decided. And primaries have lower turnout, more polarized voters, and more vulnerability to targeted messaging. If you can move the needle in a 20% turnout primary with surgical messaging, you can remove the incumbent before the general election is even relevant.
Ideological purity became competitive. The new system rewards politicians who are consistent enough that they can’t be reframed. But consistency and governance are in tension. Actual representation requires nuance, compromise, trade-offs. Ideological purity requires the opposite. So the system now incentivizes politicians to be ideologically pure rather than representative.
THE PERVERSE INCENTIVES THIS CREATES
Once you understand the new system, you understand why politicians now behave in ways that seem irrational or cowardly.
First, it incentivizes candidates to avoid positions entirely. Why take a stance on anything controversial when that stance can be weaponized by an outside group six months from now? This produces a generation of politicians who are essentially blank slates—all messaging, no actual governance philosophy. They’ll say they support “education” and “jobs” and “families”—concepts so vague they mean nothing. But they won’t say how they’d actually fund education or what kinds of jobs they’d create. Because specificity is vulnerability.
Second, it incentivizes candidates to hide their records. If you’ve been in government for any length of time, your record is vulnerable. The old response was to be transparent about your votes, explain the context, and trust the party to back you up. The new response is to hope nobody notices. When outside groups do notice and attack, the instinct is to go silent rather than defend, because defending requires re-litigating votes that half your primary voters might disagree with.
Third, it incentivizes primary challenges against any incumbent perceived as insufficiently ideologically pure.Because the playbook works, primary challenges become common. Incumbency becomes a liability. If you’re a moderate Republican in a district that’s trending conservative, or a progressive Democrat in a district trending progressive, someone will run against you from the “purer” direction. And with outside money, they can be competitive even if they have no track record.
Fourth, it requires outside money to remain competitive. If you’re running without a PAC willing to spend hundreds of thousands on your behalf, you’re operating with one hand tied behind your back. This concentrates political power in the hands of the people with money to spend on campaigns, which usually means wealthy individuals, organized industries, and ideological networks. This also means that politics becomes less responsive to actual constituents and more responsive to donors and outside groups.
The result is a political system where experienced, thoughtful people increasingly don’t want to serve, because the headache isn’t worth it. Why spend years building expertise and relationships if an outside group can end your career in a compressed primary cycle where you have no protection? Why cast difficult votes if every vote will be reframed? Why take positions if positions are vulnerabilities?
So experienced people retire. Blank slates rise. Outside groups get more influence. And the people who know how government actually works increasingly step aside.
THE WEST VIRGINIA EXAMPLE ISN’T UNIQUE—IT’S THE NEW NORMAL
Craig Blair’s 2024 primary loss is useful not because it was surprising, but because it was clarifying.
He was a state senator with over a decade of experience. He had favorable ratings in his district. He was leading in polling by double digits. He had party support. By every measure that mattered in the old system, he was safe.
Then Make Liberty Win, an out-of-state PAC funded by Texas donors, decided to attack him. They spent millions on mailers characterizing his votes (particularly on Medicaid expansion) as betrayal. They deployed these attacks in a compressed timeline 4-6 weeks before the primary. They operated without accountability to West Virginia voters. And they won.
But here’s the thing: Blair’s loss is becoming normal.
Primary challenges against incumbents have increased dramatically. Outside spending in primary elections has exploded. Voting records are being weaponized with increasing sophistication. Ideological purity tests are replacing coalition-building as a primary strategy. Experienced politicians are being replaced by candidates with thin or no records.
This isn’t a West Virginia problem. It’s not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. It’s a structural problem in how American politics now operates. And it’s not going away.
Look at any state legislature, and you’ll see versions of this pattern:
* Wyoming: Outside groups attacked incumbents on voting records
* Ohio: Primary challenges funded by outside money defeated experienced legislators
* Idaho: Outside-funded challengers removed incumbents in safe seats
* Nevada: Similar patterns emerging
This is the new normal. Not the exception. The exception is the incumbent who survives a well-funded primary challenge when an outside group decides they’re a target.
WHAT PROTECTS YOU NOW?
The honest answer: not much.
But there are some asymmetries worth understanding:
Record cleanliness matters, but it’s almost impossible to maintain. If you serve in government for any length of time, you vote on complicated issues with genuine trade-offs. Any vote can potentially be reframed as betrayal. You could try to vote “safely,” but that’s not actual governance—that’s just surviving. And even then, someone will find a vote to attack.
