Archive for category: Public Affairs

When the din of the debate reaches its height, you would expect an opposition researcher to be smiling broadly, but last night, I was deeply troubled. Last night, we saw the research begin to drop on Donald Trump and all I could think was, “Where was all of this material six months ago?” Considering the treasure trove of opposition research a life like Trump’s inevitably accrues, how could it possibly have taken this long to really begin using it in earnest? With all the GOP hand-wringing over Trump’s ascendancy, what could have possibly stymied this process? What the hell went wrong?

As someone who has been involved in multiple presidential and other major campaign research operations, I have some answers to these questions that help explain why I was so deeply troubled.

Last night’s debate exposed a monumental failure in the Republican Presidential campaigns, so the question becomes did the researchers fail the campaign leadership or did the campaign leadership fail the researchers? I would argue the latter. From the beginning, these campaigns have not taken research seriously. Certainly not as seriously as it has been taken in the past. No Republican presidential campaign has hired and empowered a research director as a senior campaign official or built the research teams and resources needed to dig deep into their opponents’ backgrounds and build a narrative against them.

From the beginning last winter, the campaigns approached opposition research as a passive aggressive prisoner’s dilemma, hoping, praying and assuming that someone was whittling their spoon into a shank so that they would not have to do it. More than one campaign operative argued to me (and others), “It’s such a big field, there’s no point doing the research because Candidate X’s team is going to have to take out Candidate Y anyways.” Others argued a super PAC would come along to save the day.

Whether it was wishful thinking, a squirreling of campaign dollars, or a lack of appreciation for the strategic advantage opposition research can provide, the result was that none of the campaigns put in the time or effort to dig deep into the opponents — least of all Donald Trump, who was dismissed as a summer fling, then a fall affair, and then… oh my, he’s winning the nomination.

None of them acknowledged the problem, and none of them took action when it would have made a huge (yuge?) difference. It is most likely too late, but last night Marco Rubio showed how it should have been done a long time ago. The age old wisdom parents have given their bullied children: punch back and expose how weak the bully is. Throughout the fall, hoping Trump would fall by someone else’s shank or his own doing, the campaigns thought they could then pick up his supporters. All that time was wasted while Trump became a movement.

Like any candidate for the Presidency, Trump should be held accountable for his record and this vetting process should have begun months ago. Now that we are at this point in the primary process, the Democrats and mainstream media will gleefully do the vetting for us in the general election. The reason it did not begin earlier is that even once the campaigns realized Trump would not fade, they did not have the research infrastructure in place to sound the alarm and fire back.

It is complete and utter political malpractice that Republican voters have had to wait ten full debates, four primary contests, and an entire summer and fall of campaigning for any candidate to put together and actually use serious opposition research against Donald Trump. Even if one is a Trump supporter, this fact should be deeply concerning. Trying and testing our candidates in the primary process better prepares them for defeating the Democratic nominee in the fall.

This failure is a direct result of the low priority these campaigns placed on their research operations. For proof, look no further than the campaign finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. They show that just seven of the 17 Republicans campaigns made any expenditures on research and they averaged far less than $200,000 spent on research, even when accounting for research staff salaries. That is an inexcusable rounding error for what should be serious national campaigns.

In 2008, when I served as Mayor Giuliani’s campaign research director, my peers on the other primary campaigns and I were given seats at the table as part of the campaign’s senior leadership. We were involved in and helped inform the broad strategy and messaging, which allowed each candidate to be better served. All the campaigns had experienced leaders in research who had the reputation and understanding necessary to help drive strategy.

In 2016, none of the campaigns have (or had) a known and respected research director as a senior campaign staffer who sits at the decision making table. None of the campaigns invested the time and money in deep research that they should have, relying too much on rapid response paper pushing. None of the campaigns, therefore, were in a position to be proactive when it would have mattered.

If early money is like yeast, early oppo is like gunpowder. Stored well and carefully deployed at the right time, it can win you the race. Let it sit too long and it may explode on you, or not at all. The failure of the 2016 Republican campaigns to appreciate this reality has led us to this moment. And to my depression.

Research 101, Lesson One: In campaigns, define your opponent early and often.

It’s been said that by the time you recognize certain problems, it’s already too late to stop them. Like the Titanic steaming toward an iceberg, only to sound the alarm after it was too late to stop or turn. Or that extra drink that it took you to realize you already had one too many and have now agreed to go to a karaoke bar.

