Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.

Mary Jennings “MJ” Hegar, a 42-year-old mother and Republican turned “independent Democrat” running for Congress in Texas, is an Air Force veteran and retired Air National Guard helicopter pilot who didn’t let an abusive biological father, knee injuries, and sexual bias, harassment and assault stop her from doing three tours in Afghanistan that climaxed with a rescue mission gone awry in which she strapped herself to the skids of a chopper and fired at the Taliban. Her service earned her a Purple Heart. Back stateside, she successfully sued the Secretary of Defense (Hegar, et al. v. Panetta) to get the Pentagon to end the policy that officially barred women from combat, was named by Newsweek as one of 125 “Women of Impact” of 2012 and wrote a bestselling book called Shoot Like a Girl that came out last year and is now set to be turned into a movie with Angelina Jolie reportedly in talks to play the lead role.

“She’s a badass,” Democratic ad maker Cayce McCabe told me last week.


McCabe’s biggest concern heading into the shooting and editing of the 3½-minute biographical spot released last month was whether or not he could “do her story justice.”

He did. The ad immediately began to ricochet around the internet, Hegar’s fundraising and name recognition turbocharged by millions of YouTube views and Facebook shares. It earned her coverage in news outlets as varied as USA Today, Adweek and People. It got her on CNN and MSNBC. And it has made her a Democratic candidate to watch in Texas’ 31st Congressional District, which is composed of suburban and rural areas north of Austin, includes Fort Hood in Killeen and has voted for nobody but GOP Rep. “Judge” John Carter since it was created more than a decade and a half ago.

It also was the third Putnam Partners ad in the past two years that made a Democratic military veteran go viral. In 2016, it was Jason Kander, his blindfold and his AR-15. In 2017, it was Amy McGrath, the first female Marine to fly an F/A-18 fighter jet in combat, launching her upstart candidacy in Kentucky’s 6th District. This year, it’s Hegar.

In what is shaping up to be a year defined by record numbers of women running for office, and a surge in veterans, too, the McGrath and Hegar spots arguably have been the two best examples of intrinsically compelling characters using an emerging medium (“long-form” political ads) and tapping into the cultural zeitgeist (fervor on the left plus bipartisan disgust with a feckless Congress) to alter the trajectories of candidacies. It likely will be a key piece of the puzzle if Democrats are able to flip the 24 seats they need to take back control of the House of Representatives come November.

Veterans have emerged as an effective voice to channel Democratic voters’ frustration and anger, Putnam Partners boss Mark Putnam said in an interview in his office in Washington. “They have the toughness, strength and idealism needed to fix a broken system.” Putnam, 54, is known best for his exacting work for red-state Democrats and his half-hour prime-time special for Barack Obama in 2008. “Activist Democrats,” he said, “are often looking for progressive candidates who can make an argument but also have a profile with bipartisan appeal. We see this with Amy, we see this with MJ—they want somebody that makes them say, ‘Yes, that’s how we can win campaigns.’”

More broadly, these ads highlight a wholly new way to envision a campaign. Especially for first-time long-shot candidates, these spots have flipped the typical path to electoral success. It used to be one ran locally in an effort to get attention nationally. But the preponderance of smartphones and a hunger for clickable media have enabled the opposite. “We did a video that made her a national figure,” McGrath campaign manager Mark Nickolas told me, “in order for us to be able to run a local campaign.”

“It’s letting other candidates who aren’t your normal big names have a shot to get out there,” said Bill Hyers, a consultant and Army veteran whose ad for fellow Army veteran and ironworker Randy Bryce kick-started his congressional campaign in Wisconsin a month before the McGrath debut.

“Having a story that cuts through the clutter is a powerful weapon,” added Jim Margolis, a senior adviser to the presidential campaigns of Obama and Hillary Clinton.

“You’re not only getting known but you’re also getting some of the resources to make a real push and actually have a shot at winning,” longtime Democratic strategist Joe Trippi said.

But can virality lead to victory? Kander, after all, exceeded expectations in his bid in Missouri to win a seat in the U.S. Senate—but lost. Talked about as a possible presidential candidate, he’s now running for mayor of Kansas City. McGrath, meanwhile, notched an upset in her primary and has worked her way into “toss up” territory in the general election. Hegar has an even steeper climb. High-priced, cinematic ads by themselves can’t guarantee victory even for incumbents, as Putnam knows from experience.

But one thing is for sure. “You’re going to see more of this,” Trippi said. “That’s sort of over the horizon what this all means.”

