Chris Landers stories from The Center for Public Integrity

New Media Communications

Ohio,United States — 2011-09-16T15:32:33-04:00

Since starting New Media Communications in his Ohio basement in January 1995, Mike Connell has built his firm into one of the leading Web designers for conservative causes and Republican politicians. That GOP business also has led to significant government accounts for GovTech Solutions, a separate online services company owned by his wife Heather.

The road to New Media's success hasn't always been smooth. But after enduring a slow start and some lean years, business has taken off. Now during the busy campaign season, Connell can fly to visit clients in Washington and around the Midwest on the six seat Piper airplane he owns.

The Internet has taken Connell on a wild ride.

In 1995, the online frontier was largely unconquered by the political set. In March of the previous year, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, U.S. Rep. Martin Hoke trumpeted his status as the first Ohio congressman with an e-mail address, which he said offered "a new way for the 10th District computer techies to take a ride on the information highway right into their congressional office in Washington." If reporters called Hoke's office then, they could have connected with his 30-year-old press secretary, Mike Connell.

Connell was an early promoter of political technology. He had made a name for himself in Republican circles by designing software for the George H. W. Bush campaign in 1988. At the end of 1994, he left Hoke's office and moved to Ohio to start New Media, with start-up funds from a Small Business Administration loan.

Selling the Internet as a political tool was tough work in the beginning. Before politicians would pay to be on it, they had to know what it was. In a July 1996 article for Campaigns & Elections magazine, Connell praised "the boldest new medium since the invention of the Gutenberg press," but conceded that "you'll be lucky if it touches as many people between now and November as a single TV or newspaper ad."

The Clinton-Dole debates that October proved him wrong, though: when Dole announced his Web address on the air, it received more than 2 million hits the next day.

New Media was still taking "baby steps" in 1996, says Connell. Revenues were lean. "It was a "rude awakening," he says. "It took a couple years for the business to take off."

But Connell got on track with a high-profile client: New Media designed the www.jeb.org site that made Jeb Bush the first candidate online in the 1998 Florida gubernatorial race.

The year 1999 was big for politics on the Net, with election-related Web sites appearing and disappearing as entrepreneurs struggled to find a business model that worked. New Media partnered with the lobbying firm DCI Group to form DCI/New Media, creating the lobbyists' Tech Central Station (tcsdaily.com) and other sites.

Other Republican campaigns and committees soon followed as clients, and New Media scored another Bush account — the 2000 presidential campaign of Jeb's older brother, George W.

In 2000, Connell told Inside Business magazine that his company dealt "in a very niche market." But the family business found a new niche when his wife Heather formed GovTech Solutions to pursue government accounts rather than political business.

Heather Connell is majority stockholder in GovTech Solutions, and until September 2001, the DCI Group was a minority stockholder. While it is identified as a woman-owned business in the federal procurement database, Connell says his wife's company never sought formal certification as such, nor has it received set-aside government contracts.

Mike Connell says he and his wife formed two companies because the two markets are different: New Media helps to advocate political positions, while GovTech's work provides a nonpartisan way for an office to communicate with all constituents.

When political clients ask New Media to work on their government Web site, Connell says he refers them to his wife's company. Though Heather Connell is the majority owner, the business' day-to-day operations are managed by its president, Randy Cole.

In some cases, New Media and GovTech Solutions have had contracts with the same clients. New Media might design a campaign Web site for a candidate who, once elected, would contract with GovTech to design a federally funded official site. At least four of the seven New Media clients who won House races in 2004 also used GovTech as the designer for their congressional sites.

That year, New Media provided Web design services for the re-election campaign of George W. Bush, three senators and seven House members, in addition to the Republican National Committee. In all, the company took in $1.2 million for its work on the 2004 campaigns.

By 2004, GovTech had served as Web designer for the official, federally funded Web pages of 37 members of Congress. And the following year, according to House financial statements, GovTech received more than $144,000 in business from 21 Republican House members and Republican-led committees.

In 2002 and 2004, GovTech received authorization from the General Services Administration that allowed federal agencies to purchase services directly from the company without going through the full bidding process. A news release from the company said, "As a GSA-approved vendor, GovTech can contract directly with agencies to streamline the procurement process."

Between October 2002 and the first half of this year, the General Services Administration reported more than $800,000 paid to GovTech by federal agencies. The company has designed Web sites for the White House, Department of Energy, and the 2004 meeting of the Group of 8 in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, among others.

