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Dirty Politics – Part Three

An operative’s tour of opposition research

Allen Raymond knows a thing or two about dirty politics.

At 41, Raymond has spent most of his career working deep inside Republican politics. He was once the head of opposition research for the New Jersey Republican Party, and as he worked his way up the food-chain of electoral politics, he went on to become chief of staff to a co-chairman of the Republican National Committee. He did a stint in presidential elections working for Steve Forbes’s presidential campaign in 2000, and after Forbes lost, Raymond became the executive director of the Republican Leadership Council, a political action committee with several U.S. senators on its board. He also ventured into business for himself, setting up a GOP phone-bank business with seed money from his mentor, uber-lobbyist and now Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, and Barbour’s partner, Ed Rogers.

In 2002, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in New Jersey, James Treffinger, hired Raymond’s phone-bank company, GOP Marketplace. Its assignment: to call voters on Super Bowl Sunday, in the middle of what turned out to be a tight game, attacking one of Treffinger’s primary rivals on abortion. The calls appeared to come from yet another opponent, effectively allowing Treffinger to smear one candidate while making voters mad at another for interrupting them during the game. (Treffinger ended up going to jail on mail fraud and obstruction of justice charges from an unrelated corruption case.) Prosecutors interviewed Raymond about the Super Bowl calls but did not bring any charges.

Raymond’s dirty tricks eventually did land him in jail for three months in 2006, thanks to his role in another case during the 2002 Senate races. Working for the New Hampshire Republican Party, Raymond hired an Idaho telemarketing firm to use repeated calls that immediately disconnected to tie up a Democratic Party get-out-the-vote phone bank on Election Day. In 2006, he served a three-month sentence for conspiring to engage in interstate telephone communication with the intent to harass or annoy.

These are two of the more vivid recent examples of political dirty tricks. While not always illegal, dirty tricks have become a staple of political campaigns.  They don’t cost much, and they can be devastating — if they don’t backfire and lead their practitioners to prison.  They’re also what give opposition research a bad name, as research and dirty tricks often become synonymous, when in fact they are very different animals.

In itself, there’s nothing wrong with conducting opposition research. The process helps voters distinguish among the candidates by highlighting their records and various (and occasionally evolving) stands on the issues. The problem with opposition research isn’t the fact that it’s collected, but when it’s disseminated in dirty ways.

Because voters frown on negative campaigning (even as they respond to it), candidates work hard to distance themselves from the most virulent attacks on their opponents. As such, these dirty wars are usually waged by front groups that give the candidates plausible deniability when they become public. They rely on the standard tools of leaks to the media and traditional TV advertising, and technology has increasingly made the smear-delivery system more diffuse, less transparent, and in many cases, more lethal. 

Since coming out of jail, Raymond has left politics (“I can’t even vote,” he says). But his bird’s-eye view has given him a unique perspective on the way campaigns operate. He has also shared this perspective in a book, How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, published earlier this year, and in recent testimony before a congressional panel.