Oppo
Holly Pretsky at City and State New York:
Researchers don’t just work for political campaigns. They also investigate opponents in legislative fights and policy campaigns, working on behalf of unions and advocacy groups. Yang said a typical oppo book on a candidate and their opponent can cost between $20,000 and $30,000. Davis was paid $35,000 each by the 2022 congressional campaigns of Alessandra Biaggi and Carlina Rivera, and Scott Stringer’s mayoral campaign paid him more than $80,000 in 2021. Local campaigns prioritize research too. Yusef Salaam’s City Council campaign worked with Davis last year, as did Susan Zhuang’s. Wanecke worked with Sandy Nurse’s campaigns. “It’s just a neutral part of the business, and you would be naive to completely ignore it,” Yang said. The low-hanging fruit are the easiest things to dig up: old news reports on a person, their legislative voting record, campaign fundraising and expenditure records, what they’ve said on social media. Another starting place is what the opponent is claiming about themselves. For example, if they say they’re born and raised in the district, the researcher would start by verifying that. Another common tactic is looking for online content that the opponent has deleted – spending a lot of time on Internet Archive. Deception and hypocrisy are common themes in successful “hits.”
I love oppo,” said political consultant Evan Stavisky, whose firm Parkside Group has worked with state Senate Democrats and Rep. Tom Suozzi. “Candidates have an obligation to voters to present them with the full picture about who the candidates are and what the stakes are in the election.” His mom, Queens state Sen. Toby Ann Stavisky, had a primary challenger in 2016 who had made anti-gay comments in Korean to a church group. “It would have done a disservice to the constituents for them not to understand that,” Evan Stavisky said. And it’s true. When there is a lack of vetting, voters can get burned. Just look at disgraced former Rep. George Santos, the poster child for failed oppo. After the Times finally exposed the extent of his lies post-election, there was quite a bit of discourse and finger-pointing about vetting. Everyone was blamed: the Nassau County Republican machine, the state Democratic Party, Democratic candidate Robert Zimmerman’s campaign, the researchers, the journalists, even the voters themselves for not caring enough! The DCCC did put together an 87-page book on Santos, but it largely focused on Santos’ conservative stances and involvement with Jan. 6 and “The Big Lie.” It also stated that Santos attended Baruch College, which the Times later found was false.
It is common practice for a campaign to bring oppo to a reporter, who then writes about it, only to see the article they wrote cycled back into campaign ads. In 2022, the DCCC was shopping around oppo on how New York Republicans had been inconsistent in their stances on abortion. City & State eventually wrote about the flip-flopping in 2023. Just recently, there has been a spike in traffic on that story. That’s due to a series of social media posts in late March from a sponsored Facebook page called “The American Horizon,” which took our logo, added new photos and rewrote our headline. Who pays for “The American Horizon” posts, according to Facebook’s ad library? The DCCC. A closed loop.
