Reprinted from Campaigns & Elections, August, 1994
A dwarf endlessly sweeps the sidewalk in front of the Presidential Mansion in
Santo Domingo. Some in the Dominican Republic believe employing a dwarf brings
good luck. The incumbent President has two. In the May election, they came in
handy.
President Joaquin Balaguer, at 87 years old and blind, was the oldest living elected official in Spanish-speaking America, having served 28 years in the highest office. He wanted four more years for his Partido Reformista Social Christiano (PRSC) party. To win he capitalized on an aggressive running mate for Vice-President, a hot-tempered opponent who couldn't hold his campaign on the road, and a team of American consultants he was never to meet. The campaign's success in winning votes by staying ahead of the curve provides insightful lessons for candidates in all countries.
That said, it was indeed a strange election of color-coded baseball caps, campaign slogans printed on machetes, and leaked polls. By election day, the name Bill Hamilton was both derided and hailed by different segments of the electorate. Almost every poll we conducted was leaked (and usually denounced by the opposition) but often our faxed strategy memos were intercepted by our opponents and read on TV before they reached our client. "Our telephone lines must be tapped," an aide said with a shrug, as if it were to be expected.
Perhaps the fulcrum for the President's ultimate victory was a polling program initiated in 1991 that helped organize a political guerilla war for Vice-Presidential candidate Jacinto Peynado. "Perhaps" is the operative word for an unusual election that saw separate campaigns for the same party - one spawned by Peynado and his American consultants and the other conducted by an indigenous group working for the President. There was little interaction. It was much like the standoffish treatment that Mike Dukakis' functionaries afforded Lloyd Bentsen's Texas team in 1988.
It all began three years ago when Hamilton & Staff was hired by Peynado to study the mood of the country and status of the upcoming Presidential race. Peynado, a 53-year-old millionaire with eclectic financial interests and genes that trail back to a former Dominican President, was serving his second term as Senator from the Santo Domingo area. Peynado was close to the President, but had also spoken out independently as a member of Congress. A loyal member of the PRSC, Peynado helped the party keep its eye on future election strategies.
For the next three years, twice a year, polls were conducted and strategic decisions were conducted and strategic decisions were crafted based on the results. Peynado truly knew more about the nation than perhaps any other person in the country. He was equipped to run, to assist, or to patiently wait his turn. And he had to wait until the last moment.
With minutes left before the filing deadline, Balaguer anointed Peynado as his running mate. The papers were signed and Peynado was encouraged to put together a team. Peynado had gambled even before he was selected, by recruiting a team of political professionals that included Rob Scroth, Hamilton, and Ray Strother.
At first, getting selected VP was like being assigned a deck chair on the Titanic. With eight weeks left, the President and his party had fallen to 12 points behind his major opponent, Jose Francisco Peña Gomez of the PRD (see chart below). After having spent three years using the "dispensing power" of the presidency, Balaguer had drawn almost even with Peña Gomez in the late fall of '93. But then things began to fall apart and Peña Gomez, who had maintained his popularity throughout Balaguer's tenure, moved back in front substantially.
Peña Gomez, 51, born of Haitian parents but reared by Dominicans, former mayor of Santo Domingo, and leader of the PRD, had built up strong popularity since his third place showing in the 1990 Presidential race behind Juan Bosch (PLD), the traditional foe of Balaguer. By mid-March when the Americans first huddled with Peynado, media consultant Bob Squier and pollsters Penn & Schoen had taken their candidate Peña Gomez to a commanding lead with both positive and negative TV spots, while the Balaguer Reformistas were still bickering among themselves about who their candidates for the Vice-Presidency and Congressional seats would be.
There seemed to be a difference of opinion about the conduct of media campaigns in the Dominican Republic, so Peynado won approval from the President to conduct a unilateral campaign with his money and American consultants. In late March, Hamilton, Schroth, Dane and Ray Strother divided the calendar to allow a full-time presence on the ground. With the Jaragua Hotel as base, the team began implementing a strategy to capture the dynamic from Peóa Gomez. The first step was to tie him to the disastrous years of 1982-86, when his party had last been in power. That PRD president, Jorge Blanco, is in jail on a corruption conviction and Peóa Gomez had been the number two man in the party.
Our second imperative was to introduce Jacinto Peynado as the younger part of the team who was fully capable of taking over national leadership because of his energy, management skills, and integrity. Our polls had shown that while Balaguer was viewed as honest (his appointees were not), he was seen as too old to really function day to day -- and that's where Peynado came in.
Because next-door Haiti was a bubbling cauldron, we stressed the progress the country had made under Balaguer and emphasized the word "stability." There was an undercurrent of feeling that Peña Gomez was a volatile personality. We worked to demonstrate examples of his instability with television ads built around a piece of taped footage where Peña himself threatened to burn down the country if an attempt was made on his life, a statement he made on TV immediately after Mexico's PRI candidate Luis Colosio was assassinated. Near the end of the campaign we found videotape where he had leaped from the stage to attack a reporter - the sort of luck we needed.
