Campaign Consultants Test Their Arguments : Strategists’ Goal: Get Inside Public Mind

Enter the Arden Fair mall and walk past the Waldenbooks store, past Sporting Feet, past Hickory Farms, the Briar Patch Smokeshop and Fredericks of Hollywood to Kinney Shoes. Turn right. There, tucked away in a back wing of this otherwise ordinary suburban shopping center, is a little business with something extraordinary for sale.

A sign out front reads “Heakins Research, the Opinion Store.” On a hot Friday night in June, political consultant Doug Watts and half a dozen associates filed into a tiny back room of the establishment and took their places behind a two-way mirror. They had come to purchase some public opinion about toxic pollution.

The mirror allowed Watts and company to peer undetected into an adjoining room where 13 strangers--an auto mechanic named Bob, an office manager named Linda, a reading teacher, one “just a housewife,” Mike the dry wall hanger, three retired government workers, and a few others--were squeezed around a conference table.

The strangers, registered voters all, would receive $25 apiece for expressing their opinions in a two-hour discussion. They did not know that opponents of Proposition 65 were paying them. They also did not know that political Peeping Toms sat behind the two-way mirror, listening intently, scribbling notes.

After a few preliminaries, the moderator passed out copies of the toxics initiative. Mike the dry wall hanger was one of the first to react. He was a young man, with a wispy, Larry Bird-like look. Elaborate, indecipherable tattoos trellised his arms and disappeared into a white T-shirt. On the other side of the glass, the observers quietly awaited Mike’s assessment. A thought occurred: A political system that allows a 22-year-old construction worker to command the complete attention of these high-priced campaign consultants cannot be all bad.

“Well,” Mike said, finally, “I like the initiative.”

Groans.

“Except for this ‘allows exceptions.’ ”

It’s a shame he could not see the grins behind the mirror.

“We are,” crowed a Watts’ aide, “going to kill them.”

Most ballot propositions are born of a simple reason. Many people perceive that a problem needs solving. Property taxes are too high. Giant lawsuits are creating an insurance crisis. Developers are plundering the coast. Whether the perception is founded on hyperbole or reality does not exactly matter.

What does matter is how wide and deep the perception runs. What also matters is whether an initiative can be crafted that will both advance a credible solution and also overcome an electoral tendency to reject new laws when confused about their effect. So to win passage, an initiative at once must be technically complete and structurally simple, a tall order.

Poll after poll in early 1986 demonstrated that Californians were concerned about toxic pollution and contaminated drinking water. It was a hot issue. And so a handful of the state’s leading environmentalists and Democratic political strategists drafted what would become Proposition 65 on the November ballot.

Consultants’ Attitude

Sal Russo and Doug Watts, political consultants hired in April to defeat the proposition, believed it was cynically motivated--that the environmentalists were conniving to lance their longtime foes, the big farmers, and that Democrats were exploiting toxic concerns to establish a unifying theme for an important election.

After enough signatures were gathered to qualify the proposition, however, motivation of its authors became more or less moot. The initiative would go before California voters. It was time, from the Russo and Watts perspective, to start hunting for a way to defeat it.

The first order of business was research, and there were two paths to pursue. First, the opponents needed to know legally all they could about toxic waste law and Proposition 65 in particular. Was it redundant to existing laws? Would it undermine them? What were its worst-case consequences?

Second, and trickier, Californian’s perceptions about toxic waste had to be thoroughly plumbed. Was concern prominent in polls because of media-created hysteria or honest fear? Was this an issue ascendant, or had it peaked? Whom did Californians blame? What did they know about it? What risks were they willing to accept to live with chemicals? What trade-offs would they accept to do without them?

If Proposition 65 was to be defeated, the two pathways of research would eventually need to converge. The ultimate quest was to determine the highest common denominator between legal vulnerability and public doubt, to define a cutting theme and consolidate it into one or possibly two slogans, or tag lines, of four or five words.

Television Concepts

Once found, this message would furnish the creative foundation for television concepts. There really were only two requirements--it had to be powerful enough to sway a majority of voters, and resilient enough to withstand a competitive campaign.

