Political Strategy. Corporate Advisory. Policy Intelligence.
I spoke to Ben Johansen, Adam Wren and Lisa Kashinsky for POLITICO on shutdown and GOP election losses.
“Republicans aren’t the ones asking for anything, so for them it’s a choice between changing the rules or helping Dems find an offramp,” Liam Donovan, a veteran GOP strategist, told POLITICO. “Last night’s result theoretically allows Democrats to declare victory and end this on their own terms, but success makes choreography of any resolution that much trickier.”
Timothy Cama quoted me in POLITICO’s Power Switch, on reporting by Kelsey Brugger, about the wind and solar tax provision that appeared and vanished in the reconciliation bill.
“It was a perfect MacGuffin for the most frenzied point in the process,” said Liam Donovan, a political strategist at the firm Bracewell. He called it a “reminder to industry that things could get worse.”
Adam Wren and Dasha Burns quoted me in POLITICO Playbook on Republican midterm strategy.
Fabrizio and LaCivita — who don’t have a formal partnership — are helping the GOP as a whole avoid messy primaries by getting the president to weigh in early in favor of his preferred candidates. In the process, the operation is consolidating support behind those candidates as they gear up to face flush Democrats who, as Republican strategist Liam Donovan notes, will “beat each other up on personal and ideological grounds for the ensuing year [in] an inversion of the dynamic that has plagued the GOP in competitive races for the better part of the past decade.”
I sat down with Leigh Ann Caldwell for a Puck interview on how K Street was handled during the One Big Beautiful Bill — ignored in some respects, shut out entirely in others — and how different the process felt from the 2017 tax reform fight.
In a very candid chat, Donovan broke down how lobbyists were ignored in some respects, and completely shut out of the process in others. The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: How influential was K Street in crafting the BBB compared to eight years ago, when the first Trump administration passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act?
Liam Donovan: It’s been very, very different in terms of the level of open collaboration. Back then, you had a blank canvas. And the idea was, Okay, we can kind of do whatever we want in tax reform. It was very hand in glove — Republicans on Capitol Hill working with friendly industries to shape policies, take stakeholder input, and ultimately support the product. That’s really not been this experience.
I sat down with Caitlin Oprysko for a POLITICO Influence interview on my move from Bracewell to Targeted Victory, why the old lobbying playbook is delivering diminishing returns, and how industries should be thinking about positioning in a scrambled political landscape.
Donovan joined Bracewell in 2017 from the Associated Builders and Contractors, and before that was a fundraiser at the NRSC and helped manage several trade association PACs. In an interview, Donovan said he expected to remain an adviser to some of his former clients at Bracewell as a complement to the work his former colleagues are doing.
“I’ve been, for the last 15 years, doing more shoe-leather lobbying work,” Donovan told PI. But over the past eight years — and especially over the past six months — he argued, “the old playbook just gives diminishing returns. You can have the best tactics in the world, you could have all the resources in the world and smart people, but the landscape has just fundamentally changed.”
In Donovan’s estimation, if a company or industry is facing challenges in D.C., much of that likely stems from the lack of a broader understanding of how a brand should be positioning itself in the current political landscape, where traditional alignments have been scrambled and almost no longstanding alliances are sacred.
Donovan pointed as an example to the energy industry, which made up a large chunk of his work at Bracewell. Oil and gas interests in particular expected to come into the second Trump administration riding high, only to face being caught in the president’s trade wars. The disruption “I think threw a lot of people for a loop,” Donovan said. “You had a lot of people that stand to be winners and beneficiaries of these policies that still had to step back and go, ‘Wait, what’s happening?’”
“At the end of the day, it all sort of flows up to risk and reputation,” he told PI. “Whether you’re proactively trying to achieve advocacy ends or just trying to stay out of this administration’s slipstream, it is really critical to be approaching this in a deliberate way and in a strategic way.”