Beyond Dumpster Diving

These researchers say there’s no reason to hide in the shadows...

Mary Anne Carter is a research director for Republican campaigns of all levels across the country.

Gary Maloney is president of the Jackson-Alvarez Group. He has worked for nine Republican presidential campaigns and in countless other races.

Mike Gehrke has been the research director for the DNC, the DSCC and John Kerry’s presidential campaign.

Tracy Sefl is a senior vice president at Navigators Global. She has worked for The Glover Park Group, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the DNC.

This month we accomplished something nobody thought we could: We got four top opposition researchers together for an on-the-record Shop Talk lunch. This is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Politics: Has the perception of what you all do shifted at all? Does opposition research still have a very negative connotation?

Mary Anne Carter: I think changing times have actually changed perception. I think people now are more likely to think of some geeky little kid sitting behind a computer now than some cloak and dagger 1950s Sam Spade-looking guy going through dumpsters.

Politics: How much of it is cloak and dagger?

Gary Maloney: Well there is the getting caught part. Republicans have an enormous fear of jail. They are less willing to cross the line and do things that are distasteful or risky. It’s why Republicans don’t steal votes as a rule but others do. And that’s because they’re just afraid and they will not cross the line. I firmly believe there is nothing that we do in politics that is worth breaking the law for. And if there is some client who says to you, “I know this crosses the line, but I’m right behind you,” forget it, pal. There’s no way we’re going to put ourselves on the line for a race like this that’s going to last two months or for somebody like you whose ethics are so low.

Politics: Has anybody ever said that to you?

Maloney: They’ve asked for things and I’ve had to just say, “Sorry, not a chance.” Nothing really crazy—but you mentioned the actual dumpster diving, well there’s the question of whether you’re taking away someone else’s property. It’s the old Washington Post test— if you aren’t willing to see it appear on the front page of The Washington Post, then you shouldn’t be willing to do it.

Politics: But there are things that have been done that no one wanted on the front page, but they got there anyway, right?

Maloney: One of the reasons that the four people sitting here have lasted in this business as long as they have is because they haven’t been willing to cross certain lines.

Mike Gehrke: I’ve got to tell you I don’t think I’ve ever been asked to do anything like that.

Tracy Sefl: I can say unequivocally that I’ve never been asked by anybody to cross that line. And I also have made a point to adhere to a professional code of ethics as a sociologist. It’s important for me to be able to point to that and know that there are rules that govern the profession that I’m a part of.

Gehrke: I also think there’s a lot of focus on cloak and dagger and dumpster diving when what comes out of that is just not useful to what we do. Ninety percent of what we’re doing is votes, quotes and anecdotes.

Maloney: Right. Collect the dots, connect the dots.

Carter: I’ve never been asked to do anything that could get me thrown in jail. But every candidate thinks their opponent is having an affair, which I never get. That is one thing that I have had to say to candidates. I tell them, “I’m not going to follow people. Hire a private eye if you want that.”

Maloney: To me the exception to that is when evidence of a private relationship shows up in public records. But 90 percent of the time personal relationships cannot be proved or disproved, and it’s not worth going after because you waste all this time and get everybody’s hopes up. Even if you get alleged proof, it probably can’t be used without terrific blowback. If it’s going to come out it will come out. But it will blow back on you if you have your fingerprints on it, so just stay away.

Gehrke: Anything you do has some potential to come back at you and you become part of the story. There are things that you really cannot do and I wouldn’t advise anyone to do in getting information. Just don’t do it.

Maloney: And even if you were to get the information, there’s a process question: “How did you get the information?”

Gehrke: Right. Don’t be stupid. As much as we all believe in what we do, it’s not worth it to do that type of stuff. There’s a reason those laws are there.

Politics: Do you all run your own firms or work at firms at the moment?

Carter: I’ve run my own firm for the last 11 years now. We do a lot of corporate work nowadays as opposed to the political, but we still do five to 10 races per cycle. When I started my own company in 1998, we took campaign-style research and brought it to corporations and said this is the kind of research you need to do on your competitors. And that’s really how I built the business.

Maloney: I’ve had my own firm under two different names for 23 years and focus mostly on campaigns. Corporate money is better, but I find myself getting bored with it unless it’s really a campaign-style fight.

Sefl: I’m with a bipartisan firm right now doing strategic communications, so the majority of my work isn’t ever exclusively one trade or another. My path was to go from academic research to D.C. to apply those skills in a political setting and to work in a broader world where research informs everything we do.

Gehrke: Until January I spent most of my career working for campaigns and committees. So after two tours with the DNC and after being research director at the DSCC, I woke up one day, twenty years into it, and said, “I guess this is what I do for a living.”

