Exit Poll (2003)

An excellent piece from 2003 on centrist Democratic consultants. Little has changed today. The centrist consultants, people like Geoff Garin, are still leading Democratic politics astray. It's time to pass the torch to younger generations, who are not stuck in the media environment of 1990.
Read Noam Scheiber's 2003 piece and decide for yourself.

Three weeks into Kamala Harris' campaign, the Harris inner circle had a meeting with the Democratic consultants that had advised Biden. CNN reported on that call: "Veteran Democratic numbers man Geoff Garin, summarizing [the centrist] analyses, [told Harris] to stop saying, 'We’re not going back.' It wasn’t focused enough on the future, he argued. Second, lay off all the “weird” talk — too negative."

Unbelievable. And now, in October, we see the effects of this risk-averse advice. The polls are tightening. Harris appears to have lost some of the momentum she had back in July and August.

Is this because the Harris campaign has pivoted away from "weird"? Because her campaign has de-emphasized "we're not going back," and Tim Walz stepped away from energy and fire and gave a traditional centrist bipartisan-first debate performance? Is it because Harris has returned to the "traditional mindset" put forth by people like Geoff Garin?

I think that is what is happening. Traditional Democratic centrist consultants have persuaded Harris to rein in the energy of her campaign, pivot to bipartisanship, and run to the center.

Is that the right plan? I don't think it is the right plan.

Below I'm pasting the text of a 2003 New Republic piece from Noam Scheiber. The central character is Geoff Garin. Read it and see if you think his advice, which is eerily similar to his 2002 advice, is the right advice.

Noam Scheiber told me he was ok with me posting this. It's no longer on TNR's site and I couldn't find another public source. If TNR wants me to take it down, just ask me (DM on bluesky works), and I will.

Exit Poll

The New Republic
February 24, 2003
Copyright 2003 New Republic, LLC

By Noam Scheiber

The people who really run the Democratic Party.

Just before Thanksgiving, a political consultant who'd recently worked for a successful Democratic candidate got a call from a friend of his working on the 2003 gubernatorial campaign in Kentucky. The Kentucky campaign aide wanted his friend's advice on an important speech his candidate was slated to deliver. But, when the consultant read the speech, the language sounded eerily familiar. "I called him back and said, 'Is Mark Mellman your pollster?'" the consultant recalls. "Yeah, why?" his friend responded. "Because the message is the exact same thing we did."

After the Democrats lost the Senate and came up short in the House last November, political observers largely blamed House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and Democratic National Committee Chair Terry McAuliffe. Gephardt left the House leadership partly as a result, Daschle considered doing the same, and many commentators--this magazine included--called upon McAuliffe to resign. And rightly so. As the party's de facto leaders, Daschle, Gephardt, and McAuliffe signed off on the Democrats' failed strategy of de-emphasizing national security and the Bush tax cut in order to focus on traditional Democratic winners like education, health care, and Social Security. But they weren't making their decisions in a vacuum. To a large extent, the Democratic leaders were relying on a small circle of influential Democratic pollsters and consultants--the people who formulate strategy in Washington and then turn around and advise House and Senate campaigns around the nation on how to implement it. Pollsters and consultants have two chances at landing campaign work: They can work for specific candidates, in which case their primary responsibility is to develop themes for advertisements paid for by the candidate. Or they can work for a party's House or Senate campaign committee, in which case their primary responsibility is to develop themes for advertisements paid for by the party.

Or, increasingly, they can do both. Between them, two D.C. firms, The Mellman Group and Garin-Hart-Yang, handled the polling for just about every important Democratic Senate campaign last year--Max Cleland in Georgia, Frank Lautenberg in New Jersey, Erskine Bowles in North Carolina, Jean Carnahan in Missouri, Tom Strickland in Colorado, Bill Bradbury in Oregon, Alex Sanders in South Carolina--and many of the top House and governor's races. At the same time, Geoff Garin and Fred Yang (Peter Hart, the firm's founder, no longer does much campaign work) enjoyed unrivaled influence among the five firms who did polling for the House Democrats' campaign committee. Mellman served as the exclusive pollster for the party's Senate campaign arm.