The GSA Schedule contracts from the federal government can serve as a stamp of approval for state and local government purchasers.

In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell's office paid about $465,000 to GovTech, which redesigned the Web site and worked with the office to present Election Night results in 2004. In 1999, when Blackwell co-chaired the congressional Census Monitoring Board, New Media had won a contract to redesign a bilingual Web site for the board.

New Media went international under the auspices of the International Republican Institute, for which Connell consults. The company created Web sites and sent cell phone text messages to voters in the 2000 Slovenian general elections. Connell also consulted in Macedonian parliamentary elections for USAID.

In 2004, Connell joined with another Republican Internet consultant, R. Rebecca Donatelli of Campaign Solutions to form Connell Donatelli, which creates online advertising campaigns.

For the 2006 elections, New Media Communications has redesigned more than two dozen state GOP sites and worked on Blackwell's campaign for governor of Ohio.

FLS-DCI

2011-09-16T15:25:46-04:00

With roots in Republican politics and corporate public relations, FLS-DCI and its sister companies have become a one-stop political shop. They have handled phone calls for the Bush campaign, lobbied the White House for corporate clients, and, through the separate-but-affiliated group Progress for America, lobbied the public on behalf of the White House.

During the 2004 election cycle, FLS-DCI served as telemarketers for the Bush campaign, House and Senate candidates in 23 states, taking in more than $26.9 million, according to a Center study of federal filings.[correction] In the political off-season, however, the affiliated DCI Group lobbies for corporations looking to influence politicians and the public.

The partners have a long history in politics.

Tony Feather served as executive director of the Missouri Republican Party from 1987 until 1990, when he left to manage the unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign of the state's then-Attorney General William L. Webster. The candidacy was marred by word of a federal investigation that ultimately resulted in Webster serving a two-year prison term for using state employees and equipment for his campaign. Feather went on to become Midwest Regional Coordinator for the Republican National Committee, in 1993.

Thomas J. Synhorst's background includes working on campaigns for Sen. Charles Grassley and serving as senior advisor to Sen. Bob Dole through 1996. In 1999, Feather joined Synhorst, Jeffrey T. Larson and a fourth partner, Chris Hodges, to form Feather Hodges Larson & Synhorst, later known as FLS-DCI.

Feather served as political director to the Bush-Cheney campaign for the presidential race in 2000. Today, to comply with the McCain-Feingold Act, the partners have created two divisions. Larson runs the state and national party division in Minnesota, while Feather heads up FLS' federal candidate division from Missouri (he currently is working with the Republican National Committee on congressional campaigns, according to The Washington Post).

The DCI Group, formed in 1997, is primarily a lobbying firm. Synhorst is its chairman. Feather worked as a lobbyist for the firm from 2001 through 2005.

Feather also founded the group Progress for America in 2001 with James K. Glassman, former part-owner and editor of Roll Call, serving as its national chair. According to information posted on the group's Web site in 2001, it was formed as a "grassroots organization dedicated to supporting Pres. George Bush's agenda for America." Feather reportedly left the group before the 2004 election, and Glassman says he headed the group "very briefly, but I haven't had anything to do with it in years."

By 2004, Progress for America had become a Republican issue-ad powerhouse, including among its officers and directors a series of DCI lobbyists — Chris LaCivita (who also consulted for the anti-John Kerry 527 committee Swift Boat Veterans for Truth), Brian Kennedy and the group's current president Brian S. McCabe. In 2004, Progress for America paid DCI Group more than $800,000 for consulting services.

Synhorst also reportedly consulted for Progress for America, and two companies of which he is a principal — FYI Messaging and TSE Enterprises — brought in $2.8 million from the group for direct mail, phone contact, e-mail, and Web site services.

The two companies received about $370,000 for services to Republican candidates and party committees.

Progress for America turned out some of the most influential ads of the Bush campaign, including "Ashley's Story," featuring a 16-year-old girl who had lost her mother in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The group also produced ads touting each of Bush's Supreme Court nominees; in the case of Harriet Miers' 24 day candidacy, it led the public relations effort, launching a Web site, www.justicemiers.com, and offering to set up interviews with friends of Miers on the day of her nomination.

