The thing that’s hardest to believe about George Santos, the congressman from Long Island who claimed falsely, or without evidence, that he worked for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, that he was the target of an assassination attempt, that he starred, and “slayed,” on the Baruch College volleyball team, that he was Jewish (“I said I was Jew-ish,” he later clarified), that his grandparents survived the Holocaust, that his mother died in the September 11th attacks, that four of his employees were killed in the Pulse night-club shooting, that he had his shoes stolen off his feet on Fifth Avenue, and that an alter ego of his had a role on the show “Hannah Montana,” and who has been accused of swindling three thousand dollars from a homeless Navy veteran with a dying dog, of working for a company running a Ponzi scheme, and of performing in Brazil as a drag queen named Kitara (“Sue me for having a life”), and whom the Republican senator John Kennedy recently called a “bunny boiler” (“I don’t know if you’ve seen ‘Fatal Attraction,’ but there are people like that out there,” Kennedy said), is that he actually won election. Horrifying? Yes. Distressing? Sure. But, in a game-recognize-game kind of way, isn’t it also a little bit impressive?
“I like to win the things that people say you can’t,” Chris Grant said the other day. Grant is the forty-two-year-old founder of Big Dog Strategies, the consultancy that led Santos to victory after his previous consultants quit. Big Dog (“I’m six-six, three hundred whatever,” Grant explained) did work for more than a hundred Republican campaigns in 2022 and was the lead adviser for eight. Grant agreed to supply some tips on the art of pulling off wins in difficult races.
Big Dog had candidates with worse odds than Santos. Upstate, Nick Langworthy defeated Carl Paladino after being down by some thirty points. What’s the secret? “A non-stop focus on the issues and an obsession with data,” Grant said.
But every campaign is different. In 2018, Big Dog had Steve Watkins trumpet his biography in a Kansas congressional race. “The primary was a long shot,” Grant said. “As has been well documented, he didn’t have deep ties to the district.” (Watkins was later charged with voter fraud for listing a UPS store as his address.) “But he did have a compelling military story. That was a strong play for him.” In the general, it emerged that Watkins, like a less imaginative Santos, had fabricated some of his bio, including a story about how he had provided heroic aid to climbers during an earthquake on Mt. Everest. But by then he’d already pivoted to the issues. He won by a point.
When hiring, Grant is picky about résumés. He has one rule: applicants must have prior experience in blue-collar or service jobs. (Santos’s embellished C.V. wouldn’t make the cut, but his real one would: he used to work in a call center for Dish Network.)
Grant, who grew up outside of Buffalo and wears Clark Kent-style glasses, always wanted to be a political operative. “I read a Scholastic News magazine in third grade about George H. W. Bush, and I decided that I was a Republican because he wouldn’t raise my taxes,” he said. Grant was a junior in college during the 2000 Presidential election. He explained, “There are guys in the business that you look up to. Karl Rove was the guy.” To stay sharp, he reads five or so books at a time: “One of the best books I’ve read in the last ten years was ‘Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.’ Short of the murdering of people, he had an interesting way of building things.”
Grant thinks that people have a distorted view of what political operatives do. “ ‘House of Cards’ is what we wish it was,” he said. “ ‘Veep’ is what it is.” The Times’ chief fashion critic recently saw calculating menace in Santos’s wardrobe. “He just looked so darn convincing,” she wrote, of his quarter-zips worn beneath blazers. Grant said that operatives’ aesthetic advice was rarely so advanced. “We have to tell some people basic things: take a shower, brush your teeth, comb your hair.”
How would Big Dog counsel other celebrities in media storms? “My advice to Prince Harry would be to shut up,” Grant said. Would he advise Harry to attend the Coronation? “If you have any basic human decency, if your father’s going to be sworn in as a monarch, I would think you’d be supportive. But I’m not a monarch!” What about Will Smith? “Don’t slap people?” he said.
As for Joe Biden and his classified-documents scandal, Grant said that the President had already made a big mistake. “If you’re a President, never encourage the appointment of a special prosecutor,” he said. But he wasn’t surprised by the decision. “The first hint of problems, Democrats cut bait,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine being a successful operative in the Democratic Party, for a host of reasons. Republicans don’t have the advantage of a sympathetic press, so we are much more battle tested. If I had a communications problem, I’d hire a Republican.” ♦