Changing slogans midstream, Watts said, “is near-death. It means you are desperate. It means you either have to come up with a miracle, or pack it in.”

In May a campaign staff was assembled. Attorneys were hired to forage through the proposition. Legislative experts began to tally how many toxic laws already were on the books, both state and federal. Chemists and industry scientists were consulted, along with farmers. Newspaper articles and scholarly research papers were clipped and stacked in a growing pile at the foot of Watts’ desk.

An early discovery was that most people, especially reporters, used the shorthand “toxics initiative” to refer to the cumbersomely titled proposition. A name change was ordered forthwith for the steering committee. Californians for a Balanced Future became Californians Against the Toxics Initiative.

“Now we’re able to say we’re against toxics,” Watts said. He figured the subtle difference might be worth a few percentage points anyway. Campaign manager Michael Gagan, ensconced in campaign headquarters across the street from the Russo Watts + Rollins Inc. office, took down the brass door plaque identifying “Californians for a Balanced Future” and hung it on his office wall, crooked.

Research led to development of what opponents called their “zero discharge” argument. The thrust of the proposition was to require the governor to establish a list of chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects. Businesses with 10 or more employees responsible for discharge of any listed chemical into drinking water would face fines. Moreover, posted warnings would be required wherever anyone might be exposed to listed chemicals.

Zero Discharge

The authors of Proposition 65 said it did not apply to use of the chemicals in “safe amounts.” However, Watts and company asserted that the initiative forbade discharge of chemicals in any amount. Hence, zero discharge.

This argument was popular with the committee of businessmen that hired Russo Watts + Rollins. With zero discharge, all kinds of dark dilemmas for industry could be painted. Would beer cans need to be labeled as toxic? Would chlorine in swimming pools be banned? Would even peanuts, which emit infinitesimal amounts of a natural toxin, fall under the warning requirement?

Russo explained that this was important for fund-raising purposes: Contributors to an initiative campaign are driven by different motivations than those who donate to candidates.

“When you are talking about candidates, the reasons for giving are totally different than with a ballot proposition,” Russo said. “You have all the ego gratification, to be able to sit around a table and say, ‘Well, you know, Ron called me yesterday. Yeah, he was out in Santa Barbara, you know. . . .’ There is a big ego factor that is very, very important in candidate fund-raisers.

“Ballot propositions, on the other hand, are primarily about economic interest. . . . People whose oxes are gored, one way or the other--either if it passes or if it doesn’t pass--are the people who are going to be interested in ballot issues, in terms of dollars.”

By June, fuzzy initial images of commercials were flickering in the imaginations of Watts and others. Footage of San Francisco sewage flowing into the ocean; the City of San Francisco would be exempt; a powerful image for Los Angeles viewers. Conversely, how would San Francisco voters react to a commercial that captured effluent pouring into Santa Monica Bay, with the reminder that the City of Los Angeles was exempt?

Gagan, too, had a vague picture of an advertisement: Tom Hayden caught by a camera drinking water from a public fountain while a narrator intoned, “What’s he so worried about?”

Gagan said that in idle moments he and Watts had pondered the thrill of forgoing polls and focus groups and building the campaign strictly on their gut instincts. Wouldn’t it be fun? The wistful notion was put aside, however, and in late June the campaign against Proposition 65 embarked down the second avenue of research. It was time for a trip inside the collective public mind.

Between June 23 and July 1 the campaign against Proposition 65 conducted focus groups in San Diego, Van Nuys, Sacramento, South San Francisco, Irvine and Fresno--California’s major media markets.

Marketing research outlets like the Opinion Store in the Arden mall would round up by telephone 10 or more registered voters and offer to pay them $25 to $35 if they would come down for two hours for a group discussion. The idea is to build a representative demographic sample, but it certainly is not a scientific process.

Gary Lawrence, a Santa Ana-based pollster hired for the Proposition 65 campaign, led the focus groups. He was in a back room of the Irvine marketing research facility, gulping down a Burger King dinner before going to work when a secretary popped in and advised him they had one participant too many.