The New York Times reported that Progress for America members attended strategy meetings with Bush administration officials regarding the president's Social Security plan, and the group has run ads this year supporting the Iraq war. In the first three months of this year, Progress for America paid DCI about $560,000 for consulting services, according to information filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

In recent years, the DCI Group and its Tech Central Station division have become more famous for public relations campaigns that appeared to come from somewhere else. In 2003, Washington Monthly writer Nicholas Confessore described the pieces posted on Tech Central Station's Web site as lobbying disguised as news, coining the term "journo-lobbying."

One sponsor of the site — McDonald's — has found itself the beneficiary of an ongoing Tech Central Station campaign to debunk the Morgan Spurlock documentary about fast food called Supersize Me.

The campaign included opinion pieces penned by Glassman, the Web site's founder and "host," that were published in major newspapers. One of them, St. Louis' Post-Dispatch, took issue with Glassman for not disclosing that McDonald's was a TCS sponsor. Glassman told the Post-Dispatch that he had never been paid by McDonald's and that writing about the movie was not a conflict of interest. In a telephone interview for this report, Glassman told the Center that neither DCI Group nor the Web site's sponsors had influenced his writing.

At least one client, Avue Technologies Corp., has agreed with Confessore's assessment. In a February lawsuit over a contract disagreement, Avue's lawyer described the goal of the company's sponsorship of Tech Central Station as "to generate favorable publicity about Avue's products and services and to fund the creation of positive 'news' stories that purported to be the work of independent journalists." To clear up any doubt, the brief continues, "This type of 'news' creation is sometimes referred to as 'journo-lobbying.'"

Court filings by each company indicate that Avue had paid DCI $150,000 to sponsor Tech Central Station from December 2003 through August 2004.

Glassman said he was unaware of the lawsuit against DCI, because "my relationship is only with TCS, not DCI."

"But that is not the way TCS does business," he said. "TCS is a very transparent organization as far as our support is concerned. … We list our sponsors and advertisers online and make sure people can see it."

As for FLS-DCI, it has undergone another name change, to FLS-Connect. The company and its affiliates are providing fundraising, mail, and phone bank services in state and national elections this year, making at least $14 million so far from state and national Republican party committees, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, a subscription service offering campaign finance data.

Correction: Since publishing the database of spending on campaign consultants Sept. 26, 2006, the Center identified additional payments to Feather Larson Synhorst, increasing its total from $21 million to $26.9 million.

Mark McKinnon (Maverick Media)

2011-09-16T15:29:03-04:00

Maverick Media, formed in 1998 as a political consulting super-group of sorts composed of top consultants, was created for the single purpose of electing George W. Bush as president. In the 2004 election cycle it took in more than $177 million from the Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee, according to Federal Election Commission data analyzed by the Center for Public Integrity.

The leader of the group is Mark McKinnon, a former Democratic consultant who previously worked with late Texas Gov. Ann Richards and presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis, former governor of Massachusetts.

In 1996, McKinnon, who worked for the Austin-based public affairs firm Public Strategies Inc., announced his retirement from politics in a Texas Monthly article titled "The Spin Doctor is Out." In it, he described his once and future profession as one of "incredible highs, devastating lows, sometimes feeling bulletproof, sometimes feeling that all the blood had been drained out of my body. I had no idea of the toll it had taken on me mentally and spiritually until I quit."

McKinnon recounts his early history in politics, beginning with covering it for the student newspaper at the University of Texas at Austin — and how he got elected its editor: he said he won by leaking damaging information about one of his opponents to another, then "I sat back, watched them cut each other up, and coasted to victory."

He also "spent several years in Nashville working as a song-writer with Kris Kristofferson. And was wildly unsuccessful," according to his bio for Public Strategies, the Austin-based public affairs firm for which he of which he is vice-chairman.

In 1984, he joined fellow UT alumnus Paul Begala (who later authored Is Our Children Learning?: The Case Against George W. Bush) working in the press office of Senate candidate Lloyd Doggett. The Democrat "got creamed," McKinnon said in the Texas Monthly article, but it was his introduction to another future consulting star, James Carville. He said Carville "looked like a prehistoric reptile and acted like a hyperactive twelve-year-old. But if you spent enough time around him and got over the initial shock, you could see that he was a flat-out political genius."

McKinnon worked as the press secretary for Texas Gov. Mark White during the campaign that saw his 1986 defeat, then headed for Louisiana — a state known for colorful politicians — for his "Ph.D." in politics, working for Buddy Roemer. A Democratic congressman running for governor, Roemer defeated Edwin Edwards, who had been in office since 1972, by portraying himself as an outsider ready to clean up Louisiana politics.