Early narrative control is increasingly valuable. The outside group attacking you has an advantage if they define the narrative before you can. If you can control your own story before someone else tells it for you, you have breathing room. This requires resources, strategic messaging, and speed—essentially, your own outside-funded apparatus. So to compete with outside money, you need outside money. That’s a trap.
Outsider status can be an advantage in primary elections, but it’s a liability in general elections. You can win a primary as a blank slate because no one knows you well enough to have opinions about you. But in a general election, being a complete unknown is risky. This creates a perverse situation where the people who win primaries are often the people worst equipped to win general elections.
Ideological consistency can provide some protection. If you’re consistently voting a particular way, it’s harder to create the shock of “betrayal” that makes reframing effective. But ideology and governance are in tension—ideology is clean, governance is messy. So this protects you by making you a worse representative.
Being boring helps. Genuinely. If you’re not someone that outside groups perceive as a particular threat or opportunity, you might not attract the resources necessary for effective primary challenges. This is a depressing advantage, but it’s real: flying under the radar is safer than being visible and engaged.
Having a fully outside-funded apparatus of your own. If you can match the outside group spending against you with your own spending, you can survive. But this just means politics is now determined by who can attract the most outside money, not by who has the best ideas or who connects with voters best.
So the system doesn’t just offer you no protection. It offers you false options: either don’t govern well enough to have a record to defend, or don’t represent your district’s interests effectively so you’re not a threat to outside groups, or have enough outside money to match whatever’s thrown at you.
Most politicians can manage at most one of these. Many can manage none.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR DEMOCRACY (AND IT’S NOT OPTIMISTIC)
I’m going to be direct: this shift is corrosive to representative government.
When party affiliation provided real protection, it created stable incentives for legislators to serve their districts. They could cast difficult votes because they had institutional backing. They could take positions that weren’t purely aligned with outside pressure because they had party infrastructure. They could actually represent their communities in ways that didn’t necessarily align with national ideological movements.
Now, politicians are increasingly vulnerable to outside actors with resources and ideological purity tests. This creates pressure toward ideological conformity, against local representation, and in favor of politicians who can attract outside backing. Outside backing usually means alignment with national movements rather than local needs.
The irony is brutal: we’ve created a system where representatives are simultaneously less protected by their parties and more dependent on outside forces.
Party affiliation used to mean something. Now it’s just a label attached to a politician who’s essentially freelancing in a landscape where coordinated outside groups can take them down at any moment.
This is why you’re seeing so many retirements. Experienced politicians are looking at this landscape and deciding it’s not worth it. The protection that used to come with seniority is gone. The vulnerability is maximum. The headache is constant.
And as experienced politicians leave, they’re replaced by people who either:
* Haven’t served long enough to have a real voting record (blank slates)
* Are so ideologically pure that they can’t be reframed (which means they can’t compromise or negotiate)
* Have attracted outside backing and are therefore beholden to outside actors
None of these produces better representation.
THE SYSTEM REINFORCES ITSELF
Here’s the feedback loop that makes this hard to escape:
Outside groups attack incumbents → incumbents lose or retire → blank slates replace them → blank slates can’t be reframed because they have no record → they’re elected → they govern without experience → governance gets worse → voters get more frustrated → outside groups have easier targets.
Each element reinforces the others. It’s a system that perpetuates itself. And once it’s established, it’s incredibly hard to break because the incentives all push the same direction.
Consider what would it take to restore party protection:
* Parties would need to mobilize resources to defend members
* But parties are also weakened by the same dynamics
* Parties don’t have the donor base they used to have
* Parties don’t have the infrastructure they used to have
* So parties can’t actually defend members even if they wanted to
Consider what would take to reduce outside money:
* You’d need campaign finance reform
* But Citizens United made that a constitutional issue
* Reform efforts have consistently failed
* So outside money isn’t going anywhere
Consider what would take to make voters more resistant to targeted reframing:
* You’d need media literacy
* But media literacy is a slow educational process
* It competes against sophisticated messaging and algorithmic targeting
* So voters probably aren’t getting more sophisticated
The system is locked in place. The pieces reinforce each other. Attempts to fix one piece don’t work because the other pieces keep pushing the same direction.
THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH
The most likely outcome is that American politics continues to become:
* More ideologically pure
* More driven by outside actors
* Less representative of local concerns
* Less able to attract experienced, thoughtful people to public service
I’m not happy about this prediction. But it’s the one the data supports.
