The Center for Public Integrity

Mark Mellman got his start in the politics of polling as a graduate student at Yale.

In 1981, Connecticut congressional candidate Bruce Morrison asked for Mellman's help on his campaign. The Democrat went on to win, and Mellman went to Washington, D.C., to form Information Associates, which became incorporated as The Mellman Group in 1986.

The firm specializes in polling and focus groups for Democratic candidates and progressive organizations, as well as corporate and government clients. It performs research for candidates to see which messages will get through to voters. The group also performs public opinion surveys for corporations and interest groups, sometimes teaming with Republican polling firms such as Public Opinion Strategies.

The Mellman Group's client list includes the NBA's Washington Wizards, United Airlines, both PepsiCo and Coca Cola, more than three dozen Democratic House and Senate campaigns, and government agencies that include the departments of Justice, State and Labor. The firm also works outside the country for corporate and political clients, for example, helping César Gaviria win the presidency of Colombia in 1990.

In the 2004 presidential race, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry was the firm's client. At a Stanford University conference the week after the November election, Mellman jokingly commented on his reaction to the Democrat's loss: "[Y]ou can't imagine how much time it takes to lie on the floor in a fetal position, it really takes a lot out of me."

The image — encouraged by some politicians — of the pollster telling the candidate what position to take just isn't true, according to Mellman Group Vice President Doug Usher.

In the weeks before the 2004 general election, after the House ethics committee admonished Rep. Tom DeLay for ethics violations, his re-election campaign tried a new tack.

“They went up with a television ad that attempted to show the other side of Tom DeLay — a soft, cuddly version of Tom DeLay,” pollster Rob Autry told the audience at a 2006 political consulting conference.

It fell to the Texan’s pollsters at Public Opinion Strategies, the Republican research firm of which Autry is a vice president, to tell them that the public wasn’t buying it.

“While they acknowledged that, ‘Hey, he’s probably a decent guy,’” Autry said, surveyors kept hearing “‘I’m not so sure he’s the right guy for me.’” Worse, over the two- or three-week run of the ad, “the numbers hadn’t moved at all.”

With only days before the election, the pollsters argued for a change in strategy: focus attention on DeLay’s opponent. The new ad linked his Democratic opponent Richard Morrison to John Kerry, Howard Dean and Michael Moore. On Election Day, DeLay regained his seat by a 14 percent margin.

Since its 1991 founding, Public Opinion Strategies has done more than 7,600 surveys for politicians, government agencies and corporations. Its Web site describes the firm as “strategic partners,” who “use data to make decisions” and “don’t hesitate to have an opinion, make a judgment, and then live or die by the results.” In the 2004 elections, the firm took in more than $4.5 million for its campaign services, which constitute “about half” of its work, according to the Web site.

The proof that media consultants abuse their clients, according to Doug Bailey, founder of The Hotline political news service and former Republican consultant, is the sheer volume of airtime they advise candidates to purchase now.

The number of times each political ad airs has risen exponentially over the years — a phenomenon other consultants confirm — and in Bailey's mind, for no valid strategic reason.

He's convinced that bloated ad buys flow directly from the consultants' pecuniary interests.

A study by the Center for Public Integrity found that in the 2003-2004 presidential election cycle, candidates for national office, party committees and independent "527" political groups spent more than $1.78 billion on campaign consultants, 67 percent of which went to media consultants who handle ads.

The silver-haired Bailey says that with each passing year, he sees an escalation in volume of political advertising, which is measured and priced in the television business according to "rating points."

"In the seventies, a campaign that bought 500 gross rating points a week in a market was considered to be either on the verge or having crossed the line [of] too much," he says during an interview in the third-floor lunchroom down the hall from his office at the Watergate. "And yet today, in the closing weeks of any contested campaign, it's not unusual for campaigns to be buying 3,000 gross rating points. Which is just a massive, massive buy."

And why? "Because consultants earn more money, the more ads that are bought," he says.

To put the numbers in perspective, a 500-point buy means the entire viewing audience will see a commercial — on average — five times in one week. A 3,000-point buy means viewers — in theory — will see it an average of 30 times.

Just days before the 2004 presidential election, a chilling political advertisement arrived in the mailboxes of voters in the key swing state of Pennsylvania.

Directly below a darkened image of the Democratic nominee, the front of the brochure carried the question: "How Can John Kerry Lead America In A Time Of War?" It charged Kerry with "changing positions," "cutting defense" and "slashing intelligence," and featured images of the front pages of nine newspapers, each with a photo of the World Trade Center ablaze and billowing smoke. Another image of the smoldering towers appeared on an inside page, detailing the charges against Kerry's record on defense and intelligence.