The third objective in our campaign plan was to polarize the election into a choice between the two main parties and reduce the vote for Juan Bosch (PLD) and other minor candidates. Our polls showed a large number of PLD voters had Balaguer as their second choice. (Bosch had split from the PRD in the 70s forming the PLD; while PLD'ers were not fans of Balaguer and the PRSC, they hated Peña Gomez and the PRD.)
In addition to targeting the 1990 PLD voters,this race finally came down to a vote for a leader who demonstrated safety, stability, and modest improvements vs. a leader who was risky, had been associated with a corrupt President, but promised a quick turnaround for lower prices and more jobs. We believe our media had set up this choice as the parameter of the race. The execution of a political message in a Latin country, however, is a little different.
The Tables Turn
Political communication in the Dominican Republic is a carnival of color-coded baseball caps, dancing, giant rallies and music jingles. Every television commercial shows mobs of people reaching desperately toward the candidate of their choice or making the hand signal that represents their allegiance to a particular party. The PRSC, represented by a waving of a single finger. Therefore, crowd shots looked like the bleachers of an Alabama football game when the team is sporting a perfect crowd. Often the only distinction from the commercial of one party to the other is the color of the caps they wear and the flags they wave. Television viewing is a continuum of Latino music and paint box graphics. The fist PRSC commercial put on the air before the Americans became involved was a group of necktie-strangled overweight politicians dancing and lip syncing a jingle.
We employed a local production team to work with our US camera man. Ellias Munoz and Che Castallanos were talented and hard working and ensured we used reliable production people who were loyal to the PRSC. They also made polite excuses for us when we trod on local sensitivities. Only Schroth was fluent in Spanish and often carried our strategic discussions, while Hamilton and the Strothers nodded politely, happy to pick up the one or two Spanish words they knew out of a whole conversation. Most political business was, however, conducted in English.
Our media stripped away the traditional music and flags and concentrated on message. We actually put our candidate on camera delivering a serious message. Jacinto's followers called him JFK because of his no-nonsense approach and head-on delivery. It was hard for Dominicans to imagine a candidate looking into a camera and addressing an audience without bands and jingles.
Massive television buys demanded constant pressure to furnish fresh commercials and Dane Strother became mole-like in a local production studio. A new commercial went up almost every day. And constant changes were necessary to keep pace with information from the polling. Our three years experience in the country had allowed us to shake out the kinks of opinion research across cultures, using in-house interviews, covering remote rural areas, operating under an expanded registration system, and with an electorate that had a high proportion of illiterates. Not only was it accurate but the tracking surveys drove most of the decisions.
But the traditional campaign style of the Dominican Republic was not ignored. Tens of thousands of people would mob Jacinto's Toyota bus while we threw red baseball caps to hysterical people climbing on top of each other to reach the prize. When we left a neighborhood it was a sea of red. As we drove on, motorcycles would drive along side on the shoulder of the road and beat on the windows of the moving bus demanding hats. Juxtaposed to this, the PRSC's organizational consultant, Ildemaro Martinez, a competent and tireless Venezuelan, was helping the party put together a modern GOTV program.
There was an initial dispute over the outcome of this selection, as there was in 1990. But this time more than a million more Dominicans voted than in 1990 because of a new registration system and all of the polls had it "too close to call." (With 7-10 days to go, our polls had the PRSC down 2 points, Gallup had PRSC up 1 point,and Peña Gomez' own pollsters had the PRSC up by 1-2 points.) The count was 42.4% to 41.6%, nearly three million votes cast, a difference of less than one point.
The Reformistas pulled off this incredible razor thin comeback because of their advantage with the more stable, status quo segments of the electorate-- women, older voters, and both ends of the social class structure. These subgroups have traditionally been the slow go, don't risk, status quo groups in Latin American elections. On the other hand, the PRD led with those voters who usually push for change - men, young voters, and the employed middle class.
More specifically, Balaguer's major advantage came from the very large group of lower class, older ama de casas (homemakers). He also added upper middle class homemakers of all ages and older agriculture workers to his winning coalition.
Peña Gomez' base was men, especially the middle aged and younger working class males. Middle class working females gave only a slight edge to Peña Gomez, while their male counterparts gave him a very decided advantage.
Slowly, the gap in the polls had begun to narrow. The popularity of Peynado soared until he was as well-known and as popular as both Peña Gomez and President Balaguer. Crowds swelled. Occasionally, PLD people began hanging around Peynado's house and its boundless dining table. Strother and Schroth learned from their Dominican experience and employed a dwarf to stand in a chair next to them at the Jaragua's dice table. They won. The President won. And the long-range project of Vice President-elect Jacinto Peynado had paid off. His campaign was a classic example of how early planning can put a candidate in position to take advantage of the vagaries of politics-- a strategy that takes discipline, not just luck.
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