What will happen to the 150,000+ people who worked on the campaigns?

@LuckyGuy Excellent question. That was a huge amount of money, and do they just put the workers in storage for another 3 years or so?

The vast majority of those positions were either volunteer or seriously part time. Like, I’ll give you $50 if you knock on doors for a couple of hours and hand out flyers at the mall. I almost signed up for that back on Obama’s first campaign.

Those full-timers will do the same thing census worker do every ten years – try to find another job. They might start work on their party’s next congressional campaign. And print shops are definitely going to feel the hit, at least until the next big thing comes along.

Some on the Obama campaign will score jobs in the new administration. others, particularly college grads will now have valuable work experience that could help them get jobs.

@Seek_Kolinahr I am ignoring the volunteers. Every dollar of that $6B (or $12B) was spent right here in the US (almost) . It went to pay ad companies, hotels, airlines, TV and radio stations, production crews, printers, etc. A lot of people were employed putting out the stuff most of us hate to receive. Where will all those people go? Making car ads for Toyota?
The $6B ( or $12B) was almost like a giant social program.

@marinelife I fully agree, it is excellent experience and useful for finding the next job. But those people were not the ones getting the $6B .

@Adirondackwannabe Maybe they are all put in cold storage.

I worked on several campaigns. We always went back to our regular work when the campaign was over. I think the campaigns tend to divert a lot of people from what they normally do to what happens for the year of the campaign. One in four years, people work on campaigns. The rest of the time, they do other work.

There will be some who do get laid off. Certainly a lot of Romney employees will get laid off. But I think they will quickly find other things to do. Campaign workers tend to be intelligent, skilled people; the kind that usually don’t have trouble finding remunerative work.

They’ll all catch up on sleep and get back to their real lives. Campaigning is a time suck.

Feeling either elated or downcast, they go back home and do whatever they did before they got into politicking.

What will the ad agencies shill now?

Most of them will go back in storage along with all the other former Jerry Springer audience members.
A small proportion will revert to their old jobs, Donald Trump’s hair weaver & fungal foot fetishists.