After working on the 1988 Dukakis campaign, which he describes as unfocused and "futile," McKinnon returned to Texas to help Richards win her 1990 gubernatorial race. He was not with her four years later when she lost to Bush. At the time, McKinnon told the Houston Chronicle that "Bush ran a pretty error-free campaign."

McKinnon's 1996 retirement was, of course, premature; late in 1997, Texas newspapers began reporting that he was "in talks" with the Bush campaign, and in the spring of 1998 it became official.

In a 2005 interview with PBS' FRONTLINE, McKinnon described warming to the Republican governor who would become his boss: "… [B]ecause I'd been drinking the Democratic Kool-Aid for years working in those trenches, my predisposition was not to like him. And I tried very hard not to like him because he was a Republican … [but] he was talking about issues that had typically been Democratic issues … this was so completely different than the old-style, Newt Gingrich politics that I had associated with the Republican Party, which was 'Burn government down!'"

Ultimately, McKinnon said, it was Bush's character that won him over. He told FRONTLINE "as it is so often in the president's world, the fundamental ingredients of our relationship were really based upon friendship and loyalty [rather] than about money or consulting or professional engagement."

After Bush's gubernatorial re-election, McKinnon stayed with him for his first presidential bid, then returned to Public Strategies.

Maverick Media, with McKinnon as its president, was the 2000 Bush campaign's media strategist, scripting and producing campaign commercials. Maverick brought together a number of political and advertising heavyweights, including Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer of the Republican advertising firm The Stevens and Schriefer Group, Public Strategies co-founder Matthew Dowd (also once a Democratic consultant) as director of polling and media planning, and Hispanic advertising guru Lionel Sosa.

In The Big Enchilda, his book about the 2000 campaign, Stevens described McKinnon's devotion to Bush: "[W]hile I still reveled in the sheer combat of campaigns, the smell of napalm in the morning and all that, Mark had gotten back in the game for one reason — to help Bush."

After the successful election, the team disbanded. But in 2004 its members reunited for Bush's re-election campaign. "There was never really a discussion," McKinnon told FRONTLINE. "It was just [that] this has always been a team, and we never stopped working and trying to help the president. … It's a very close, tight-knit group that's worked together for years, and the president just kept the team together."

One of the more successful ads the group produced in 2004 was "Wolves," featuring a pack of the animals as a metaphor for terrorism. McKinnon told FRONTLINE that he and Maverick had been testing metaphors for months before hitting on the idea: "People got it right away. It was like, 'Oh yeah, wolves, terrorists — scary. Got it.'"

Another Maverick ad used grainy footage of Democratic opponent John Kerry windsurfing to illustrate what the Bush campaign described as his shifting messages on the Iraq war as he tacked back and forth off the coast of Nantucket.

A third commercial, which McKinnon told PBS "had the most impact" quoted Kerry on funding for the Iraq war: "I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it." In an interview with ABC News' Diane Sawyer, Kerry later called the remark an "inarticulate" statement. Maverick featured the quote in several ads and it became a major talking point for the campaign.

After the 2004 election, McKinnon returned again to his post as vice-chairman of Public Strategies. In 2005, he was nominated to fill a Democratic slot on the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees American broadcasting abroad including Voice of America. After protests from Democratic senators reported by The Washington Post, the nomination was withdrawn and resubmitted to fill a Republican slot.

The Post and other papers have reported that McKinnon has pledged to help Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in the 2008 presidential election, barring a run by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

This year, McKinnon and a bipartisan group of political and advertising consultants announced a new project, Hotsoup.com, a Web site to be launched in October. According to a news release, Hotsoup will offer readers "smart debate over the real issues, not the irrelevant and partisan discourse they're getting now."

Consultant profile: Hal Malchow (MSHC Partners)

2011-09-16T15:33:51-04:00

Hal Malchow wrote the book on what has come to be known as "micro-targeting."

The textbook-sized The New Political Targeting, published in 2003, is a dense tome written for political professionals. It is unlikely to make the bestseller lists, but if one takes its premise, that is unimportant. It only has to reach the right people.

"What most Americans and many political observers fail to understand," Malchow writes, "is that almost every competitive election is decided by a small percentage of the voters."

In major elections, fewer than 20 percent of all voters are "truly undecided," he says. The challenge is to find them — and the message that will sway them and bring them to the polls.

