Media Experts Taking Over : Campaigning Now Subtle Exercise in Demographics

On the afternoon after his victory in New Hampshire, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis sat in the Las Fontanas restaurant in Tampa, Fla., and engaged in hard-core campaigning, Super Tuesday style.

He didn’t shake any hands or kiss any babies, visit any fat-cat fund raisers or meet a single voter.

But in an hour and 40 minutes, Dukakis appeared live via satellite on local news programs on 12 stations across six Super Tuesday states, including KING-TV in Seattle, WPLG-TV in Miami and WBAL-TV in Baltimore.

From now on, say campaign officials, satellite hookups, demographic studies, airport press conferences and shrewd purchases of TV advertising time will replace house-to-house canvassing, stops in roadside cafes and saturation paid advertising as the key tactical elements of the presidential campaign.

The shift to the wholesale campaigning of Super Tuesday means that the press, whose coverage some campaigns feel they were able to counteract before, is likely to have more sway over voters.

And it means that the art of running for President now becomes a subtle science of research and demographics.

Rather than trying to find a message that will appeal to the most voters, candidates and their handlers are isolating their respective “target populations” by congressional districts and aiming the candidate’s appearances and advertising there to “achieve the greatest efficiency per dollar spent,” in the words of Ed Reilly, pollster for Democratic candidate Richard A. Gephardt.

The process reveals the extent to which Super Tuesday, a 20-state event on March 8, has forced campaigns to rely more on market research than political instinct.

It has transformed half the country into a war-room map broken down into small delegate units. It has transformed voters into demographic targets. And it has further translated the language of politics into the sterile vocabulary of social research marketing.

Unique Political Process

“We’ve never faced quite this kind of process before,” Gephardt media consultant Robert Shrum said.

The reason is size. In New Hampshire, Vice President George Bush saved his political career in the final three days by kicking into hyperdrive a crack local organization, telephone banks and a saturation TV ad campaign.

But on Super Tuesday, with 90 million people to reach, no campaign organization can call 70% of the voters, as some did in New Hampshire.

And with 50 to 60 TV markets, no candidate can afford to dominate television with paid advertisements, as Gephardt did in Iowa or Bush did in the final days of New Hampshire.

“From now on, nobody will be able to dominate the thinking process with paid commercials--nobody,” said Democratic candidate Albert Gore Jr.

New Hampshire and Iowa were small enough, and TV time cheap enough, that voters saw spots for Democrats Dukakis and Gephardt and Republicans Bush and Sen. Bob Dole 20 times or more, according to campaign media officials.

Will Target Ads

Now, Dukakis’ campaign, for instance, will run its ads in certain markets so that the average voter will see it three to five times, and in many places the campaign won’t run any ads, Dukakis media buyer Leslie Dach said.

Even if campaigns had unlimited funds, federal regulations effectively bar the kind of media saturation seen in Iowa and New Hampshire. Most campaigns spent the maximum amount allowed in Iowa and New Hampshire under federal matching fund rules, which are based on each state’s population. But to do so for Super Tuesday would cost roughly $25 million, which is close to the total allowed any campaign for all primaries combined.

So the successful candidates on Super Tuesday will be those who can focus most efficiently on their target population. Once these potential supporters are identified, the candidates will tighten their rhetoric to please them and use satellite uplinks, selective advertising and airport press conferences to reach them.

The campaigns identified their target populations in Iowa and New Hampshire by finding out what categories of voters--based on income, consumer preferences, geography, education and other criteria--were receptive to the candidate’s carefully constructed message.

Now, using census data and polling, and by calculating what TV time costs in each potential market, they are finding out where those voters live in Super Tuesday states and determining what it would cost to reach them through television advertising.

Indeed, most campaigns, such as Dukakis’, are not trying to win the most votes, but have “focused on a delegate strategy,” in the words of Dukakis’ campaign manager Susan Estrich. Instead of trying to persuade the most Americans their man is best, the campaigns are trying simply to win as many delegates as possible to the national conventions.

In most states, the delegates are apportioned according to the percentage of the popular vote in each congressional district.

