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.”

Read the full Q&A here.

I spoke to Sahil Kapur, Scott Wong and Kyle Stewart for NBC News on SALT tax deduction.

Democrats are guaranteed to attack SALT limits imposed by Republicans as an attempt to raise taxes on residents of blue states, which hold enough swing districts to decide control of the House.
“I don’t think there’s any magic number where it’s not a fertile attack line for Democrats, so at a certain point SALT members just have to take yes for an answer,” said Liam Donovan, a lobbyist and former GOP aide, who said the cap is likely to end up above $10,000 but well short of the $100,000 pro-SALT members appear to want.
“To me, the best way to indemnify yourself politically is to make the number as big as possible but with an income phase-out,” he said. “Hard to attack Republicans if you can’t claim it hurts middle class families. The poster child is ostensibly the cop or firefighter who has a big property tax bill, which is a relatively cheap and easy problem to fix.”

Read the full piece here.

Erin Schilling and Chris Cioffi quoted me in Bloomberg Tax on how defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy credits are making a jobs argument while avoiding the word “solar.”

Lobbyists are doing a full-court press to save those investments and jobs. If industries and companies don’t have a champion willing to speak up for their preferred tax credit as the Republican’s forthcoming tax and spending bill gets drafted, they risk being at the mercy of the process, Bracewell’s Liam Donovan told Bloomberg Law.
“With these slim margins [in Congress], one determined member makes all the difference, and leadership will be trying to navigate the path of least resistance,” said Donovan.

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to Grace Segers for The New Republic on McConnell’s legacy and Trump.

“This is not the conference that he took over, but it’s the one he built,” said Republican strategist Liam Donovan.
There was a brief period of time in which McConnell’s methodical, ruthless political style imbued him with a sort of “folk heroism” among Republicans, said Donovan. McConnell’s willingness to block Obama’s agenda—as well as his Supreme Court nominee—and his efforts in pushing through Trump’s judicial nominees cemented his reputation as a political fighter. McConnell also helped push through the massive tax cuts that became one of Trump’s major legislative achievements in 2017.
“I think [Trump’s] greatest successes ironically occurred when he and McConnell were working together in a sort of transactional way, both on the political side and on the legislative side,” said Donovan.

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to NPR’s Barbara Sprunt for an explainer on how reconciliation works and why it is the key to Trump’s agenda.

“It’s nice to have the Senate majority, and you get pretty titles and gavels, and you can nominally control the floor, but as Schoolhouse Rock! would tell us, unless you have 60 votes for most things, you can’t move forward,” said Liam Donovan, a political strategist.
“It’s become the preferred tool over the past 25 years in this modern, partisan political era,” said Donovan.
“The amendments that happen in the final legislative package are really important — you’re playing with live ammunition when you’re on that final stage of reconciliation,” said Donovan.

Listen to the full interview here.