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Leviathan’s Reach? The Impact ofPolitical Consultants on the Outcomes of

the 2012 Republican Presidential Primariesand Caucuses

SEAN A. CAINLoyola University New Orleans

Recent scholarship into American political parties argues that the power to nominatepresidential candidates has not entirely devolved from the party to voters but retains partyinfluence via a network of allied actors including political consultants. Once party elitescoalesce around a preferred candidate, primary voters tend to comply with their will. How-ever, scholarship has not yet shown whether consultants help produce this effect. Consul-tants, even those with close contractual ties to the party organization, do not behave as thisview expects, and they worked for several GOP candidates in 2012, enhancing intrapartycompetition rather than rallying around the front-runner.

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign spent $37.5million1 between January 1, 2011, and June 30, 2012, on the services of professionalpolitical consulting firms to help win the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.Eleven of his GOP opponents also hired consulting firms during that time period, buttheir combined spending to consultants amounted to only $1 million more than that.But he was not the front-runner in political consultant use. That distinction went to for-mer Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who made payments to 31 consulting firmsduring the primary season, compared to Romney’s 20. Yet Gingrich spent a mere $4 mil-lion on the services of his consultants. If Gingrich hoped to win the nomination with thehelp of his consultants, it would be on the cheap. Gingrich contracted with six consultingfirms that had been employed by the Republican National Committee (RNC) in 2008 or2010, the same number as Romney did. If Gingrich, out of elected office for more than a

Sean A. Cain is assistant professor of political science at Loyola University New Orleans. His researchfocuses on American election campaigns, political consulting, campaign finance, and political parties.

1. See “Data” below for description of consultant spending data collection methodology.

Presidential Studies Quarterly 45, no. 1 (March)VC 2015 Center for the Study of the Presidency

132

dozen years before running for president, hoped by doing so to demonstrate the organiza-tional strength of a viable, party-approved candidate, he had, at best, modest success andwon only two states’ primaries.

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum had also been out of office for severalyears, but he spent $9.5 million on the services of consultants, and while only three of hisfirms had recently worked for the party, he paid them 80% of that sum, compared toGingrich, who spent 11% of his budget for outside consultants on those with recentparty contracts. Did Santorum have his consultants to thank as he finished in second placewith 11 popular vote victories? Or was his or any other of the field’s consultants irrelevantto their relative success or failure? Would they have been better or worse off to hire firmswho had worked for the party in order to be their party’s presidential standard bearer? Inshort, does the use of political consultants by presidential candidates increase politicalparty influence over the outcomes of primaries and caucuses to the extent that candidates’consultants are beneficiaries of party largesse?

The nomination of candidates has long been considered vital to understanding theextent of American political party power, and answers to these questions help explainwhether political consultants serve and enhance such power. According to Schattsch-neider (1942), “[t]he nature of the nomination procedure determines the nature of theparty; he who can make nomination is the owner of the party” (quoted in Ranney 1971,151). Yet presidential primaries and caucuses, as means for the party-in-the-electorate tonominate candidates, diminish party power to the extent they encourage candidates toself-select to run, develop personal campaign organizations, and actively campaign onthemes not vetted by the party organization (Aldrich 1995; Crotty and Jacobson 1980;Wattenberg 1991, 1996). The political consultants upon whom candidates rely to pro-vide strategic advice to target and persuade voters have been thought to heightencandidate-centered campaigning by exploiting these incentives to distance the candidatefrom her party (Sabato 1981; Shea 1996).

However, consultants who works for a presidential candidate seeking nominationmay not necessarily resist the will of party leaders and insiders in their selection of andlabor for candidate clients. Most consultants maintain professional relationships with oneparty’s (and rarely the other’s) organization as well as its candidates (Luntz 1988), oftenhaving prior employment as staff of party committees and offices (Kolodny and Logan1998) or as providers of electioneering services as contract workers for party campaigncommittees (Kolodny and Dulio 2003). Consultants, in this regard, are informal actorswithin a mutually beneficial network of party elites (Grossmann 2009; Herrnson 2009;Nyhan and Montgomery 2011). To the extent that presidential candidates rely on con-sultants for their services, and those consultants have professional ties to party commit-tees, the political consultant may be less mercenary than loyal partisan foot soldier.