The campaigns will therefore concentrate on the congressional districts in which their target population exists in large enough concentrations to win them the most delegates.

“If you move your media buy up by a couple rating points in one congressional district, you might get one more delegate, while you would have to buy 15 more rating points in another district to do the same thing,” explained Gephardt pollster Reilly.

Cost-efficiency dominates the campaign strategies for good reason. While Dukakis has enjoyed wide attention because he is the best-financed Democrat, miscalculations about where to spend over the next two weeks could wipe out that advantage.

Even Bush, the best-financed candidate in either party, now must go carefully or risk running out of money by the late primaries.

Indeed, those who listened to political professionals these past few days might have thought they were attending a budget planning meeting at a Fortune 500 company.

“The question of resource allocation is vital and crucial,” said Gore strategist George Shipley.

“This is the place where somebody is going to outthink somebody else,” said Robert Squier, a Democratic media consultant not affiliated with any presidential campaign.

Because saturation advertising is not feasible in the Super Tuesday states, it also means that the press, the most difficult element for campaigns to control, is expected to become more important than it was in Iowa or New Hampshire.

Looking for ‘Free Media’

Campaign strategists regard the press as basically another means of getting a candidate’s message out; they refer to newspapers and both radio and TV news as “free media,” as distinguished from “paid media,” or advertising.

In the Super Tuesday states, said Gephardt media consultant Shrum, “you don’t have the capacity to go over the top of free media,” as Gephardt officials believe they did in New Hampshire.

Campaigns are changing their schedules dramatically in recognition of the press’ greater role. The house parties and drop-bys at the local grain and feed depots that were such a staple of Iowa and New Hampshire campaigning are largely over.

Now, a typical campaign day consists of flights to three different states and press conferences on the tarmac at airports, intended to offer the illusion on local TV that the candidate was in town.

The continuing goal is to get the candidate on the local TV news. In addition to the airport appearances are the satellite hookups, such as the one Dukakis took part in last Wednesday. These allow candidates to have live interviews on local newscasts in a variety of cities around the country.

Dukakis and Republican candidate Pat Robertson each plan to do satellite hookups at least once or twice a week. Such hookups, which the campaigns offer to pay for themselves, are also cheap, costing anywhere from $600 to a few thousand dollars an hour, depending on the time of day and the city from which they originate.

In live interviews, the candidate also can control his message more than in a report from a correspondent, or a taped interview that is edited.

That is particularly true on local stations, where local anchors, less experienced than most network correspondents, generally ask softer questions. Often candidates do little more than repeat the scripted message contained in their paid commercials.

“On local TV you get . . . two minutes on the top (of the newscast) about what you’re doing, then they give you five minutes live,” said Bush press secretary Peter Teeley. “You take seven of the first 15 minutes of a show,” far more than one could get on network news.

Such techniques “really helped us” in New Hampshire, Teeley said, where Bush was otherwise roughed up in the reports from network correspondents.

Bush’s campaign similarly used drive-time radio. “We were on every morning with about eight to 10 radio stations,” Teeley said. “We started at 6:15 in the morning, just calling up stations--’Hi, this is Vice President George Bush’--five minutes, bang, hit the next one.”

The expanse of territory being contested on Super Tuesday, however, may inhibit candidates from such maneuvers now, except for targeted markets, and may make network coverage, skeptical or otherwise, more important.

“If you get a big story on the (networks) that is positive, you’re going into 20 states as opposed to one media market,” Teeley said.

Organization Counts Less

Some campaigns also contend that organization, a strength in the past for Robertson, Bush, Gephardt and Dukakis, also will play a different role now.

In New Hampshire, the Gephardt campaign called nearly 70% of the registered Democratic voter households at least twice, according to Gephardt New Hampshire campaign director Mark Longabaugh.

Now, says Roger Stone, media consultant for Republican candidate Jack Kemp, “organization is mostly nullified.” If so, that would help Kemp, whose organization is not considered as strong in the South as Bush’s or Robertson’s.

Others say organization will play a different role, becoming a way of attracting publicity. But all agree the game has changed. When it was designed, March 8 was initially called by some Southern Tuesday. Now the nickname is the March Monster.