WASHINGTON—A federal court transcript released Tuesday revealed the dark inner workings of the political consulting industry. Facing an imminent electoral wipeout, top strategists admitted under oath that they view democratic elections as a massive operational hazard.
THE COURT: Counsel may call the next witness to the stand.
Q: State your name and occupation for the record, please.
A: My name is Arthur Vance. I am the Chief Political Strategist at Democracy Solutions LLC.
Q: Mr. Vance, your firm managed forty-seven congressional campaigns this cycle. Is that correct?
A: That is correct. We provided full-service narrative management and voter apathy cultivation.
Q: And how did those campaigns perform?
A: We are currently facing a total electoral wipeout across all forty-seven races. Every single candidate lost to a person who simply handed out free soup.
Q: An electoral wipeout of that scale seems catastrophic. How did your firm respond to these numbers?
A: We did what any professional consulting firm would do. We filed sixteen federal lawsuits to outlaw the concept of counting things.
Q: You sued to stop the counting of votes?
A: No, we sued to stop counting in general. Mathematics has a well-known anti-incumbent bias. We asked the court to replace ballot tallies with an online mood board.
Q: Mr. Vance, isn't the entire purpose of your industry to help candidates win elections?
A: Absolutely not. Our purpose is to bill eighty million dollars in television ad buys. Actual voting introduces far too much volatility into our quarterly earnings reports.
Q: Are you saying the political consulting industry actively dislikes elections?
A: The entire industry hates them. Voters are completely unmanageable. They do not follow the slide deck. Agnes Periwinkle, Head of Audience Sedation at Live Nation, actually warned us about this months ago.
Q: What did Ms. Periwinkle advise you to do?
A: She recommended we lock the voting booths and just play faint elevator music until everyone goes home. In hindsight, we should have listened.
At press time, Mr. Vance asked the judge if the jury could be replaced by a private focus group of undecided voters from Ohio.
