Capital of Campaign Mailers

You have the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, Fisherman’s Wharf and, of course, those little cable cars climbing halfway to the stars.

But there is another, lesser-known distinction that San Francisco could claim (if it cared to) -- Democratic junk mail capital of the world.

Crowded in and around this jewel box of a city are roughly half a dozen political consulting firms that account for many, if not most, of the glossy brochures, postmarked entreaties and 11th-hour hit pieces that flood mailboxes in campaigns across the country.

If your home is Kansas or New York City, you may have seen the work of Duane Baughman, who scratches out ideas at his favorite coffeehouse in San Francisco’s affluent Pacific Heights neighborhood. If you live in Alaska or Florida -- or any of more than a dozen states between -- you may have gotten one of 30 million mail pieces sent during the 2004 campaign by Paul Ambrosino and his partners, whose firm sits on the second floor of a Financial District high-rise.

California, for good or ill, is the state that birthed the modern political consulting firm. Improbably, given its vast television market, California is also the place where targeted voter mail was perfected, thanks to computer technology and a rush of creativity that began in the 1970s.

Much of the innovation took place in San Francisco, and many of the top Democratic practitioners never left its liberal confines, even as political mail exploded into a nationwide business.

From work on a handful of California races, the industry today accounts for tens of millions of dollars every two-year election cycle; the trade magazine Campaigns & Elections listed more than 100 direct-mail firms in its most recent consultant scorecard. Of those, 15 or so handle the bulk of the work nationwide; among Democrats, many of the biggest players have San Francisco as their return address.

“It may be a dubious distinction,” campaign consultant Eric Jaye said of the city’s prominence as a political post. “But it’s one that we hold.”

To many, campaign mail is a nuisance on a par with panhandlers, unwanted e-mail and telephone solicitors. What may be junk to you, however, is electoral alchemy to its practitioners, a blending of psychology, political science and pop art.

Forget for a moment the candidate or issues. San Francisco’s Rich Schlackman can hold forth at length on the importance of layout, paper stock, color reproduction and typefaces. “There’s a reason why Neiman Marcus doesn’t publish their catalog on newsprint,” said Schlackman, one of the nation’s leading mail consultants. “The word ‘I’ can mean different things, depending on if you use a thin I or a strong I typeface.”

Long before television became the main form of political communication, candidates used the mail to reach potential supporters.

Thomas Jefferson penned letters in his campaigns, and Abraham Lincoln targeted opinion leaders with his missives, according to Robert Blaemire, an amateur historian and campaign consultant in Virginia.

In 1925, political scientist Harold Gosnell conducted a groundbreaking study that showed the power of direct mail in boosting turnout in a Chicago mayoral race. Less than a decade later, attack mailers were used to discredit muckraker Upton Sinclair in his 1934 bid for California governor.

For most of the nation’s history, efforts to woo selected voters were primitive at best. A piece of mail -- a form letter or perhaps a broadsheet designed to look like a newspaper -- might have been delivered to a certain precinct based on its voting history. But even in a 75% Republican precinct, one in four letters were wasted on Democratic households.

Also, voting records were often haphazard, so creating any sort of reliable mailing list was enormously time-consuming and, thus, not terribly cost effective. Sorting voters by occupation, marital status or ethnic surname in places like Los Angeles or San Francisco -- something that can be done today in seconds -- would take a team of campaign workers days to complete 50 years ago.

And then computers changed everything.

The use of refrigerator-size mainframes in the 1960s allowed for creation of the first quality voter lists, which enabled candidates and their strategists to target mailings based on such attributes as voting frequency, ethnicity, gender, household size and birthplace.

California was a natural proving ground, as the home of Silicon Valley. It also helped that the state kept some of the best voter records in the country and that a transient population and weak party system prevented the growth of Eastern- and Midwestern-style political machines, which stymied innovation there and kept candidates beholden to party bosses.

But the biggest incentive to improve the sophistication and reach of political mail was that proverbial mother of invention, in this case the need to work around the huge cost of television advertising.