“What do you have?” he asked.

“Five ladies, eight men.”

‘Redundant Demographic’

“OK, send one man home. Choose the guy who seems to be the redundant demographic. What kind of mixture among the men have you got?”

“An upscale businessman, a cowboy, an out-of-work plumber, and a lot of older men, over 55.”

“OK, send home one of the older men. Just say, ‘Sir, could you hold on a minute?’ so he’s not embarrassed, so the other people don’t know, and I’ll be in right now.”

And in the participants would troop. There were always a few who, by dress and demeanor, seemed to believe they were secretly auditioning for one of those hidden-camera aspirin commercials, the kind in which ordinary folk testify how quickly Product X has relieved their king-sized headache. They would scan the room as soon as they sat down, eyes stopping at every picture and light fixture-- where’s that camera?

The two-way mirror was standard equipment, and the view from the other side never bored. It was like observing a human ant farm. The irresistible inclination was to start rooting for favorite participants and booing the boorish loudmouths. The campaign officials in the gallery occasionally would lampoon participants who would not be swayed by arguments against the initiative; those who opposed it were praised for their intelligence.

Lawrence started every session the same: “My name is Gary Lawrence and, believe it or not, I do this for a living. Sometimes we test food products, or commercials, but tonight we are going to be discussing a public policy issue.”

What would follow was a two-hour journey, with Lawrence as guide, into their own minds. With carefully planted questions and the unflappable manner of a talk-show host, he would work around the table, eliciting opinions about toxic waste and the Proposition 65.

“Bull----!” was a cranky man’s reaction to reading the proposition in Fresno.

‘Unvarnished Opinions’

“Well,” Lawrence said, undeterred, “I did ask for your unvarnished opinions.”

“Well,” the old man shot back, “there wasn’t much varnish on that, now, was there?”

“My job,” Lawrence said in an interview, “is to get inside peoples’ minds and look around. I’m a mental voyeur. That’s what I call myself. Get inside peoples’ minds, find out what attitudes they have predisposed toward my side, what new pieces of information would galvanize those attitudes and start driving behavior. At the same time, I want to find out what attitudes my opposition can take advantage of. And then you have a face-off: Whose attitudes are going to win?”

Lawrence is a steadfast conservative and practicing Mormon. He looks, as he is often reminded at focus groups, like the television cop Barney Miller. Lawrence earned a doctorate in political science at Stanford University and has been a pollster for 19 years. He had worked on several previous campaigns with Russo and Watts and is well-established in national Republican politics.

His role not only was to gather information, but also to help interpret it and plot strategy. Lawrence relishes battles with liberal Democrats, and he claims to know their mental pressure point:

“A lot of people who are swayed by liberal Democrats, the Tom Haydens of the world, they have this perception of themselves as sophisticated, intellectual, progressive, with it, chic, in, fashionable, you name it, and they think that, you know, we conservatives on the other side, we’re just a bunch of moribund fossils.

“And so you’ve got to split that intellectual thing from them. There are two things that an intellectual cannot stand: He cannot stand to be caught out on the facts, and he cannot stand to be laughed at. I intend to do both of them in this campaign. Liberal intellectuals take ridicule worse than any other group.”

Before he revealed what topic was to be discussed, Lawrence would ask each participant to identify the biggest problem facing California. There were some eye-openers. In Irvine one woman said X-rayed food was Problem No. 1. A San Diego man, who blamed the “bilateral commission” for every onerous thing in the land, asserted “privileges replacing freedoms” was the main dilemma. A Sacramento retiree confessed he worried most about the ever-rising tide. In Van Nuys, real estate value earned prominent mention.

Toxic Waste Cited

But also, in each city, toxic waste and water pollution frequently were cited as the state’s biggest problem. At first blush, it appeared the environmentalists and Democrats knew what they were doing. At least their timing seemed right.

At seemingly every focus group a startling personal parable would pop up to suggest that concern about toxic pollution was perhaps more than a mere product of media sensationalism.