The result is that, in many cases, the same polling firm was making decisions on both sides of the equation. On the candidate side, the pollster would put together what's known as a "benchmark" survey, the results of which typically serve as the basis for just about every commercial, speech, or talking point the candidate delivers. "The pollster is the one that has first-line responsibility for message development," says Ken Smuckler, a longtime consultant for Democratic House candidates. Meanwhile, the firm (if it's a big one like Garin-Hart-Yang or the Mellman Group) could exert even more influence at the party level, playing a key role not only in shaping the national message but also in determining which races the party needed to channel money into and what kinds of commercials that money should buy. As Jim Jordan, former executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), puts it, "If you're going to dump a million dollars into a race, it's worth spending thirty thousand dollars first (on a poll) to see if it's going to work."

Given the influence that a couple of big firms have both with the national party and with individual candidates, it's not surprising that last year's Democratic hopefuls all pretty much read from the same script and ignored the two most important issues facing the country. "The strategy all along has been that, if you can take the war and taxes off the table, we can have a debate on the issues where we are strongest," one Democratic leadership aide told the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call last spring. And, as it happens, this was exactly the strategy that the party's top pollsters were pushing. Just after the September 11 attacks, Mellman and two employees wrote an essay in the trade publication Campaigns and Elections citing one of their own polls in which just 33 percent of voters in one congressional district listed terrorism as a top concern, compared with 42 percent for HMOs and 40 percent for prescription drugs. "Polls show people still care about education, Social Security, health care and other domestic issues that dominated the political agenda over the last year," Mellman and his colleagues concluded. They doggedly stuck to that line as the campaign wore on. In January of 2002, Mellman told USA Today, people "are as concerned about health care and education and prescription drugs as they are about terrorism"; eight months later, he told The Hill newspaper that health care would the "the dominant issue of the next decade."

Garin and Yang pushed a similar message to House Democrats. According to Roll Call, Garin joined Mellman in strongly advising Democrats against taking on the Bush tax cut, citing the risk they'd be labeled "tax-raisers." Then, late last March, Garin and Yang conducted a survey of more than 30 congressional swing districts. The results showed a potential Democratic advantage among the key group of voters who supported Bush on the war on terrorism but questioned his handling of domestic issues. In a widely circulated memo advising House Democrats of these findings, Garin and Yang encouraged the party to make education and Social Security the key issues of the campaign. "There was a lot of hand-wringing about the Garin-Yang poll in the spring," says one party official. "It said that national security was going to be hard given Bush's strength."

In fairness to Mellman, Garin, and Yang, it's possible the Democrats wouldn't have performed any better in last year's midterm elections if they'd said more about the war on terrorism and the tax cut. But that's hard to believe. A Gallup poll conducted three days after the election showed that only 34 percent of Americans thought Democrats were "tough enough" when it came to dealing with terrorism, compared with 64 percent who thought the GOP was. Even Mellman concedes, "We got no vote from the minority of people concerned about taxes and terrorism." At the very least, staking out a clear position on national security and the tax cut might have been worth a try in a few key races. But, thanks to the unprecedented influence of a small group of pollsters over party strategy, we'll never really know.

The highly concentrated nature of Democratic polling and consulting has a lot to do with the way campaigns are funded. Because of their huge disadvantage in hard money (the restricted contributions that candidates can raise directly from donors), Democratic candidates tend to be extremely dependent on soft money (the unrestricted contributions only party committees can raise--or at least could until McCain-Feingold). Not surprisingly, this affords pollsters such as Mellman and Garin extraordinary influence over party strategy. "Mark (Mellman) conducts DSCC sponsored polling," says one pollster with experience dealing with the Democratic leadership. "He's also the pollster for Daschle. This makes him a favorite of theirs in decisionmaking. That's where he's pitched his tent from a marketing perspective."

