TV and High Tech Send Campaign Costs Soaring

He is running expensive TV ads just like every other candidate in a tough congressional race this year, but Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) may be getting the biggest bang for his buck out of, well, wooden nickels.

The senator has had half a million wooden tokens stamped with the message, “Don’t send your dollars to Washington, send Nickles,” and he passes them out to everybody, from onlookers at a parade in Mustang to spectators at a football game in Tulsa. Each “nickel” costs his campaign 3 cents, whereas a 30-second TV spot costs up to $3,000.

“A TV spot is gone after 30 seconds. A wooden nickel you can keep forever,” his campaign manager, Clinton Key, says.

Costs Up 18%

However, Nickles stands practically alone as a candidate who has found a cheap way to make the voters notice him. Nationwide, spending on Senate and House campaigns has climbed 18% from the 1983-84 election cycle and is expected to total $440 million as candidates venture still further into the high-technology age of polling, electronic advertising and computer-aided direct mail.

Critics such as Common Cause, a citizens’ lobby, decry the soaring costs on grounds that challengers often cannot keep up with incumbents--and that all candidates must spend enormous amounts of time raising funds, increasingly from special interests, to whom they may feel compelled to grant legislative thank-yous.

On the other hand, some political scientists, including Herbert E. Alexander at USC and Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia, suggest that the problem is underfinancing, not overspending. Sabato calls for much greater spending to benefit voters, saying studies show that political advertising “not only is generally substantive but in fact frequently has more issue content than news broadcasts.”

Making Money on Politics

The rising cost of TV advertising is “the most significant factor in the rise of campaign spending in the last decade and a half,” Sabato says. “I think it is an outrage that TV stations are making the money they make on politics. We are the only industrial democracy in the world that doesn’t allocate some free time to parties, if not candidates. Every time it’s mentioned, the TV lobby goes to work and that’s the end of it.”

Alexander, a USC professor who heads the Citizens’ Research Foundation, contends that campaign costs are not that high in relation to the benefits for society.

Citing the $514 million spent for electing a Congress and a President in 1980, Alexander says the costs “may sound inordinately high until one considers that the nation’s leading commercial advertiser, Procter & Gamble, spent $649 million promoting its products” that year.

Campaign spending, he says, “ought to be considered the tuition we pay for our education on the issues.”

However, many critics see things getting out of hand. Randy Huwa, vice president of Common Cause, complains that “we are rapidly approaching the situation in which the ability to raise money for campaigns is almost a prerequisite for public office. With the cost of House races averaging $250,000 and Senate races $3 million, candidates are trapped in a perpetual fund-raising machine.”

Spending Limits Sought

Common Cause has pushed sputtering efforts in Congress to set limits on overall spending and provide taxpayer subsidies for House and Senate campaigns.

Adding to the rise in campaign costs is telemarketing, a relatively new tool that is coming on strong. Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) has spent $500,000 on professional telephone banks not only to raise money (more than $1 million) and deliver a message, but to recruit thousands of campaign volunteers.

“This has given us an enormous grass-roots effort in a state in which the conventional wisdom says the only thing that matters is television,” Cranston’s campaign manager, Darry Sragow, says.

TV still matters plenty to both Cranston and his Republican challenger, Rep. Ed Zschau: The millions they are paying for media spots will help make them the biggest spenders at any level in this year’s elections.

Cranston, who spent $2.8 million to win reelection six years ago, initially budgeted $6 million for this campaign but raised it to $10 million after Zschau announced that he was shooting for $13.5 million. Counting the $6 million spent by also-rans in the Republican primary, it appears that the California Senate race will top the Senate record of $27.7 million set in Texas in 1984.

House Record Set

A new House spending mark already has been notched in Massachusetts, where more than $3.2 million was poured into a Democratic primary election won by Joseph Kennedy, son of the late Robert F. Kennedy.

Here in Oklahoma, Nickles and his Democratic challenger, Rep. James R. Jones, are devoting half of their war chests to a barrage of issue-oriented TV and radio ads touting their own achievements and denouncing each other’s records.