And at the forefront is Putnam, part artist, part operative. “A little Errol Morris,” Nickolas said, “and a little Roger Ailes.”

***

For Putnam, this has been building for a generation. A native of Anchorage, Alaska, who graduated from Brown University with a degree in biology, he got his start in politics as an aide to Joe Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign. Putnam isn’t undefeated—Alaska Sen. Mark Begich, for instance, lost in 2014 in the wake of a controversial attack ad—but Putnam nonetheless has made winning ads not only for Obama but for mayors (Denver’s Michael Hancock, Pittsburgh’s Bill Peduto, Richmond’s Levar Stoney), governors (Colorado’s John Hickenlooper, North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, Rhode Island’s Gina Raimondo) and senators (Maryland’s Ben Cardin, Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey, North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp). The first time he pitched a veteran conspicuously as such was in the 2002 congressional campaign of Democrat Jim Marshall of Georgia. Polling showed his military story made him attractive to a wider array of voters. And he won. (And he kept winning until the Republican wave of 2010.) Ever since, simmering trends in technology, social media and online fundraising have helped to produce fertile ground for something like the Kander ad.

Putnam did with the up-and-coming Kander what he does with every candidate he works with. He met with him, his family members, and his wife and their child, looked at photo albums, asked questions. He listened. And the conversation turned to boot camp and landed on the fact that Kander could assemble and disassemble his Army-issued weapon with uncommon quickness and skill. “Can you do it blindfolded?” Putnam asked. And could he do it in 30 seconds? “Because that would make a great ad.” In Missouri, the easiest way to attack a Democrat is on guns, he said, and Kander had an “F” rating from the National Rifle Association. Sen. Roy Blunt was going to use that. It was only a matter of time. And Putnam and Kander were prepared when he did. “Background Checks” was a hit.

The first ad for McGrath was different. There have been a handful of memorable campaign-fueling ads for veterans in this cycle—from the aforementioned Randy “Iron Stache” Bryce to Staten Islander Max Rose’s “Chopper,” made by Margolis’ pedigreed firm, to West Virginian Richard Ojeda’s introductory spot made by a former coal miner who taught himself filmmaking watching The Walking Dead—but McGrath’s campaign literally wouldn’t be happening let alone surging without “Told Me.”

The backstory: McGrath was ready to retire from the Marine Corps. The presidential election of 2016 made her want to continue her public service in a different form. She had met former Rep. Ben Chandler (D-Ky.) at the Naval Academy, and she asked him for advice. He connected her with Nickolas, an all-but-retired political strategist who now was more focused on his documentary work in Brooklyn but had purchased a farm in Kentucky’s 6th District. Nickolas mentioned her to Putnam, which is how Putnam ended up watching on YouTube McGrath’s brief December 2016 speech when she was inducted into the Kentucky Aviation Hall of Fame. It was genuine, but shy of inspiring, Putnam thought, until the 7½-minute mark—when he was struck by something she said and the quiet ferocity with which she said it.

“Your recognition gives me a lot of hope that we as a nation will keep reflecting on what we want to encourage our girls in particular to become,” McGrath told the crowd. “Do we want them to be judged by their looks, by their dress size, or do we want them to be OK with feeling powerful? With being smart? With being”—and here her face stiffened into visceral resolve—“physically strong? With being aggressive. Because, folks, those are the traits that made me successful as a Marine Corps fighter pilot. Or do we mock them? Do we tell them they’re ‘angry,’ or ‘ugly,’ or ‘unladylike,’ or whatever word you want to throw out there? I think that’s very important. Role models matter. Leaders matter. What they say. How they act. Their character. Matters.”

“Chills,” Putnam told me in his office. “Steel and toughness wrapped in modesty and patriotism.”

For most of last summer, though, next to nobody knew who McGrath was. Fundraising had stalled. Her candidacy was going nowhere. So Putnam and Nickolas gambled it all on an ad. They had her wear her leather pilot’s jacket, even though the temperature sizzled into the mid-90s. They put her on a tarmac in front of a fighter jet. “This is my new mission,” McGrath said into the camera. It ended with a fade-out zeroing in on her military dress and medals and a sword. And it cost “$33-34,000,” Nickolas said—fairly standard for a more highly produced video, what with union-rate camera crews, time in the editing studio, fees for music and so on—sending her campaign some $7,000 into debt. The ad was set for release on August 1. He woke up that morning “terrified,” he told me, “absolutely terrified.” Had the ad flopped, McGrath’s candidacy was all but done.