And, because the party committees--the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) on the House side and the DSCC on the Senate side--control the soft money, it's only natural that a candidate would want to hire a consultant with close ties to the DCCC or DSCC when staffing his campaign. "This is a dog-eat-dog game," says one longtime campaign manager, who counts himself fortunate to have worked with Mellman for that reason. "I would recommend that any candidate have at least one part of his team with a foothold in the power structure in Washington."

But this system has obvious disadvantages--namely that once a campaign hires a top-flight pollster, it feels enormous pressure to adopt that pollster's biases. Sometimes this is simply out of deference to the person who is now the most prominent member of the campaign staff. "When you have a high-powered pollster and you're in a message meeting," adds one longtime consultant, "you'd better have a good reason for standing up and saying the pollster is wrong." The manager of a narrowly unsuccessful House campaign laments, "A few weeks passed (after the election), and I looked in the mirror and realized I could have pushed more. A lot depends on the campaign manager and candidate challenging the consultant, not being steamrolled."

Not that there's much open conflict between pollsters and candidates' longtime staffs. "The consultants are connected to the national committees; they hold the purse strings," says a campaign manager for a losing Senate candidate whose race had been expected to be closer than was. "There's an implicit 'you have to do what we say.' It's not that heavy-handed. It's actually very positive: 'If you follow our advice, follow this path, you're going to get funded.'" The problem, the campaign manager continues, is that "all along there are decisions the candidate may have done differently had this pot of gold not been sitting out there." Worse, often that money never even comes. "The pollster's not just working for you, he may be working with the committee, for other incumbents," this campaign manager adds. "Sometimes there's the feeling of, is this your best advocate? … Are you competing against their (other) clients?"

For their part, it's understandable why the party campaign committees turn to the small circle of well-known pollsters to do their polling: Parties have to make decisions involving millions of dollars based on incomplete information; to help make those decisions, they inevitably seek advice from pollsters they trust. But, even if this small circle is necessary, admission to that circle isn't always an especially meritocratic process. The reason is that many of the decisions about which firms to hire get made by low-paid staffers at the campaign committees who are looking to move on to high-paying jobs at the same consulting firms to which they're handing out contracts. As one pollster who's worked for the DCCC concedes, "The DCCC staff tend to be lame ducks from day one. … There are some winks and nods and cozy arrangements that inevitably emerge from what, in many respects, is an employment agency." It should come as no surprise then that these staffers routinely dole out business to the highest-profile, D.C.-based firms: That's where they generally want to work.

The most egregious of these quid pro quo arrangements happen far away from Washington. The sheer number of House Democratic races makes it impossible for the party committee to keep track of every single one. Instead, the DCCC hires a small cadre of regional coordinators-- "regionals" in the campaign vernacular--to dispense advice to candidates on behalf of the committee and to report back to the committee on the candidates' progress. In practice, though, the regionals--many of them ambitious 20somethings who work long hours for extremely low pay overseeing several dozen races--are frequently little more than middlemen between candidates and consultants. "A lot of firms seem to need their help to land business," says one longtime pollster, who adds that "very often the errant conventional wisdom is found in greatest concentration in those regional reps."

The disproportionate influence a couple of big polling firms enjoyed last year meant that when somebody on a given campaign--whether a staffer or a pollster or a consultant from a smaller firm or the candidate herself--had a different idea for how the campaign should be run, she often had a hard time making herself heard. A consultant for a House candidate complains of being ordered by the campaign committee in Washington to run an ad supporting the president on Iraq--this, while the campaign was trying to turn the race into a referendum on the North American Free Trade Agreement, which it considered its best hope for winning. "We got word from the mother ship, as the staff calls it, that we had to do a spot on Iraq. A whole positive spot on Iraq when we're getting destroyed with soft money." "We were in a state which was evenly split" on Iraq, says one Senate campaign manager. "There was no clear message of what to do (from the pollster) other than try to make it go away. … They were saying, 'Support and move on; you want to be talking about Social Security, prescription drugs.' That may be what you want to talk about, but we don't get to set the agenda. Every single meeting the candidate went to--it didn't matter what group: seniors, students, labor--the first question was, 'What's your position on Iraq?' The notion you could ignore that issue was foolhardy."