In essence, targeting shoots to get the magical 50 percent-plus-one needed to win.

Malchow has put his principles into practice at his firm MSHC Partners (its name recently changed from the more cumbersome Malchow Schlackman Hoppey & Cooper). In 2004, the firm provided direct mail services to federal candidates, including Democratic presidential contender Sen. John Kerry.

The micro-targeting strategy has gained popularity with the sheer amount of data — both public information and consumer information — collected in databases and available for purchase. Commercial marketers, Malchow argues, have become experts at predicting the buying habits of consumers, while political campaigns have been slow to follow. The result, he writes, is that "most campaigns do a poor job of finding the voters they need."

Since Malchow's book was published, the Republican Party has been credited with finding potential voters for President George W. Bush's 2004 re-election campaign using the micro-targeting approach that draws upon consumer research to predict political leanings.

Malchow argues for using traditional voter lists, which contain party registration and little else, and combining them with census data showing income, education level, home value and ethnicity and commercial data collected by traditional marketers — magazine subscriptions, for instance, along with automobiles and other purchases.

All that information is then analyzed by computer, using something called a "Chi Square Automatic Interaction Detector." In language only a mathematician would love, Malchow explains, "Chi Square is the statistic used to compute a probability value, or P-value. The P-value is the probability that the observed relationship between the predictor and the target efficiency could be explained by chance."

The gist, however, is that all of this analysis can lead to election success. Malchow found, for instance, that targeting people with a long travel time to work can improve turnout on Election Day, but cautions against using drive time in your strategy unless you understand the reasons behind the numbers (for example, candidates whose platforms address transportation issues).

Computer analysis can also yield a list of unregistered voters who might support your candidate. In a 2005 Campaigns & Elections magazine article, Malchow laid out a strategy to find them. For starters, traditional voter lists — those including names, addresses and party affiliations from previous elections — by definition do not list people who aren't registered. Unregistered voters, however, can be isolated by subtracting voters from the commercial databases that include every resident of an area.

The scientific, controlled nature of micro-targeting has been made possible by advances in computer processing. And MSHC Partners also has entered the online world with an Internet marketing division headed by Michael Bassick.

At a political consultant conference sponsored by Campaigns & Elections in June 2006, Bassick said the business is still in its infancy. His division, he said, doesn't make a profit, but Internet advertising holds promise. Using Internet advertising to determine who is looking at an ad and for how long, as well as micro-targeting to certain areas (such as to California residents who read The New York Times online) make banner Internet ads a cheap option for politicians.

Micro-targeting is coming into its own with the promise of Internet and cable companies that will have the potential to target very small segments of their audiences. Politicians then could reach different groups with focused messages rather than the carpet-bombing approach of buying time on the traditional broadcast networks.

For now, though, Bassick is skeptical of revolutionary rhetoric about Internet advertising, calling it "a lot of hyperbole."

"The Internet isn't going to change anything right now," he told a room full of campaign consultants at a conference this year. "There's no crazy revolution going on in terms of advertising. Anyone who tells you that is lying."

Consultant profile: Mark Mellman (The Mellman Group)

2011-09-16T15:36:23-04:00

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.

"We don't put a message on the candidate that doesn't fit them or that they don't believe in, or have them pick up a position on an issue that they don't want to work for. Frankly, I think it's a little bit unethical," Usher told a group of consultants, candidates and academics at a June 2006 conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by Campaigns & Elections magazine.

"Unfortunately, the ethics really come down to winning and losing," he said. "Who's ethical? I don't know — who won?"

Usher said that candidates have a lot of issues they care about, and his research simply helps to narrow those to a few messages to play up and to pinpoint a few that would be better unmentioned.

"Candidates come in wanting to change the world, and the world isn't just one or two issues," he says. "We test it all."

In April 2006, Mellman wrote in a commentary piece for the Washington newspaper, The Hill, that Democratic campaigns should spend more time and money on voter registration efforts — a strategy he says is difficult to sell to candidates, who would rather focus on get-out-the-vote efforts targeting known supporters.

Mellman argued that broader research is needed outside the election cycle to determine what methods work best to get voters to the polls.

"The truth is we know damn little about what works in campaigns," he wrote. "Most of what passes for evidence in this business is nothing more than dimly remembered anecdote or thinly disguised salesmanship."

Consultant Profile: Public Opinion Strategies

2011-09-16T15:39:16-04:00

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.