Hillary Clinton now faces this challenge as Bernie Sanders’ poll numbers rise in the early primary states. Polling has Sanders leading Clinton by double digits in New Hampshire and neck and neck in the upcoming Iowa caucuses. These numbers clearly, and rightfully, have many in Hillary’s campaign leadership fraught with concern. So, after accruing an undoubtedly substantial book of opposition research on the junior Senator from Vermont, Team Hillary has begun launching some of the juiciest attacks in their arsenal. The problem — it’s not going to work.

To understand why this strategy will be futile, one has to understand what I call the Castle Doctrine of Opposition Research. The term is coined for Mike Castle, a moderate Republican Congressman (and former Governor) who ran for Delaware’s open U.S. Senate seat in 2010. Castle was widely presumed to be the nominee and have a strong chance of winning the general election. But he failed to take seriously a primary challenge from a right-wing two-time failed candidate named Christine O’Donnell.

O’Donnell today is most famous for having to clarify that she was not in fact a witch, but during the primary, she was able to define herself as the grassroots Tea Party solution to taking back Congress. In the final weeks of the primary, Castle’s campaign finally unleashed an assault on O’Donnell. But it was too late. O’Donnell defeated Castle by just over 3,500 votes. As was later shown in the general election, the universe of oppo on O’Donnell was bountiful and effective in defeating her — even in a campaign against a once “bearded Marxist.” If Castle’s team had been prepared for the threat and acted earlier, defining O’Donnell as an unelectable, fringe candidate who would guarantee continued Democratic control of the Senate, things might have been different. As the Castle Doctrine teaches us, if you do not define your opponent early and often, they will define themselves.

In 2000 and 2004, the Bush campaigns put on a masterclass in defining their opponents early and often. When Al Gore appeared on the debate stage and came off as a dull, aloof policy wonk, it merely confirmed the image the Bush campaign had been pushing to the public and press for months. As part of the 2004 research team for President Bush’s re-election, I know that we started calling John Kerry a flip-flopper in January 2003, and we never stopped. Using a mountain of examples showing John Kerry’s record of flip-flops, we pushed that narrative with the press and public. By March 2014, when Kerry claimed he voted for funding our troops before he voted against it, his fate was sealed.

In 2012, Obama’s strategists employed this playbook to great effect against Mitt Romney. While Romney was stuck fighting his way through a bloody primary, the Obama campaign was busy portraying Mitt as a heartless corporate automaton who neither shared your values nor cared about people like you. For voters, Romney’s infamous 47% comment only secured a belief already instilled in them by the Obama messaging machine.

The idea behind the Castle Doctrine is to inoculate your campaign from a potentially serious opponent before they even become a threat. In order to do this, you must lay the foundation for any attacks you may want to use further down the road by defining the opponent in such a way that those attacks support what the public has come to believe about them. It’s as simple as the ancient adage from The Art of War, “Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought.” In this case, to define your opponent before they can define themselves is key to victory.

The Clinton campaign’s failure to begin using their best oppo to define Bernie Sanders as the left-wing, fringe candidate that he is has allowed him to define himself as the progressive savior and fresh voice the Democratic Party needs.

As Team Hillary continues to cart out hits like Bernie’s glowing audio tribute to his hero, Eugene Debs, the media and voters have already decided who Bernie Sanders is to them. It may be simply too late to turn Hillary’s Titanic away from Iowa iceberg of how the electorate views Bernie, and the more aggressive the attacks become, the more Sanders supporters will point to them as evidence that their candidate is gaining momentum. Whatever silver bullets Clinton’s opposition researchers have been able to accrue on Sanders will sadly be fired in vein, as they bounce off the armor Bernie has built by defining himself before Clinton took up arms.

Of course, there’s also the question of whether hitting a lifelong Socialist as, well, a lifelong Socialist, is actually a problem for Democratic voters, but that’s a discussion for Lesson Two. Stay tuned.

The Washington Post reports on Delve’s launch and highlights our “invest[ment] in technology that aims to predict what one’s political opponents and corporate competitors will do next. … The move underscores a shift in the influence industry as firms look for ways to add data-based competitive intelligence to traditional shoe-leather lobbying services.”