The award-winning brochure — the ad was honored with a "Pollie" by the American Association of Political Consultants — was funded by the Republican National Committee, but was the work of Olsen & Shuvalov, an Austin, Texas-based consulting firm that traces its roots to Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser.

The company that would go on to become Olsen & Shuvalov was formed in 1999 when Rove sold the assets of his direct mail firm, Karl Rove & Co., to Todd Olsen and Ted Delisi, two of his former employees. Now run by Olsen and another longtime Republican consultant, Heather Shuvalov, the outfit specializes in direct mail campaigns and fundraising. A subsidiary group, Praxis List Co., manages and rents out the mailing lists of potential GOP donors.

The room is packed at a Washington, D.C., conference for political consultants. They've assembled for a panel discussion entitled "Understanding the Internet In Campaigns." The speaker at the microphone begins as latecomers stand or drag chairs into the crowded room.

"My name is Bill Hillsman," he announces in a reedy voice that cuts through the chatter. "I was sent with a message for you all.

"I was sent here by the voters and I was sent here by the non-voters. And what they're here to say is that if you screw up the Internet the same way that you've screwed up television advertising, radio advertising, direct mail, those stupid phones calls — 'Hey Mom, Ted Kennedy is on the phone, he wants to talk to ya!' — they're all going to stay home. They're sick of it."

Hillsman, it seems, always has a message. The president of North Woods Advertising, he is one of the few political consultants who doesn't associate himself with a particular party. He shows an open disdain for what he calls "Election Industry Inc." — the network of parties and consultants who make their livings from campaigns.

The group he founded, Independent Voters of America, raised money on the Internet for a 2004 anti-Bush ad aimed at "independent and undecided voters in battleground states." The title of his 2004 book neatly sums up his philosophy: Run the Other Way: Fixing the Two-Party System One Campaign at a Time.

Hillsman's ad campaigns have turned heads and raised eyebrows since a series of ads helped get an unknown college professor — the late Paul Wellstone of Minnesota — elected to the U.S. Senate in 1990. One of them, "Looking for Rudy," used the hand-held camera style of director Michael Moore's documentary Roger & Me to follow Wellstone as he walked into then-Sen. Rudy Boschwitz's campaign office to challenge him to a debate (he wasn't there, or in any of the other places Wellstone looked).

To measure the impact of political consultants in presidential and congressional campaigns, the Center for Public Integrity analyzed 2003-2004 expenditures of the organizations that spend money on political campaigns.

These organizations, termed “committees” by the Federal Election Commission, exist for House, Senate and presidential candidates, as well as for political party and “527” organizations. Because they fall under Internal Revenue Service regulations, 527 groups file contribution and expenditure reports with the IRS. The others file reports with the FEC.

House, presidential, and party reports are filed electronically; their data tables were downloaded from the FEC Web site. House candidates who expect to raise or spend less than $50,000 for the whole cycle can choose not to file electronically and those paper filings were not included in the database.

Senate campaign and Senate party committees file reports on paper, so the information from these reports was typed into the database by Secure Paper Solutions of Fredericksburg, Va., an outside vendor.

In the 2004 election cycle, 527 committees had the choice of filing on paper or electronically. These filings were included in the database.

The Center targeted House and Senate candidates from the two major parties who participated in the general election. However, one filing from an Independent candidate was included because he won the election.

All reports are from the 2003-2004 election cycle (Jan. 1, 2003 through Dec. 31, 2004), the latest full cycle for which records were available. From these reports, the Center compiled a database of campaign expenditures.

Center researchers then began the process of identifying expenditures for consultants.

This identification proceeded in two, interrelated steps:

When people discuss the sometimes prohibitive costs of political campaigns, rarely is the role that consultants play in driving up costs addressed.

Consulting firms hired by presidential candidates who make it all the way to the November election earn millions of dollars. If their candidate wins, the consultants' careers are made.

For work on hot House or Senate races, consultants can make anywhere from $200,000 to $500,000 per candidate, according to Raymond Strother, lead partner in the Democratic consulting firm Strother-Duffy-Strother. The most successful firms work for several candidates at a time.

"We make an enormous amount of money here," says Strother during an interview in his new office just north of Washington, D.C. "We make the kind of money a brain surgeon would make."

At political consultant training seminars attended by Center for Public Integrity staff doing research for this study, the speakers invariably advised that more money be poured into their own medium specialties — be it television, direct mail, phone calls or specialized targeting programs — always in the name of conserving valuable campaign resources and making the biggest impact. In that vein, they warned against wasting money on items like yard signs, bumper stickers and other "tchotchkes," or on reaching out to voters who they've decided will never vote for their candidate.

The most influential advisers hired in any big campaign are the media consultants, say experts. They contribute seasoned advice on message and strategy, play crucial decision-making roles in the placement and timing of expensive commercials, and as a result, they have an enormous impact on the campaign's budget.