Knowing what the numbers are, and how to move them, has led Public Opinion Strategies to the top of the list of Republican pollsters. According to the National Journal, the firm’s 2004 win-loss record was the best among major consulting firms. Its 2004 clients included the National Republican Congressional Committee (which paid more than $2.3 million for the firm’s services, according to the Center for Public Integrity's analysis of 2003 and 2004 campaign filings), the Republican National Committee ($219,000) and George Bush ($204,000), who also employed his own in-house pollsters.

The same surveys that tell researchers that voters aren’t likely to, for instance, cuddle up to DeLay, can also reveal that voters aren’t enamored of a “liberal” supporter of “radical Michael Moore,” as DeLay’s commercial put it. Testing reactions to those sorts of negative messages has landed Public Opinion Strategies in hot water on several occasions, when the firm has been accused by opponents of crossing the line between research and spreading negative views, a practice known as “push polling.”

Surveys testing negative messages are not usually made public, but they form a basis for a campaign’s decisions about whether — and how — to attack opponents. Questions tend to be along the lines of “Would you be more or less likely to vote for this person if you knew that …?”

In 1996, 800 voters in Texas were asked for their opinions on then-Attorney General Dan Morales, who was preparing to file suit against several major tobacco companies. The survey, taken by Public Opinion Strategies on behalf of some of the tobacco companies, and later published online by Mother Jones magazine, asked several questions about voters’ opinions of Morales and the proposed lawsuit. Voters were asked to react to Morales’ support of gun control and affirmative action, among other issues — positions he later told The New York Times were mischaracterized.

In a telephone interview, Public Opinion Strategies co-founder Glen Bolger acknowledged that his company commonly tests for negative messages — but not just about the opponent.

“Most of the time we’re [also] testing stuff our candidate is likely to get hit with,” he said.

The year 1996 was big for push polling, and the practice garnered heavy media attention. According to media accounts, the Bob Dole for president campaign engaged in a push poll attack on fellow Republican contender Steve Forbes in several primary states.
As the official Dole pollsters, Public Opinion Strategies caught the flack for the incident, until the State Journal-Register of Springfield, Ill., and the Wall Street Journal brought to light a telemarketing company, Campaign Tel Ltd., which had been paid more than $1 million by the campaign to make at least 10,000 quick, anonymous calls criticizing Forbes’ flat tax plan or his position on gays in the military.

In August of that year, 31 members of the American Association of Political Consultants, professional pollsters including Public Opinion Strategies, sent a letter to the association and to media outlets outlining the differences between push polls and real polls. Public Opinion Strategies founders Bolger and Bill McInturff co-authored an article for Campaigns & Elections magazine titled “‘Push Polling’ Stinks,” echoing the AAPC’s position in distinguishing between the practice and legitimate “survey research.”

Legitimate calls, they wrote, are drawn from a small sample of voters (less than 1,000 people) to gauge public opinion. The calls last from five to 40 minutes as pollsters test a variety of messages, including negative messages about the candidate and his or her opponent. Quick hit push polls, by contrast, go out to many thousands of people in an often last-minute effort to change votes and spread negative, usually biased, information. Bolger and McInturff objected to the term “poll” for such calls, preferring “persuasion or advocacy phone calling.”

The article ended with a piece of advice for push poll victims: “If your campaign is hit with a last minute bout of misleading phone calls, you should spotlight it. But if in January or June before a November election you should receive wind of a 20-minute survey, settle down before you dial up the press. At least your opponent may have telegraphed a likely campaign strategy.”

A number of opponents of Public Opinion Strategies clients have failed to heed that advice. Based on a complaint from one recipient of a call two weeks before a 1998 election, the Florida Elections Commission investigated that state’s Republican Party on charges of push polling in connection with a Public Opinion Strategies poll.

A 1997 Florida law requires pollsters to disclose who is sponsoring the call. The law presumes that telephone campaigns of fewer than 1,000 calls lasting longer than two minutes are legitimate polls. For the poll in question, Public Opinion Strategies made 300 calls lasting four to six minutes, but included, commission staff reported, statements that “appear to have been distortions, exaggerations, misrepresentations or innuendo."

Upon review, however, the commission found that the questions in the poll were “efforts to seek information from voters for use in tabulating the voters’ reactions to certain statements,” and cleared the party in 2000.