Sefl: Mary Anne, you mentioned your work as a deputy campaign manager—I don’t know that I can think of Democrats with a research background who have branched out to that.

Gehrke: It’s true there are very few. Researchers on our side in the past few years have usually branched out to communications. It’s just a lot more fun and a lot less work. It’s a better job, frankly, unless you really love what we do.

Carter: When they discover that research is more than a Google search, that’s when we lose them. (laughter)

Gehrke: I remember in 1995 going into a meeting with the research guys at the DNC, and they were showing off this fantastic new system they had that would take anything, scan it and OCR it. And they said, “The problem is that we can feed in all these newspaper articles but you have to clean it up a little.” They promised us the technology was just a couple years away. (laughter) And 15 years later, OCR is worthless.

Carter: I’m assuming that all of our approaches are similar, but obviously I’m not sure. I’m interested in how you present research to a client. You do a report and source and footnote everything for them of course. But do you typically give it to them on a disc or are you still old school and do an actual hard copy of everything?

Gehrke: When I hire consultants, I’m happy with a PDF most of the time. I do know consultants who still deliver actual books, and I know campaign managers who will have it no other way.

Sefl: It just feels so wholly impractical, the idea of paper. I’m thinking of actual hardcopy books, for example, where its not full copy text searchable and you actually have to go and read the book and how long that can take versus doing everything electronically.

Maloney: And what about something like Questia, do you both use that?

Gehrke: Yes. I know there are several consultants experimenting with different ways of trying to build it into searchable databases and tagging and wiki things. But at the end of the day, I could just be hitting the tipping point where I’m becoming one of those guys who’s wedded to old ways, but a simple word document or a PDF that indexes easy is about the best way I’ve found to go through things.

Maloney: Old ways? This is coming from the man who practically invented tracking?

Gehrke: (laughter) I didn’t invent tracking. I was actually hauled into research as a tracker and just fell in love with it.

Sefl: When you talk about hard copy versus electronic, that raises some interesting issues of document security too. Not that you can’t drop a CD in Lafayette Park, but there seems to be less likelihood of a document getting out if it’s not always printed and bound.

Carter: I was doing a race a while back running against a sitting congressman who had an entire book of research on my guy. One day he left it on top of his car, and it just so happened that a friend of mine found it and Fedexed it to me. So you do need to be careful if you’re going to use hard copy.

Carter: You both have probably worked with the younger generation. I’m curious as to what you see in the up-and-coming young researchers. Do people still actually go out into the field and look at the microfilm, or have things changed so much it’s really a lost art?

Gehrke: I think that it’s getting to be a lost art. I’m willing to bet that there are campaigns that get books based on nothing but clipped news articles. In fact, I know of a few who complain about it. (laughter)

Carter: Last cycle I was asked to submit a proposal, and I included cost for travel to the district. So the campaign actually called me and asked why I would need to come to the district. So I just said, “I don’t think you guys want me if you’re questioning that.” That floored me.

Gehrke: Coming off a presidential race, you get a little detached from the congressional and Senate races, which is where a lot of the better research goes on. But to a large extent there are researchers coming up that do so much of it online that they may have never been to a courthouse. Somebody you can trust to go into a courthouse and know what they’re looking at is a very valuable thing.

Maloney: It’s a celebration of nerds. I don’t want some guy to be looking at girls all day, I want him to be researching. That’s why I’m paying him. We want people who can stay focused and people who don’t stand out. I’ve found a lot of people who might not fit at all into a regular office environment fit in perfectly for research.

Sefl: That’s such a sweet, backhanded compliment. (laughter)

Politics: Do you have reporters that you go to over and over?

Maloney: I’m afraid you’ll have to ask the Democrats, because they seem to get their stories in a lot better than we do.

Carter: Well, my general belief is that the press wants a good story, and I think that’s the number one rule. But what they consider a good story is biased and it’s biased toward the left. One thing I actually did on a campaign once was take every state reporter and do a matrix. We listed what stories were of interest to them, included whether they were married, whether they had kids. That actually ended up working pretty decently for us. And we found out what their bias was, so to speak.

Maloney: If our bosses want to get the story out, they have to carry the story themselves through earned media or paid media. What they really would like to do, though, is hand it to a reporter and let the reporter run with it. That avenue has become increasingly difficult for Republicans. For example, Ben LaBolt, who was the designated javelin catcher for the Obama campaign, seemed like the only person quoted answering questions about Obama’s record as an Illinois state senator. There was a great deal in that record that was fodder for the campaign. But you managed to hear a great deal more about things that Sarah Palin did back in Alaska than you ever heard about the eight years Mr. Obama spent as state senator. It seemed as if Ben LaBolt was able to answer and deflect practically every story that came their way about that. It led the McCain campaign to actually try to force the issue by putting some of these things in their ads. So that avenue of giving it to reporters was essentially closed off to them.