Experienced legislators retiring. Blank slate candidates winning primaries. Outside groups deciding elections. Voting records becoming liabilities instead of assets. Ideological purity becoming the competitive advantage. Governance becoming secondary to survival.
This is the direction the system is moving. Not because people are making bad choices. But because the structure of incentives now rewards these outcomes.
THE REAL LESSON FROM CRAIG BLAIR
I keep coming back to Craig Blair’s loss because it’s clarifying in a specific way.
He had everything the old system said would protect you:
* Party affiliation ✓
* Institutional power ✓
* Electoral experience ✓
* Favorable polling ✓
* Double-digit lead ✓
And none of it mattered.
An outside group decided to attack him. They had resources. They had a compressed timeline. They had a reframing of his record that, while misleading, was technically defensible. They operated without accountability. And he lost.
His loss didn’t prove that party affiliation is useless. It proved that party affiliation is insufficient.
And that’s a different claim. A more unsettling claim.
Because if party affiliation can’t protect someone like Craig Blair—a legislator with experience, with favorable ratings, with party backing—then it can’t protect anyone.
If no one is safe, then politics becomes about constantly looking over your shoulder. Wondering which outside group will decide you’re next. What vote in your record will they use to take you down. Whether you should retire before they find it.
That’s not democracy. That’s paranoia with voting rights attached.
And it’s the system we’ve built.
WHAT NOW?
This is the operating environment. The old system is gone. Party protection is insufficient. Outside money is dominant. Voting records are vulnerabilities. Blank slates are competitive. Experienced politicians are leaving.
This is happening. The question now is: what do we do about it?
Some people will try to reform campaign finance. That probably won’t work—Citizens United is constitutional law now, and reform efforts have failed consistently.
Some people will try to strengthen parties. That probably won’t work—parties are also weakened by the same structural forces.
Some people will try media literacy efforts to make voters more resistant to reframing. That’s probably too slow to keep up with technological sophistication.
But there’s one thing that might actually work: understanding how the system operates and building defenses specifically designed to counter it.
Not campaign finance reform. Not party reform. Not media literacy. But coordinated, strategic, operationally sophisticated defense against the specific tactics that outside groups use.
If operatives understood how outside groups work—really understood it, not just the surface tactics but the machinery underneath—they could prepare differently.
If journalists understood the pattern across multiple states instead of treating each attack as an isolated incident, they could report with more skepticism.
If voters understood that they were being targeted by outside actors with specific intentions, they could be more resistant to reframing.
If states coordinated their responses instead of treating attacks as local problems, they could scale solutions that work.
None of this would eliminate outside money. None of this would reverse the structural shift. But it might make outside groups’ operations less effective, more expensive, more risky.
And that might change the calculus enough to matter.
WHERE THIS GOES
This is the first article of several. I’m going to walk you through:
* How outside groups actually operate operationally—the machinery underneath the tactics, the decision tree that determines which races they target, why standard responses fail.
* A detailed case study of Make Liberty Win’s operation in West Virginia—specifically how the machinery I describe in Article 2 played out in the Blair race in real time.
* What counter-infrastructure actually looks like—how operatives, journalists, and parties can build defenses specifically designed for the new system.
* How this plays out in practice, what works, what doesn’t, and how the system evolves.
My assumption is that you’re reading this because you’re either:
* A political operative trying to understand why your protected incumbent got removed in a primary
* A party leader trying to figure out why you can’t protect members anymore
* A journalist trying to understand what’s actually happening when outside groups attack candidates
* A voter trying to understand why politics feels more broken than it used to
If you’re in any of those categories, the old playbook doesn’t work anymore. Understanding the new system is the first step toward defending against it.
ONE FINAL THOUGHT
We didn’t set out to build this system. We didn’t wake up one day and decide that American politics should be run by outside actors with no accountability to voters in the states they’re influencing.
It happened gradually. A court decision here. A technology change there. A party weakening. Media fragmentation. Each change made sense at the time. But the combination created something that nobody quite intended.
We’re now living in the world that combination created. And we’re just starting to understand what that means.
The next articles will help you understand it better.
Does this match what you’re experiencing? Are you seeing the pattern in your state or district? Are you watching incumbents lose in primaries they should have won? Are you seeing outside groups win elections with reframed voting records?
I’m genuinely curious how this framework maps onto what you’re observing on the ground. Let me know in the comments—the best follow-up articles will come from the patterns you’re seeing.
And if you know operatives, journalists, or party leaders who need to understand this system, share this with them. They probably need it
Next Article in Series: The Playbook: A Torrent of Propaganda
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