In Van Nuys: “I remember a little boy from our block who lost a leg from chemicals, and now that little boy is dead, and this is a terrible thing. I would point that out.”

In Fresno: “If people weren’t dying from it, you wouldn’t hear about it in the news. It would be kept under the carpet, with corporations and lawyers.”

In South San Francisco: “You see them each morning with drills checking the water table, and the water tastes terrible. I won’t drink it. You wash your hands in it, and they smell.”

The focus groups also revealed a cynicism about the political system, disgust with complicated propositions and confusing television commercials.

“A majority of the people in California, they are illiterate,” said a Fresno corrections officer. “And I think that’s why a lot of people don’t vote. They say, ‘I can’t read the darn thing anyway.’ So they don’t vote, and when you do go to try and vote you got this crap”--he shook a copy of the initiative--”and you can’t understand what it is. So what are they going to do?

“They are going to go by what they see on TV. ‘Vote yes!’ ‘Vote no!’ So TV decides the way you vote.”

Toward the end of each focus group, Lawrence would test eight arguments against the proposition, asking the participants to rank them. The arguments each ran for a paragraph and were lettered M through T. They ranged from a declaration that the proposition “is simply not needed” to “things have gone too far when we have to put warning labels on jars of peanut butter.” Arguments about the initiative hurting farmers, helping lawyers, allowing too many exemptions, not allowing for society’s need to accept certain risks--all these were made as well.

The process, it was beginning to seem, was one of soliciting from voters the message they most wanted to hear, and then giving it them.

“You got to take the world where it is,” Lawrence said. “I go back to my old university once in a while and give a lecture there, and they say, ‘Why don’t you give me the other side of the story?’ And I say, ‘You naive idiots. You educated naive idiots. (You can say that to people at Stanford). When you go out on a date, is the first thing you say, ‘Gee, I have flat feet and halitosis’?

“I’m going to put my best foot forward. I’ll put my best foot forward, and I’ll let the other guy put his best foot forward. He’s going to point out my bad feet, and I’m going to point out his bad feet. . . . We are going to try to figure out the best possible information to give the people to swing them, and the other side is going to be doing the same thing.

“That’s as close as you get to debate in the initiative process.”

Clear patterns emerged early in the focus group process and remained consistent throughout. For one thing, the more people learned about the proposition the less they liked it. Lawrence would take votes several times during a session, searching for what prompted switches, and though the first ballots all were nearly unanimous in support of the measure, the last usually were about even.

Also, while there was keen awareness of toxic pollution and contaminated water as important public issues, the participants seemed confused as the discussions got down to particulars. Who was to blame? They weren’t sure--big business, little business, criminal dumpers, progress, who? How severe was the problem? They weren’t certain.

For every participant who knew someone who came in contact with toxic poisoning, another would argue that there probably was more risk in the free soft drinks they were sipping.

What laws already were available? Few had any idea. Once, when an argument passed out by Lawrence listed the Toxic Pit Clean-up Act, a participant in San Diego complained, “For all I know this toxic pit law had to do with rotten peaches!”

Perceptions of Severity

The Proposition 65 opponents interpreted all of this as evidence that while identification of the issue was strong--and reflected in whopping support for a toxics measure--perceptions about its severity were not yet set and thus could be shaped.

Finally, and clearest of all, what participants liked least was that government and small businesses would be exempt from the measure. They were puzzled about why the exemptions were allowed. Many thought they smelled a political rat and were certain the Sierra Club and similar beacons of the environmental movement would oppose it.

Significantly, most participants who opposed the proposition did so because they thought it should be tougher. Those who supported it did so with reservations, but routinely noted, “At least it’s a start.”

At the Van Nuys session, an emerging opponent in the midst of a long soliloquy blurted out, “It’s these exceptions. It’s filled with exceptions.”

Gagan, bouncing around the observation room, smacked his hands together: “That girl just had the line. ‘It’s filled with exceptions.’ That’s the billboard line right there. ‘It’s filled with exceptions.’ ”

He and Watts were sipping imported beer that night as they watched the discussion unfold. Toward the end Watts grew expansive about the political conundrum before him.