Putnam often advises against such an expenditure because “usually” such ads don’t even pay for themselves in ensuing fundraising let alone lead to donation bonanzas. In the case of McGrath, though, he says he wasn’t so worried. “Because I knew what I wanted it to look like, and I knew the story was incredible.” When it came out, it led Playbook. “What House Democrats want 2018 to look like,” the headline read. And on vacation in Italy, Putnam watched his hunch turn real in the form of millions of views, “a two-day adrenaline wave, of tweets and Facebook posts and eventually articles.”

And cash.

“We had $400,000 raised I think in the first week,” Nickolas told me, and eventually more than $2 million in contributions.

“What it did,” he said, “was it effectively solved the problem that all first-time candidates face, which is legitimacy. I had money. I could hire a staff. I started hiring a staff immediately. I started building an operation. And Amy’s name ID quickly went from zero to whatever it was. It allowed us to start actually running an operation. It gave us oxygen to proceed from base camp. It is no guarantee you’re going to reach the peak. But we got to leave base camp with oxygen, and now we have a fighting chance to get to the top.”

***

McCabe, a Putnam Partners senior vice president and Mark Putnam protégé, did with Hegar what his boss had done with Kander and McGrath. He essentially reported out her story. He read her book (“I looped my lanyard around the rocket pod mount …”). He read and watched and listened to interviews she already had done (“I became a combat pilot despite people trying to stop me …”). He talked to her on the phone and combed through those transcripts. “And I guess my brain just noticed the repetition of the word ‘door’. And so I just thought I could make this metaphor for the whole thing.” The door motif—which took the viewer from the door of Hegar’s helicopter to the door her father threw her mother through to the doors she knocked on in Texas and Washington—allowed McCabe to make the whole ad feel seamless, like “one shot, fluid,” he told me.

“People always say you can’t make a 2½-minute video, a 3-minute video, a 5-minute video—it’s too long, it’s too long, nobody has the attention span,” said McCabe, who studied political science and earned a law degree at Florida State and is a grass-roots operative turned media consultant with a record of boosting underdogs. The idea that people are less and less capable of paying attention is conventional wisdom that he dismisses. “You have a situation where people are spending their whole weekends binge-watching Netflix. So people’s attention spans aren’t that small. You just have to keep their attention. You have to give them something they want to watch.”

Then share.

“Doors” went viral, McCabe believes, because of Hegar (she’s “dynamic” and “electric”) and because of her story (“good enough to make a movie out of”) but also due to the moment in which it landed. “It’s not an easy time in this country, especially these past couple weeks seeing families ripped apart at the border,” he told me. “So I think a story of somebody overcoming the odds, and fighting, and a warrior—it’s kind of just what people needed.” “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda told his more than 2.4 million Twitter followers it was “the best political ad anyone’s ever seen.”

“We’re in a period when many voters aren’t looking for more of the same, so women and veterans and people who haven’t been in traditional positions of power represent change, and they represent change at a time when more of the same just won’t do,” Margolis said. “This is a political moment where I think a lot of voters are anxious to see something very different in Congress and people who don’t look like everyone else who’s currently there.”

Trippi sees these spots as sneak previews of sorts for 2020. “You’re going to have 16, 17, 18 Democrats running for president of the United States, all doing some kind of compelling long-form video,” he told me.

For the time being, though, in these House races in red states, viral ads have made Democrats who are veterans viable in a way they wouldn’t have been without them.

McCabe thinks it can propel Hegar to a win this fall.

“Absolutely,” he said. The ad cost more than $40,000 to make, a tab shared by her campaign and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Hegar didn’t have that much money to burn, but it proved to be more than worth it. “It’s helped her raise a ton of money. I mean, it’s over half a million as of right now. My guess is that it could very well be a million by the time this quarter report comes out.” Added McCabe: “We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars if not close to a million in $5, $10, $25 contributions, so these are not people who are maxed out and cannot give again.” By contrast, Carter, the GOP incumbent, had a little more than $350,000 in his coffers at the end of March.

Can virality lead to victory?

For Democrats?

In Kentucky?

In Texas?

It remains to be seen.

“But the fact of the matter is, everybody wants an Amy McGrath video or an MJ Hegar video,” McCabe said. “Everybody. They certainly come to us for that reason. Why wouldn’t you? If you’re going to spend 30 grand or more on a bio video, you want it to be viral, right?”