It's the night before the election, but you can't go to bed yet.
As the clock ticks into the wee hours of the morning, you realize you have
just a few hours left before the polling stations open. As a campaign manager
and political strategist, you have to use each minute to your advantage.
"In the election I just finished, we were still up at 3 a.m. working,"
says Carol Pennington. She is a political strategist and campaign manager
in Ohio. She wasn't alone. "I had 200 volunteers working for me moving
signs around in the pouring rain."
November isn't the most pleasant time to be outdoors in Ohio. "You
have to have great interpersonal skills to do this work because you have to
motivate others," says Pennington. "I pay these people nothing."
The volunteers might be motivated to help out because they believe in a
candidate and a political party. But they need direction. "I have to make
sure I keep them on a schedule, that I keep them happy and keep remembering
to say thank you," she says.
"You can see that if people are giving so much, you have to have the skills
to acknowledge what they're doing for you."
Although running a campaign can be exhausting and stressful, Pennington
loves the work. "If you're an accountant at a bank, you know what your
job is going to be from day to day," she says. In politics, you never know.
"One day you might be talking about the railway and the next working on
issues in schools," she says. "You have to know about a lot of different areas."
She says whatever your background, you can pull on those reserves of knowledge
to help out. "Politics pulls on everything you know," she says. "If you specialize
in a certain area, then you can carve a niche for yourself."
"It's mind-boggling," says Timothy Demkiw Grayson. He is the principal
consultant for a strategies company. "The number of elections in the United
States, with candidates going on their own, lends itself to the need for consultants."
Holly Schoenke is the executive director of the American Association of
Political Consultants in Washington, D.C. She says that more and more consultants
are getting into the business. "There are various reasons for this," she says.
"But one of the biggest reasons is that campaigns are becoming more expensive."
With additional fund-raising, more professionals are hired on to work on
campaigns. "They're needed to raise the money. And then when there is
more money in a campaign, the candidates can afford to hire consultants to
help them."
She says that more professionals are doing the work done in the past by
friends and volunteers. "Someone running for state legislature may have had
their best friend running the campaign. But now that friend has turned into
a professional consultant."
Although the number of political consultants is rising, the job isn't
new. It gained popularity as a career in the mid-20th century with the advent
of modern technology such as TV and radio. At that time, politicians realized
they could reach mass audiences in a short period of time.
Although political consultants largely came about because of new media
technology, they have in fact been working behind the scenes for centuries.
The very first political consultant was none other than Quintis Cicero. In
63 BC, he wrote the Handbook of Electioneering for his brother, who was campaigning
for a consulship in Rome.
"Above all else, political consultants have to be hard workers,"
says Schoenke. "You have to have a willingness to give your all, 24 hours
a day, every day."