In 2004, the Public Opinion Strategies’ poll of 300 likely voters in Georgia for congressional candidate Lynn Westmoreland drew fire from his opponent in the Republican primary, Dylan Glenn. The poll included questions highlighting Glenn’s race (African-American) and marital status (single) and comparing them to those of Westmoreland (white and married).

Bolger says the poll asked about Glenn’s race because it seemed to be helping him. The pollsters found that “a lot of people were supporting him because they wanted to support an African-American candidate,” he said. “Conservatives want to support an African-American candidate.” Bolger says the firm was testing the electoral waters “to see how much of a boost that was giving him.”

Public Opinion Strategies keeps a denunciation of push polling on its Web site: “‘In fact, 'push polling’ is NOT polling at all. … The differences between push-polling and survey research could not be more dramatic.” Bolger stresses that his firm is strictly a research company — it makes no telemarketing or “get out the vote” calls.

In addition to telephone surveys, the company tests messages through focus groups, Internet surveys and “mall intercepts” — asking random shoppers to rate advertising. In 2004, they launched a trial consulting division.

Public Opinion Strategies has teamed with Democratic polling firms to produce surveys for corporations and interest groups, as well as for news outlets such as National Public Radio, NBC and the Wall Street Journal.

Consultant profile: Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm

2011-09-16T15:43:09-04:00

One of the most influential advertising campaigns of the 2004 election came not from a candidate, but from a group of Vietnam veterans who mounted an anti-John Kerry offensive with the help of a small set of Republican political consultants.

The group, originally named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, held a news conference in May 2004, but it was sparsely attended.

Rick Reed, of the firm Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm, later told University of Rhode Island communications studies professor Patrick Devlin that he went to the conference only to see his uncle Adrian Lonsdale, who was one of the veterans critical of Kerry.

For an article for the journal American Behavioral Scientist, Reed told Devlin that he was surprised that there wasn't more of a response after the news conference. "The thing that struck me was that [the Swift Boat Veterans] were not political people. … They probably had no idea that this would really shake up the political process," Reed said.

Reed began producing television ads for the group, the first of which aired in early August. Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm already had some experience in making Democratic candidates look bad. Partner Greg Stevens was responsible for a 1988 ad featuring presidential candidate Michael Dukakis wearing an ill-fitting helmet while riding a tank. The first Swift Boat ad was edited together from interviews of the veterans criticizing Kerry, who had played up his military career at the Democratic convention only days before.

The ad was blunt, beginning with Kerry's running mate, John Edwards challenging that "if you have any question about what John Kerry is made of, just spend three minutes with the men who served with him 30 years ago," followed by a montage of veterans accusing Kerry of "lying about his record" and saying he "betrayed the men and women he served with."

In nine ads aired over the course of a little more than two months, the Swift Boat Veterans hammered away at Kerry's service record during the war and the anti-war stance he took after returning from Vietnam. Media reports called into question some accounts in the ads, citing statements given earlier by some Swift Boat Veterans members in support of Kerry, as well as accusations from some group members that seemingly contradicted the official record of events. Lonsdale, for example, who now said Kerry "lacks the capacity to lead" had, in 1996 praised his "bravado and courage," calling him "among the finest of those Swift Boat drivers."

Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm was paid less than $300,000 for the Swift Boat ads, a fraction of the more than $56 million they took in from the 2004 election, according to the Center for Public Integrity's analysis of 2003 and 2004 campaign filings. In comparison, South Dakota Republican Larry Diedrich paid the firm more than $1.6 million for its work in his close but ultimately unsuccessful bid for a seat in the House of Representatives.

Though cheap by the standards of political advertising, the ads generated a flood of media attention. Firm partner Erik Potholm told Campaigns & Elections magazine that "initially, the Swift Boat Veterans television buy was limited. But thanks to the enormous national media coverage of the spots, millions of people across the country saw them." A Gallup poll found that within three weeks after the first ad hit the airwaves, more than 80 percent of the country had seen or heard about it.

At a conference sponsored by the University of Virginia Center for Politics held the month after the November election, Kerry advisor Mike McCurry called the Swift Boat ads "one of the most dishonorable things I've ever seen happen in politics."

The Swift Boat ads were controversial — and influential — enough that when Stevens produced ads in 2005 for Doug Forester's New Jersey gubernatorial campaign, opponent Jon Corzine mentioned Stevens in his ads, saying that he was hired by Forester "despite his role in orchestrating the Swift Vets smear campaign on behalf of Bush."