Democratic strategy on the Bush tax cut played out in a similar way. "Any time we polled, sixty percent thought that the tax break for upper-income people should be postponed. the party was afraid to use it," one pollster from a smaller firm recalls. "In Iowa, our opponent was hitting us on taxes, the DCCC wanted us to respond" by coming out in favor of the Bush tax cut. But, the pollster argues, there was little to be gained from getting out of the
way on the issue since the people most sympathetic to the Bush tax cut in Iowa were extremely unlikely to vote for the Democratic candidate anyway. "I can show you that the voters who picked taxes as the most important issue or the second most … were not our people," this pollster says.

Instead of tax cuts and the war, campaigns were told to emphasize their positions on the traditional Democratic litany of issues. In Senate race after Senate race--Georgia, Missouri, North Carolina--party and campaign money bought ads touting the Democrats' (and questioning the Republicans') commitment to education, prescription drugs, and Social Security. Often the party's top pollsters clung to these issues even in the face of evidence they weren't working. "Prescription drugs--all the polling had identified it as an important issue," says one source close to ousted Georgia Senator Max Cleland's campaign. "But, when the ad was airing, the results not only were not what was hoped for, in some cases they were even the reverse." Democrats who try to explain the party's decisive loss in Georgia typically cite the fact that the voters who showed up on Election Day were far whiter and more male than pollsters in both parties had anticipated. And there's no doubt this accounted for the strong Republican showing. But, had the campaign's pollster, Fred Yang, been asking the right questions, namely, why would a commercial have backfired, maybe he could have figured out what was going on--namely, that national security was shaping up to be the decisive issue in the race--in time to do something about it. (His client was, after all, a military veteran
who'd lost three limbs in Vietnam.)

Worse, even in states where voters might have been generally receptive to a campaign focused on health care and the economy, the canned feel of specific issues like prescription drugs hurt the Democrats' chances. "There was always debate about what the critical issues were," says one campaign official who worked with Mellman. "A poll can be used to show prescription-drug coverage for seniors has seventy-one percent support, whereas the fact that the cost of health care is rising for too many families--making it difficult to make ends meet--this tests at fifty-six percent. In a world of scarce resources, the consultant says, 'This is seventy-one percent; you have to go with that.'" The problem, says this official, is that the issue that performs best in a poll is usually easiest for the other side to co-opt. That's why it's often a better idea to focus on a slightly less popular issue, such as rising health insurance premiums, where it's still possible to tease out contrasts. But that never happened. "Look at our opponent," the official says. "When he talked about health care, he talked about the same crap we did."

Asked whether the emphasis on the usual menu of domestic issues was a mistake, Mellman shoots back, "The fact is, the issue of greatest concern to most Americans is the cost of health care generally and the cost of prescription drugs specifically. Just to say, 'We're not going to talk about it because we talked about it already,' is to say, 'We don't care what most voters think.'" Yang makes a similar argument: "Some people say, 'If Republicans are catching up to you on Social Security, why fight it?' Well, it's the only issue seniors care about. We all know how important seniors are. What are you going to do, just give up?"

But, from a sheer tactical standpoint, the biggest problem with the set of issues the Democrats chose to run on was just that: They were so obvious and well-known that Republicans had long since figured out how to counter them. In North Carolina, for example, the DSCC ran an ad in September accusing Elizabeth Dole of wanting to "gamble Social Security money in the stock market, even though it would reduce guaranteed benefits for retirees." Dole responded with three straight ads over the next week accusing her opponent, Erskine Bowles, of distorting her record and telling voters that her Social Security plan "helps their grandchildren increase their benefits without raising taxes." Republicans wound up with a twelve-point advantage among senior citizens by the time Dole and her fellow Republicans finished flooding the airwaves with counterattack ads on Social Security and prescription drugs.