Sefl: What I would say about your story, Gary, is that that was really played out during the primary. So as someone who is proud to support President Obama, during the primary I was supporting Sen. Clinton so I’m very familiar with the situation you’re talking about. That wasn’t a clear case of partisan media relations as much as it was something else.

Carter: So the Clinton campaign had a hard time with stories also, is that what you’re saying?

Maloney: Oh, no, I agree, the Clinton campaign seemed to have a very hard time sustaining a conversation in the press about Obama’s record in the state Senate.

Gehrke: Let me frame this a slightly different way. It’s also not partisan because I often felt, having to be the Ben LaBolt for John Kerry back in 2004, we were under a lot more pressure and took a lot more daily incoming than Sen. Clinton or Obama did during the primaries in 2008. It started earlier and it was more intense. But you look back to the reporters who were doing the intense vetting of Kerry and where are they today? A lot of them either aren’t writing politics or they’re not doing investigative stuff. Part of what you’re talking about is this whole breakdown of the entire political and investigative news media.

Maloney: Now that’s really insightful. So what you’re saying then is that the quality of investigative journalism, between just those two elections, has measurably dropped?

Gehrke: I felt like it had. Not the quality of the individual reporter, the Grimaldis, the Kranishes, those guys are still out there, working hard.

Politics: Do you think that because of the cutbacks in a lot of newsrooms there are just fewer people out there doing the reporting right now?

Carter: Well, resources are scarcer. So many papers are now focused much more locally on local business and local politics. They still don’t have the money to do actual intense research even in local politics, but where newspapers are today is just a stark contrast from even ’04.

Maloney: Well like you said earlier, Mike, just getting a binder filled with 80 pages of Nexis stories, we would never ever think of doing that. If you were our boss, we would never ever think of doing that. Sorry to say there are several people calling themselves professional researchers who really put Nexis stories between some binders and hand it to a client, which is shameful.

Gehrke: I think in some way it comes back to the point that the 2008 election was significantly different from what it was in 1992 and that is that the news also played a part in this. As you were talking, I was trying to think of some good examples where we just really fed a reporter and I don’t really think like that anymore. It’s much more about telling a story.

Maloney: Doesn’t it come down to the fact that we’re the munitions factory? We’re the ones who create the bullets, but then there has to be somebody who will ultimately fire them.

Sefl: I think that’s true with a color to that, and I don’t know my ammunition metaphors very well, so bear with me. But it’s not just the making of the bullets and passing it off— it’s the aiming of the gun and that’s where I think there has been a sea change, even in my shorter tenure in this work. It’s not just the bullet-making factory in the basement that makes the bullets and then delivers them, it’s the relationship and the close coordination between the bullet-makers and the people who fire the weapons.

Maloney: Well that was the Clinton team’s great leap forward in rapid response. This is where you had the press person who had been given the go ahead to fire away. In other words, if you had a shot, you took it, and they were put right next to the researcher. You basically had the researcher feeding and the press person out there firing, and it was extremely effective. Republican campaigns tend to be hierarchical. Everything has to be run through ten suits before it comes back completely de-fanged and practically useless at that point. Not to mention that you wasted all that time.

Carter: One of the things that the Republicans used to always do—and I think they’ve gone back to it somewhat—is they tend to put research under communications, which is fine for the most part, but in the ’96 campaign I demanded research be its own department. I just didn’t feel that it should be subservient to anyone. I think there’s a mentality and I think it still exists to some degree although it has improved, that research stays in the basement. And the RNC is a perfect example of that because research is in the basement.

Politics: If you have Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, why run everything through us in the media?

Carter: Credibility. People still sit down and watch the news, and the media is still considered an arbiter, so to speak. Even though people may feel you’re biased, no one thinks you’re going to put anything downright false on the air in any way, shape or form.

Politics: I’m assuming that you all will look at your opponents’ Twitter accounts...

Maloney: There was a campaign I was involved in where the daughter of the candidate had a picture on Facebook that showed her holding a six pack of beer. Not drinking it, just holding it. And this kind of crap gets in the press. Would you now just tell all of your clients, clear out your Facebooks, no Twitter, none of this dumb stuff?

Gehrke: That’s what we tell our clients’ kids. (laughter)

Sefl: Well I’m proud to say that I don’t yet know of a research book that includes compendiums of Twitter feeds and Facebook updates.

Carter: Well, not yet.