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American Political Consulting
From its Inception to Today
Dennis W. Johnson
Today in the United States, political consulting is a vibrant, mature business that plays a key role in shaping and managing political campaigns. Political consultants measure public opinion, design television and web advertisements, target and identify likely voters, raise campaign funds, write blogs and maintain websites, and research the records of candidates and opponents. They use their skills and experience to develop sound messages and overarching campaign themes, to formulate and carry out campaign strategy, and above all, to help their candidate achieve victory. A very select few political consultants are household names; but the vast majority work behind the scenes, unseen and unknown to the general public. Some consultants are generalists, responsible for the overall running of a successful campaign; but the large majority of consultants are specialists who focus on a particular aspect of a campaign.
Political consultants have used their skills, experience, and techniques to move beyond candidate races, such as contests for governor, senator, or president. Consultants now reach down the electoral food chain and assist candidates at the local level of government. They work in the growing market of ballot initiatives, where issues are voted upon, rather than candidates. American consultants have branched out to candidate elections in other countries, and they have increasingly been involved in issue advocacy battles, both at the federal and the state level of policy making. In addition, corporations concerned about their image or those that find themselves engaged in a tough policy fight have turned to political consultants for assistance.
Early Years of Political Consulting
For much of the early years of US history, the political parties were the central focus of campaigns, fundraising, and organization. As Paul S. Herrnson and Colton C. Campbell write in Chapter 2, during the earlier part of the twentieth century the political party began giving way to the individual candidate. Candidates hired their own campaign managers and brought on people who could help raise money or could round up voters and get them to the polls. Very often, these campaign workers were volunteers, often friends or co-workers of the candidates. In many instances, they worked for free, or for the love of politics, or the admiration of the candidate. Some had good political instincts, had politics in their blood, and made valuable contributions.
But who would do this for a living, going from campaign to campaign, offering skills and services? Election scholars generally consider that the beginning of political consulting as a business was a husbandâwife firm called Campaigns, Inc., created in the early 1930s. Clem Whitaker, a newspaper publicist, and his wife, Leone Baxter, who had worked for a local chamber of commerce, pioneered the use of campaign publicity in California elections. Whitaker and Baxter helped their clients win state-wide referenda, they developed grassroots lobbying techniques to pressure state lawmakers, and employed nasty opposition research tactics against author-activist Upton Sinclair, who was running for California governor. Later, they helped defeat California governor Earl Warrenâs proposal for a state-wide medical insurance plan; and in perhaps their biggest triumph, Whitaker and Baxter were hired by the American Medical Association to fight against President Harry Trumanâs 1948 plan for national health insurance.1 In all, Whitaker and Baxter won seventy out of seventy-five of the campaigns for which they were hired.
Whitaker and Baxter had created a new business. They helped define messages, shape campaigns, spread the message to constituents, and influence lawmakers through grassroots pressure. They did this during nearly every election cycle, for a variety of mostly conservative clients, both individual candidates for office and corporate causes. Nevertheless, Whitaker and Baxter considered themselves in the business of public relations, not political consulting. For the most part, they had the business to themselves during the 1930s and 1940s.
Especially with the advent of television, candidates and parties turned to public relations specialists. During the 1952 presidential election, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai E. Stevenson turned to New York advertising agencies to help craft their message for this new medium.2 Professional assistance was now filtering down to other elections as well. By 1957, Alexander Heard found that forty-one public relations firms were offering campaign services.3
Soon, however, others not working for public relations firms would become involved in the business of politics. Joseph Napolitan, a former sports writer for a local Massachusetts newspaper turned campaign professional, was probably the first operative to be called a âpolitical consultant.â By and large, those who began to call themselves political consultants were generalists, who managed campaigns, perhaps wrote radio or television scripts, and helped formulate campaign strategy. By the late 1950s, David L. Rosenbloom found that perhaps thirty or forty professionals were managing campaigns, and like Napolitan, those who stayed with the business cycle after cycle, were the foundation of the political consulting business.4
A few political scientists, like Rosenbloom, began to take notice. Writing in 1956, Stanley Kelley, Jr was one of the first political scientists to recognize the importance of campaign consultants. In the 1970s, Dan Nimmo and David L. Rosenbloom discussed the first years of campaign management, followed by Larry Sabatoâs seminal book on the rise of political consultants in 1981.5
Polling for Candidates
Survey research is the key to that most important of campaign questions: what is on peoplesâ minds? Not surprisingly, polling research was one of the first tools sought after by political parties, candidates, and even office holders. Yet, during the 1930s and 1940s political polling and campaign predictions had fallen on tough, skeptical audiences. During the 1936 presidential election, a popular magazine, The Literary Digest, boldly predicted that governor Alf Landon of Kansas would readily beat incumbent president Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt overwhelmed Landon, carrying the electoral votes of forty-six out of forty-eight states in one of the most lop-sided elections in the twentieth century, and the popular magazine folded in disgrace. Pollster George Gallup, using more reliable scientific techniques, correctly predicted the Roosevelt landslide, but in 1948, like nearly every other close observer, predicted that incumbent president Harry Truman would lose to New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. Survey researchers Gallup, Archibald Crossley, and Elmo Roper all had made the mistake of stopping their polling well before the election, and missing the surge in Truman support during his fabled âwhistlestopâ campaign.