Stevens, founder and president of Stevens and Co. (the firm that would become Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm), was a newspaper reporter in New Jersey before becoming chief of staff to Republican Gov. Thomas Kean. He directed advertising for the 2000 presidential campaign of Arizona Sen. John McCain. Reed joined the firm in 1993, leaving a post as political editor for the White House Bulletin, a daily newsletter published in Virginia.

Curcio went from selling mouthwash as an executive for a New York advertising firm to directing advertising for the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 1984, then became the NRSC's political director for the 1992 and 1994 election cycles. In 1997, he and Reed became partners in the firm, which changed its name to Stevens Reed Curcio and Co. Erik Potholm's name was added to the marquee in 2003 after he served as the firm's vice president.

In July 2006, the firm's advertisement produced for Republican Sen. Mike DeWine's Ohio re-election campaign drew fire for drawing smoke. The ad criticizing his Democratic opponent Rep. Sherrod Brown's voting record on national security used a pre-Sept.11 image of the World Trade Center that had been digitally edited to add billowing smoke. The fakery was uncovered by U.S. News and World Report, and the campaign changed the ad when alerted by the magazine, replacing the footage with an unretouched still photo.

In an editorial calling the ad a "$470,000 embarrassment," The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer wrote "if DeWine and his campaign continue to make such inexcusable mistakes, DeWine will probably soon be referred to as a former senator."

For his part, DeWine told U.S. News & World Report he would continue to employ the firm, but he "had some very choice words for them that you can't print in a family magazine when I found out."

Consultant profile

2011-11-17T17:02:46-05:00

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).

The spot won accolades: the New York American Marketing Association named the Wellstone ad campaign the most effective of the year — a first for political advertising. It proved effective — after just one airing, according to Hillsman, the ad generated enough media coverage to get the senator to debate Wellstone.

Another Hillsman client was Jesse "The Body" Ventura. In one Hillsman ad, the wrestler turned gubernatorial candidate poses as Rodin's thinker in an attempt to sell "The Body" as "The Mind." In another, two boys play with a Ventura action figure capable of defeating special interest groups with a knockout punch.

In 2000, Hillsman produced an ad for Ralph Nader spoofing the MasterCard "priceless" commercials that ran a few times and was widely replayed on nightly news programs. The spot sparked a lawsuit by MasterCard, which drew even more coverage.

Hillsman had no federal candidates in 2004, but this year he has a couple of high-profile irons in the fire, including the campaign of Connecticut Democrat Ned Lamont and the independent Texas gubernatorial bid of country singer and mystery-writer Kinky Friedman.

It's an ad for Friedman's campaign that Hillsman wants to show the conference, as an example of how not to screw it up. The Web-only animated ad is something Hillsman calls a "KinkyToon" — an irreverent and bawdy musical commercial fit for a man who once fronted the band Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys: "Why should he be Governor? Well, why the hell not?" This toon, one of several, deals with the petition Friedman needs to file to get on the ballot. The ending takes a shot at politicians who need to check with consultants before making a decision.

The crowd loves it.

"Now I submit to you that that gets the information across that we need to get across about a very, very complicated situation," Hillsman said. "That's the type of thing that I think we really need to be doing on the Internet."

In contrast, Hillsman's Lamont ad campaign was fairly conventional. In one spot, the candidate, sitting on his couch, addresses the camera directly, criticizing George W. Bush and playing up his stance on health care. The Hillsman twist becomes evident as a crowd gathers outside the window behind him, eventually bursting into the room to help out (in a nod to the pro-Lamont movement on the Internet, the crowd is led by Markos Moulitsas, better known as the blogger behind the "Daily Kos").

In his book and elsewhere, Hillsman argues that campaigns fail when they target likely voters. The unlikely voter is his target, and a record turnout in the Connecticut primary backs him up.

Hillsman's detractors say that his style may work for outsider candidates like Lamont and Ventura, but that even Wellstone switched to a more conventional strategy for his re-election bid. Hillsman acknowledges that different campaigns require different styles.

"When you're running a top-down campaign with a lot of money, you want everything to be very, very, very controlled. So if you're trying to get out your base, maybe it's good to have Tom Daschle record a call and talk to a Democrat on Election Day," he said.

"I work a lot for challengers, not for incumbents," Hillsman said. "So the more chaotic a race gets, the more comfortable I get."