 

On July 9, presidential candidate Martin O’Malley published an “open letter” to “Wall Street Megabanks” that outlined his financial reform proposals, with the goal of bringing much needed media attention to the struggling campaign. The letter was, in fact, successful in drawing the media’s attention, however, it was not the attention the campaign was hoping for.

The very first footnote of the letter cited “an off-brand, non-Onion fake news article which said that former attorney general Eric Holder had been hired by JP Morgan Chase at an annual salary of $77 million,” which is blatantly false. Upon noticing the mistake, the campaign team quickly covered their tracks and replaced the fake citation with an authentic one: a reference to an article from The New York Times that discusses Holder’s return to the law firm Covington & Burling. Despite the rapid response of O’Malley’s team, the mistake was noticed, and O’Malley, who is polling at a meager 1% in the Democratic Presidential Primary, did not get the positive press and poll bump he was hoping for.

Fake news made headlines again the following week. On July 14, Twitter share prices spiked 8% midday following an announcement from “Bloomberg” that the company was taking part in acquisition talks. The announcement came from bloomberg.market (which has since been taken down) and contained the byline of a Bloomberg reporter. However, Bloomberg was quick to point out this announcement wasn’t theirs; they never wrote it and it didn’t come from their site, bloomberg.com. Twitter was also quick to deny the report. Soon, word of the announcement’s falseness spread just as quickly as the fake announcement originally did, and the share price fell back to its original price within the hour. Although the stock quickly evened out, Wall Street watchers were amazed by the effect a well-disguised fake source could have.

As is evidenced by these incidents, confirming information and validating sources is essential to taking successful action and avoiding negative consequences. So you don’t act based on false information, here are four steps you can take to confirm your sources:

1) Verify the source. And the source’s sources

Are you familiar with the source? If you are and trust it, great. If you aren’t, type the name of the source into a search engine. Have other sites or authors referenced it? What do others have to say about it? Also, check what source your source is citing. Often online articles provide links to the original source.

2) Check the URL

Once you have verified the credibility of  source, the next step is to make sure the site you are on is legitimate – something that would have benefited those who trusted the fake Bloomberg piece. To do this, look at the URL. If the URL you are seeing is nighttime.com.co, this is different from nighttime.com.

3) See if others are talking about it

If the news is shocking or surprising to you, others are going to be talking about it. Google the headline and/or conduct a search using the main ideas and subjects of the article as search terms. Check to see if other sources have published stories with similar information. If others have, verify the credibility of those sources as well.

4) Consult the experts

If you’re still not sure what you are looking at, call on the experts. Experienced fact checkers and researchers make careers out of knowing who to trust, or knowing how to know who to trust. The safest and smartest thing to do is to turn to these experts and let them help you make decisions based on reality, not satire.

Delve CEO Jeff Berkowitz helps The Washington Times’ Jim McElhatton interpret data on EPA responses to FOIA requests. Is the agency really more responsive to Democrat requests than Republican ones? The data suggests yes, but it might be a bit more complicated than that:

Democrats have filed more than 50 FOIA requests, including lots seeking correspondence between Republicans and EPA officials. Their findings help supply a steady flow of material for damaging news stories and campaign ads.

Republican political committees have filed just four requests since 2012, and none of those has been fulfilled.

The lack of EPA records on the Republican side doesn’t mean Republicans are less aggressive than Democrats. Campaigns sometimes file requests through intermediaries — “regular citizens” — so as not to attract undue attention inside agencies, said Jeffrey Berkowitz, a research consultant who advises campaigns on open-records requests.

Mr. Berkowitz said clients sometimes don’t want anyone to know what documents they are trying to track down, so they use intermediaries with no outward political affiliation to file requests.

Berkowitz told The Washington Times that getting FOIA requests answered takes patience, but it can produce significant results when it works:

The FOIA process isn’t easy. Months and sometimes even years can pass before agencies respond to records requests. Even then, agencies have a host of exemptions with which they can black out huge swaths of paperwork, shielding records from public view.

“You have to start early and you see with the national political organizations, they’re often thinking very far ahead.”

But the records can pay off, he said.

“If you’re about to run against an incumbent senator or congressman in an agricultural state, you might want to see what correspondence they’re sending to [the Agriculture Department] to advocate for their constituency. You may not find much, or you may find letters that match up neatly with their list of donors,” he said.

Read the full article here. Need help understanding the FOIA process and other research techniques? We can help.