Who we are, who we serve, and what we refuse to do.
Dark Horse Political is a liberty-first, constitutionally-grounded, anti-establishment political consulting firm. We serve constitutional conservatives — and we are loyal to the republic and to the people, not to any party. If that alignment changes, our thesis still holds.
In practice, most of our clients are Republicans — but not all Republicans. We do not work with the moderate, establishment-aligned wing of the Party. We work with the candidates the county chair wishes would sit down.
We also serve independent candidates whose convictions are in line with ours, in races that are non-partisan by structure or in cases where the party has rejected a good candidate outright and an independent run is the tactically correct response. A constitutional conservative whose party has turned on them is still a constitutional conservative. We will run their race.
And we defend constitutional-conservative incumbents against challenges from the left and from the establishment wing of either party. A good officeholder who has actually done the job — read the handbook, followed it, stayed loyal to the citizens who elected them — is exactly the kind of person the establishment routinely tries to replace. We will stand with them.
The sovereignty of the individual citizen under the United States Constitution and the constitutions of the several states. A government limited to defending the freedoms, lives, and property of its citizens — and no more. The right of any candidate to challenge an incumbent or a party favorite without being strangled in the crib by their own side. The voter's right to hear from the candidates the party machine would prefer they never meet.
We believe the Constitution is the employee handbook of the federal government, and each state constitution the employee handbook of its state. We work for candidates who intend to read the handbook and follow it. That is the job.
The corporate capture of the political class. Big-government expansion in any direction, under any justification, from any party. The uniparty — the bipartisan consensus that acts in its own interest and calls it governance. The anti-liberty woke left. Socialists and communists. Authoritarians on both the right and the left. Religious fanatics on the right and the left.
We do not locate our enemies along a single axis from left to right. We locate them by their relationship to concentrated power versus the sovereignty of the individual citizen. That framing is older than either party. It will outlast both.
Run both sides.
Take the party's chosen candidate over the one who is committed to defending individual freedom and liberty and refused to wait their turn.
Run vanilla "positive, issues-focused" campaigns for candidates who will not take a punch and refuse to throw one.
Manage candidates who will not do the work — we run the strategy; the candidate runs the candidacy, and a candidate who wants the firm to carry both is the wrong client.
Beg. Pitch. Send a deck. Do speculative work to earn the engagement.
We are not amateurs and you would not want to work with us if we were.
We run a specific type of client each year. The filter is why.
Dark Horse Political does not publish full client lists. We do not discuss current client work. The engagements below are the ones already in the public record — the ones our clients have chosen to make public, or in one case, the race that made the firm. Every other campaign we run operates under NDA and will remain there. Our clients' opponents learn we were there when it is too late for the information to matter. Discretion is a feature, not a limitation.
Senator Bob Dole, Republican nomination for President.
Christopher Gergen's first campaign. Nineteen years old, door-knocking in the Baton Rouge summer heat as a grassroots volunteer. First contact with the work. The sidewalk education that began thirty years of operator judgment.
Donald J. Trump, Republican nominee for President. Oregon State operation.
Christopher served as State Political Director for the Trump for President organization in Oregon from April through October 2016. Verifiable via Federal Election Commission records and Oregon press coverage of the period.
When we began this race, Trump was down by 17 points in Oregon to Kasich and Cruz, with eight weeks until the primary. On primary day we closed with a 47-point margin over the nearest challenger — 64 percent to 17 percent to 16 percent. Both challengers subsequently dropped out of the nomination process.
Loren Culp, Republican nominee for Governor of Washington.
A relatively unknown police chief from a town of 1,200 in northeastern Washington defeated thirty-four primary opponents — the closest of whom he beat by a 2-to-1 margin — including the party-endorsed favorite, who held the Washington State Republican Party endorsement and every County Party endorsement, and had raised comparable money. In the general election, Culp earned 1,749,066 raw votes, more than any Republican gubernatorial candidate in Washington State history. The record stands. Dark Horse Political ran that campaign.
The engagements above are the visible portion of a larger book. We do not name our current clients. We do not describe their strategies. We do not discuss their campaigns until the races are over and the outcomes are in the public record — and frequently not even then.
This is not a marketing choice. It is a commitment to the people who trusted us with their candidacies.
We operate on retainer. Monthly or quarterly, structured for the number of voters in the race. No hourly billing. No marked-up production fees or upcharging on mailers and printing. The retainer is the relationship, and the relationship is the firm's commitment to the campaign through every phase of the work.
The founder runs the work. Christopher Gergen is personally involved in every engagement. There is no bench to hide behind. He is involved in every campaign regardless of which team members handle specifics. When you retain Dark Horse Political, you retain the operator.
Every engagement runs the doctrine. The methodology is described in WIN. and extended in the firm's private practice. Campaigns move through defined phases, executed against the same discipline that took an unknown police chief from a town of 1,200 to more than 1.7 million votes for Governor.
The technology is part of the engagement, tiered to the scale of the race. Every DHP campaign runs on NOX — the proprietary execution infrastructure that underwrites the firm's work. NOX is included in the retainer, once operational; our clients benefit whether they know it exists or not. Additional platforms — ARMR for candidate readiness, and other tools as they are released — are available as add-ons, priced and deployed based on the demands of the race. A 25,000-voter municipal race does not need the full weight of the firm's platform stack. A federal primary against a party favorite does. We match the tools to the terrain.
We staff engagements to phase demands. Complex races, contested primaries, and late-phase offensives require senior consultants — the principal among them, Christopher. Smaller engagements and earlier phases can be executed by consultants we have trained against the doctrine. The match is made at the start of the engagement and reviewed as the race progresses.
Some of our most successful work has been done in counties the statewide press has never filmed in — places the party maps treat as assumed territory and the consulting class treats as beneath their attention. We treat them as the terrain where the race is actually decided. By the time the cameras arrive, the vote is already counted.
This is doctrine, not accident. Establishment firms chase the camera. We chase the vote.
If you have read this page and you are still here, you already know whether Dark Horse Political is the right firm for you. The answer is in whether you recognize yourself in what you have just read.
If you do, the next step is on the Engage page.
Engage