In a contest that could determine whether Republicans retain control of the Senate, Jones is accusing Nickles of opposing relief measures for the state’s hard-pressed farm and oil industries and of voting for cuts in Social Security and education aid.

Nickles is charging that Jones is a liberal in conservative costume who talks of fiscal austerity while voting for tax increases, against balanced-budget measures and in favor of congressional pay raises.

Fearing that voters will perceive him as too serious, Jones has injected humor into several ads, including one show-stopper in which he points a hair dryer at his balding head and says impishly: “I’ll have more time each day to work on Oklahoma’s problems because I won’t need one of these.”

It is an obvious dig at Nickles’ neatly groomed hair, although Nickles--who calls the stunt “childish”--says he does not use a blow dryer.

Jones Narrows Gap

Jones, who once trailed by 30 percentage points, has cut the gap to 15, prompting Nickles to bring in a new media consultant, Roger Ailes of New York. Nickles’ pollster, Arthur Finkelstein, also is from New York.

Jones, too, has gone out of state for consulting help, using California ad maker Michael Kaye and Florida pollster Jim Kitchens.

Kaye, who has produced more than a dozen 10- and 30-second spots for Jones, says that “Nickles will probably outspend us about 2 to 1, but I don’t think the amount you spend has any direct correlation with whether you win or lose. Hell, if people see our message six times and his 18--and ours is better--we don’t need 18.”

Nickles, whose “media buys” may cost $2.5 million, agrees.

“You can spend a lot of money and run some ads that aren’t very good,” he says. “We put together some ads I wasn’t very proud of, and we didn’t run them.”

Despite their heavy reliance on the airwaves to reach voters, Jones and Nickles are doing a lot of old-fashioned campaigning at ground level.

“When you get to the more rural areas, they want to see you personally, and they talk to each other about it,” Jones said recently as he made a whirlwind tour of county fairs, shucking his coat to expose a pair of checkered suspenders.

Democratic state Rep. Lonnie Abbott put it another way as he helped Jones greet voters amid the hogs and sheep in Ada: “If you ain’t seen at the county fair, you’re preached about on Sunday.”

Sophisticated Fund-Raising

Although Nickles uses computers extensively to pursue contributors and undecided voters, Sen. Paula Hawkins (R-Fla.) may have the most sophisticated direct-mail fund-raising operation in the nation, spending 40 cents for every dollar raised.

Hawkins, who is locked in a tough reelection fight against Democratic Gov. Bob Graham, has sent 900,000 “personally” addressed letters in recent months from a state-of-the-art main-frame computer and laser printer in St. Petersburg. Such high-tech equipment can make an appeal from President Reagan look as if it were typed in the White House--or a note from the senator look as if it were scribbled from a hospital bed, where Hawkins was for some time after two operations on her back this spring.

Direct Mail Systems, whose creative director, Mike Pachik, actually writes the letters, has raised $750,000 for Hawkins, nearly one-eighth of her $6.5-million campaign budget.

One letter, imploring “Keep Paula Hawkins on TV,” lists the price for airing 30-second ads in various markets and asks donors where they would like air time to be bought, suggesting the amounts they can contribute: $45 for “Good Morning America,” $90 for “Donahue,” $965 for “Wheel of Fortune,” $50 for “People’s Court,” $535 for “Jeopardy,” $1,025 for “The Cosby Show.”

If media expenses are high in Florida, they are stupendous in California. A 30-second spot on the top-rated Cosby program costs $30,000 in Los Angeles. And a “minimal TV buy” of 30-second spots in California’s five largest markets for just one week costs $300,000, according to Cranston aide Sragow.

Newsletter Blitz Cited

Faced with trying to contact 17 million potential voters in his sprawling state, Cranston will spend three-fifths of his money on media advertising. Zschau, protesting that he has to overcome--among other things--a $4.8-million blitz of Cranston newsletters mailed at taxpayers’ expense, has committed fully two-thirds of his budget to ads.

Regardless of the millions that are pumped into advertising, the question of effectiveness still remains. Even some of its creators are beginning to voice skepticism.

“I think now, more than ever, it’s harder to reach people on TV, whether it’s because they’re jaded or whatever,” media guru Kaye said. “There’s a general disinterest in politics.”