A TV presence is a must for any serious statewide candidate in California. But with the steepest ad rates in the country, the costs add up quickly -- and not very efficiently.

In the days before cable, an Assembly candidate in, say, Garden Grove would have to pay for a TV spot broadcast from Santa Barbara to Palm Springs, provided he or she could afford time on one of the Los Angeles stations.

“When you’re doing TV, you’re shouting from the top of a mountain through a megaphone to the widest audience,” said Allan Hoffenblum, one of the first Republican strategists to use targeted mail. By contrast, “when you sent out a mailer, you could literally have dozens upon dozens of different messages, depending on the voters the message was going to.”

A breakthrough came in 1968, when a young Democrat named Henry Waxman ousted veteran state Assemblyman Lester A. McMillan, thanks to a strategy designed by Michael Berman.

Working with Howard Elinson, a UCLA sociologist, Berman divided the West Los Angeles district into three voter subsets and sent distinct mailings to each group based on ethnicity, race and age.

In 1972, Berman helped elect his older brother, Howard, to the Assembly with a campaign that sent mail tailored even more closely to individual households. The younger Berman went on to become one of the state’s leading political demographers and campaign consultants.

In San Francisco, meantime, a more aesthetic-minded school of campaign mail was being developed by consultant Clint Reilly and a handful of innovators who believed that catching a voter’s eye and making the sale required more than repetition and slapdash production.

“There was almost an ethic that if it looked good, it was too slick,” Reilly said. “It seemed to me [political mail] ought to be just as good as consumer advertising.”

Drawing on San Francisco’s wealth of artistic talent, Reilly and his firm developed richly photographed, thoughtfully designed mailers on such topics as education and the environment that are still being duplicated across the country 30 years hence. “It was a tremendous breakthrough in the art of political consulting,” said Jaye, who apprenticed with Reilly in the early 1980s.

Today’s mail campaigns are as carefully wrought and lavishly produced as a Valentine epistle.

Ambrosino’s firm designed 14 mailers for U.S. Sen. Patty Murray’s successful 2004 campaign in Washington state, nine positive and five attacking her Republican opponent, Rep. George Nethercutt.

Women around Seattle received pieces touting Democrat Murray’s work on high-tech issues and portraying Nethercutt as an extremist on stem-cell research, abortion and gun control. In smaller communities, voters were targeted with mailers touting the incumbent’s work on local projects, including efforts to save a threatened veterans’ hospital in Walla Walla.

Tailoring that kind of message from San Francisco -- or from Washington, D.C., where most top campaign consultants work -- is easy, strategists say. Usually a mail expert works with local consultants and draws from a bounty of information from polling and focus groups. Add a local landmark -- Seattle’s Space Needle or South Dakota’s Mt. Rushmore -- and the postmark becomes irrelevant.

“Any great communication speaks to its audience in a way that creates a response,” said Jaye. “When it works, it captures a moment, captures a dream, captures a vision and reflects it back to the voter.”

But Jaye and others see a numbing similarity to much of today’s campaign mail, saying it has lost its edge after years of formulaic pieces and unceasing negativity.

The next revolution, they suggest, is coming on the Internet, which offers the promise of dazzling graphics and infinitely targeted messages, all delivered with just a few mouse clicks.

Already, e-mail has transformed the industry, shrinking deadlines and allowing consultants like Baughman to stay in San Francisco and play a key role in campaigns thousands of miles away.

The former political speechwriter turned to mail after a brief, unsatisfying stint in commercial advertising. He worked four years for Schlackman, then started his own firm in 1995. Since then, Baughman has helped elect New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and governors in Kansas, Georgia and West Virginia, among others.

Business is good, Baughman said from his top-floor office in the city’s pricey Cow Hollow neighborhood, a space filled with photographs of John F. Kennedy and vintage Chinese propaganda.

But the San Francisco lifestyle, the 41-year-old Baughman adds, is even better.

Heading to work one afternoon, his sports car crested a hill overlooking San Francisco Bay, shimmering silver beneath a partly cloudy sky. It made for a perfect postcard image -- the kind typically associated with dispatches from this scenic city.