Democrats aren't the only ones who fall into the trap of relying on the same group of pollsters and consultants over and over again. The Republican campaign committee in the Senate employed three pollsters in all--two more than the Democrats but hardly enough to offer a wide range of opinions and strategies. Likewise, though no one pollster for the party's House campaign committee enjoyed the level of influence that Garin and Yang did for the Democrats, the committee used the same overall number of firms--five--as the House Democrats. And, like their Democratic counterparts, the Republican committees tend to be staffed by the same ambitious young strivers looking to move on when the campaign season ends.

The difference is that there are important forces within the Republican Party that mitigate these problems. For one thing, since Republicans tend to be much better funded, their candidates aren't usually as hard up for soft money, which diminishes the influence of a well-connected pollster. A second result of this money advantage is that Republican campaigns can afford to hire what's known as a general consultant, a kind of general contractor whose job it is to keep all the other consultants honest. "Clearly any general consultant worth his or her salt has a major influence on polling and media and schedule and budget and message--the whole works," says Whit Ayres, an Atlanta-based Republican pollster. Which means that with a general consultant involved, it's much more difficult for any one consultant to hijack the candidate's message. On the Democratic side, "either the pollster or the media consultant or the direct-mail consultant ends up taking the lead," says Ken Smuckler. On the Republican side, "the general consultant generally creates an atmosphere where all of the consultants can deliberate with a little more freedom."

On top of this, the party that controls the White House always has some redundancy in its polling operation, which makes it tough for any one group of pollsters to dominate. When Bill Clinton was president, House and Senate Democrats were every bit as reliant on the likes of Mellman and Garin--according to US News & World Report, Senate Democrats went so far as to solicit Mellman's advice on how to deal with the 1997 Clinton campaign finance-scandal flare-up. But Clinton had his own pollsters--first the left-leaning Stan Greenberg, then the moderate Mark Penn--to help craft his message, so the party message never became quite so monotone. These days Karl Rove's team of strategists, along with trusted Republican National Committee pollster Matthew Dowd, influence the Republican candidates' message as much as anything that originates from Capitol Hill.

Perhaps most importantly, though, Republicans by and large have both a visceral and an ideological aversion to Washington that leads them to favor decentralized, state-and-district-level decision-making and to discount inside-the-Beltway conventions. "Republican pollsters in the Washington area tend not to be of the Washington area," says Glen Bolger, whose firm was recently named "Pollster of the Year" by the American Association of Political Consultants. "I don't go to a lot of receptions and parties, stuff like that. The last party I went to in Georgetown was when my brother was going to school there." As evidence of this detachment, Bolger points out that most Democratic firms are based in the District, while Republican firms tend to be based in Northern Virginia.

And, in the end, sometimes just having respect for local issues can be the most valuable tool a campaign consultant has to offer. By all accounts, Tennessee Representative Bart Gordon should be out of a job by now. Gordon was one of the few Southern congressmen from either party who voted for the Clinton tax increase in 1993. But he relentlessly touted his opposition to plans to build a nuclear waste storage facility in Oak Ridge while campaigning the following year. And this helped save his seat, even as Democratic colleagues with far more conservative voting records fell by the wayside. Then, in 1996, Gordon faced the same challenger in an increasingly Republican district. But again Gordon managed to survive--this time by more or less devoting his entire campaign to preserving a sacred Tennessee Valley Authority project, which the Republicans had vowed to privatize in their Contract With America. "It sounds like 'who cares' to most people, but we dug in, and it was a big issue," says Gordon's media consultant, John Rowley. Which raises the question: As long as Mark Mellman, Geoff Garin, and Fred Yang are controlling the message from Washington, what else is the Democratic Party missing?

--end