Despite the flaws of survey research, Franklin Roosevelt used the services of in-house pollsters Emil Hurja and Hadley Cantril. In the 1950s, Eisenhower relied indirectly on the services of the Gallup polling organization. But it wasnât until the 1960 presidential campaign that a major candidate, John F. Kennedy, employed a professional pollster, Louis Harris. Harris had become a private political pollster in the late 1950s, and helped guide the 1960 campaign of Kennedy. By 1963, exhausted from the demands of private political polling, Harris abandoned private political polling and began writing a weekly newspaper column, worked with national news organizations, and created the Harris Poll.6 Up until this time, polling was still done through personal interviews and time-consuming number crunching; only during the late 1960s would telephone interviews become the norm, and even later would technologies such as the CATI system (computer assisted telephone interviews) and random-digit dialing be employed.
Private polling became an integral part of election campaigns during the 1960s and early 1970s, and a small number of pioneering survey researchers set up shop. On the Democratic side, William R. Hamilton (Hamilton and Staff)7 began polling in 1964; Patrick Caddell (Cambridge Survey Research) became the pollster for the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern. Peter D. Hart (Hart Research) has polled for an extraordinary range of Democratic candidates. Since 1974, Hart has served as an election consultant to CBS News and has conducted polls for the Wall Street Journal. Hartâs campaign work comes through partner Geoff Garin, who heads Garin-Hart-Yang Strategic Research Group. At one time, roughly 80â90% of all Democratic private polling business emanating from Washington was done by the firms run by Hamilton, Caddell, and Hart. Of these firms, Garin-Hart-Yang remains at the forefront of the private political polling profession.
On the Republican side, there were four early private polling firms. Richard Wirthlin (Decision/Making/Information, then the Wirthlin Group) began in 1969 and was best known as an early adviser to Ronald Reagan. Robert M. Teeter (Market Opinion Research, Detroit), worked for a wide variety of candidates and was presidential pollster for Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and George H. W. Bush. Arthur Finkelstein worked closely with conservative Republicans, while V. Lance Tarrance (Tarrance, Hill, Newport, and Ryan, Houston) polled for Reaganâs 1984 re-election and Republican clients in the South and West.
The techniques and sophistication of polling have evolved over the years. Survey research has been supplemented by focus group analysis, by dial-meter research, and more recently by mall testing techniques and online surveys. Today, polling and survey research is at the heart of any sophisticated, professionally run campaign. By 2007, there were approximately seventy-six firms who were in private polling and research business in the United States.8
Media Firms
When Dwight Eisenhower ran for president in 1952, his campaign turned to the New York advertising firms of Ted Bates & Company and Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn (BBDO). Another early advertising firm used in presidential campaigns was Jack Tinker and Partners. During the 1960s, however, media firms were created that specialized in political campaigns.9 One of the first such media consultants was Tony Schwartz, working closely with general consultant Joe Napolitan. Schwartz is best known for his âDaisyâ commercial for the Lyndon Johnson presidential campaign of 1964. He is also the author of a seminal book on political advertising, The Responsive Chord.10 Another pioneer media consultant was Charles Guggenheim, who began working for Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 election, then worked for a variety of liberal candidates and causes. By the early 1970s, however, Guggenheim was out of the business, burned out by the pace and disillusioned with the direction of political advertising.
Several of the pioneer media firms began working in the late 1960s, including David Garth (David Garth Associates, New York), Marvin Chernoff (Chernoff/Silver Associates, Columbia, South Carolina), Robert Squier (Squier and Associates, Washington, D.C.), Robert Goodman (The Goodman Group, Brookland, Maryland), Douglas Bailey and John Deardourff (Bailey/ Deardourff, Washington, D.C.), and Roger Ailes (New York).
A second and third generation of media firms were created in the 1970s through 2000, and by 2007, there were seventy-eight media consulting firms working in American elections.11 One veteran media advisor, who began working in the 1980s, Peter Fenn, outlines in Chapter 10, the extraordinary changes that have occurred in the media advertising business over the past twenty-five or thirty years.
Reaching Out to Voters
The Eisenhower presidential campaign in 1952 was the first to use direct mail in an effective way, but it wasnât until 1964, during the presidential campaign of Republican Barry Goldwater, that direct mail came into its own. From the lists of activist conservatives compiled during that campaign, Richard Viguerie was able to create a list of over 12,000 donors. In 1972, the presidential campaign of George McGovern was the first Democratic campaign to compile a large list of probable donors, and to use direct mail to solicit them. Since then, creat...