“It would be nice,” he said, “to deal with this on a higher intellectual plane. . . . But there is no doubt we can beat this thing with somewhat deceptive tactics, skirting the issues. If faced with just having to defeat it, that’s what we’ll have to do, but I have a reluctance.”

Watts said he would rather beat the initiative with arguments about acceptable risks in a society benefited by chemicals, to demonstrate that the toxic problem was not severe and that there were enough laws to deal with it already. If successful, he said, this tack might discourage the proponents from trying again.

The other option would be to pick off the initiative with less expansive arguments--allows exemptions, hurts farmers, a windfall for lawyers, these sorts of things. Victory on this plane, he said, simply could encourage the environmentalists to come back with a tighter piece of legislation the next time around.

The next morning Watts returned to Sacramento and drafted a campaign plan outline for the committee. The 32-page outline called for an increased budget of $5.8 million. It laid out a scheme for raising the money from affected industries and provided a detailed account of how the money would be spent--$3.1 million for making and broadcasting television commercials.

The last page was the most provocative. It consisted of only a 60-word outline, entitled STRATEGY, and in the Russo-Watts style was skimpy on punctuation:

WE’RE ON THE SIDE OF MORE SAFETY, NOT LESS

Follow the research

Probable messages:

--It’s filled with exceptions!

--It hurts farmers!

--I’m no snitch!

--Look what’s being done!

Stay credible

Use of trustworthy spokespeople

Use of facts and examples

No need to oversell our case

Make opposition appear overstated, desperate, incredible

Work the opinion leaders

Early media, sustained media

Watts had chosen what he had called the low road. Rather than persuade voters with such lofty notions as the risks that must be accepted by modern society, he would pick at Proposition 65, provision by provision, exemption by exemption.

Watts, in an interview the day the document was submitted, explained his reasons for selecting this strategy:

“I’ve been looking at the political topographical map to find the highest ground, the one that would give us the advantage of putting them on the defensive by virtue of the fact that we have gone and taken it. You know, the Pork Chop Hill of the issue.

‘Side of More Safety’

“And I think it’s going to be these exceptions. And I guess, putting it into an umbrella theme, we’re on the side of more safety, not less. In fact, there’s no doubt in my mind that the strategy of being on the side of more safety not less is the high ground. It is the offensive position. And it is going to be our strategy.”

The committee had other ideas.

According to Russo and Watts, this approach did not sit well with the Californians Against the Toxics Initiative, nee Californians for a Balanced Future. Some committee members simply did not want to be on the side of more safety, not less, and anyway they didn’t expect voters would buy it. To them, the whole toxics issue was a crock.

They preferred making what they considered a sensible argument, suggesting that risks must be accepted, or that zero discharge was ridiculous. They urged the political consultants to think hard about promoting the extreme examples of what the proposition might do, to go for what they called “the giggle factor.” Another alternative argument favored by committee members was overkill; the legislative process works just fine and we don’t need this meddlesome initiative mucking things up.

The very next night Mike the dry wall hanger and the rest convened for their focus group at the Opinion Store in the Arden Fair mall. A representative of Kirk West, state Chamber of Commerce president and the steering committee chairman, joined the gallery behind the two-way mirror--apparently intent on scouting out whether this exemptions phenomenon was as clear-cut as Watts cracked it up to be.

Good to Consultant

The participants were good to the political consultant that night. Exemptions dominated their doubts about the proposition.

And Watts rubbed it in at every opportunity. Each time the word exemptions was uttered Watts, smiling, would turn to the Chamber of Commerce representative and squeeze off a sarcastic comment:

“Don’t tell that to Kirk.”

And, “Still don’t think exemptions will work, eh?”

And, “Too bad no one is mentioning those exemptions.”

And, this one just dripping with sarcasm, “It’s obvious the big issue is legislative overkill.”

The self-proclaimed born proselytizer was giving it the old hard sell.