If these consultants help candidates persuade political elites and voters in order todecide presidential nomination more than other consultants who lack contractual rela-tionships with the party, they demonstrate another means for the American politicalparty to exert power over the achievement of electoral goals as well as the ability of politi-cal consultants to serve as powerbrokers in presidential elections. Party elite politicking,whether to coalesce around a front-runner or to diffuse support across multiple

Cain / LEVIATHAN’S REACH? | 133

candidates, is not necessarily limited to endorsers who are visible to the media but shouldalso include the recruitment of professional campaigners, whose empirical study could helpscholars “tell whether professional support, which is mostly but not entirely technical, ismore or less support than political support” for shaping the course of party nomination con-tests (Cohen et al. 2008, 257). While most empirical work on the impact of political con-sultants on election results has been conducted at the congressional level (Cain 2013; Dulio2004; Medvic 2001; Medvic and Lenart 1997), this work builds upon congressional studiesof consultant use to assess whether consultants can influence electoral outcomes in a settingof such elevated ambition and stakes as a presidential primary campaign.

Political Consultants as Postreform Presidential Campaign Players

The foundations for assessing whether parties influence presidential nominationraces via association with consultants begins, ironically, with the postreform era of presi-dential campaigns in which candidates sought professional expertise outside the partyorganization to campaign directly to diverse primary and caucus electorates. After theDemocratic Party’s McGovern–Fraser reforms and subsequent reforms in the GOP insti-tutionalized primaries and caucuses as the means of convention delegate selection, a suc-cessful presidential campaign required candidates in the 1970s and ’80s to shepherd theresources of an enormous organizational effort (Wattenberg 1991). Polsby likened cam-paigns in this era to independent Broadway productions that candidates financed withthe help of their own personnel, toured across the states according to the primary and cau-cus schedule, and self-promoted with personalized appeals to each electorate without thehelp of state partes (1983, 72). Because they could offer a variety of services from pollingto advertising to meet the new demand, political consultants helped candidates circum-vent parties and became “a new group of political decision-makers [which] has gainedsignificant authority” (Polsby 1983, 73). Consultants became a “relatively small and elitecorps” of professionals who gained experience from working on hundreds of campaigns,and often more than one campaign per election year (Sabato 8-9).

In postreform presidential campaigns reliant upon professional consultants, candi-dates endeavor to shape the perceptions and prognostications of news media elites, whointerpret primary campaign events and outcomes to emphasize intraparty competition.Candidates attempt to cultivate media coverage and expectations, and maximize theirelectoral success across the long nomination calendar in order to keep campaign dona-tions flowing (Damore 1997; Mutz 1995). A journalistic pioneer of horse-race evalua-tions, R. W. Apple, described near the start of the 1976 presidential primary calendarthe media’s tendency to fashion “[a] kind of rough standing among the candidates [that]has suddenly started to emerge in the minds of political professionals around the country”(Arterton 1978, 11). The early nomination contests after the reforms saw the emergenceof candidates who exceeded media expectations and sustained enough momentum toreach some success in winning delegates, if not the nomination, and voters could developtheir candidate preferences around expectations of viability, unless the contest was heav-ily lopsided (Bartels 1985, 1988).

134 | PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY / March 2015

Although political consultants have had an adversarial relationship with the newsmedia, it emphasizes the viability of campaigns that use particularly reputable consultingfirms. Consultants view the media more negatively than the public as a whole for itstendency to critique the fruits of their labor, such as campaign ads via adwatches (Dulio2004, 95-97). Media actors, however, consider the presence of consultants in campaignorganizations, at least at the congressional level, and are more likely to view campaignsthat hire well-reputed consultants as viable and competitive than campaigns that useless-esteemed consultants or none at all (Cain 2011). I expect this phenomenon betweenconsultant presence and media perceptions of campaign viability to occur in presidentialcampaigns because candidates throughout the postreform era have consistently devotedhuman and financial resources to woo reporters, and “[l]ike the rest of the campaign, get-ting good press has become professionalized” (Polsby et al. 2012, 164). Since the 1980s,the news media has paid close attention to the political consulting industry, especially inpresidential election years (Panagopoulos 2006). Candidates hire a well-rounded team ofconsultants very early in the campaign, because they believe it can indicate themselves a“serious candidate” to party insiders and the news media (Johnson 2007, 37). On theother hand, the political press follows decisions to hire consultants in its handicappingcalculus, and it discounts the chances of candidates who experience “organizational prob-lems” (Jackson and Crotty 1996, 60).

Candidates and Consultants within the Expanded Party Network

Even as candidates wage mass media campaigns, the political party organizationhas remained a player in the presidential nomination process because its stamp ofapproval mitigates the uncertainty that surrounds candidates’ prospects. Dark horse can-didates have limited abilities or hopes to overperform against low expectations, and mostpresidential nomination decisions are biased toward the front-runner who can outraise,outpoll, and outshine her opponents during the “invisible” primary period before the firstprimaries and caucuses (Steger 2000). These candidates have some hope for elite supportbecause endorsements by party leaders and insiders correspond to improvements in candi-dates’ public opinion poll standings (Dowdle, Atkins, and Steger 2009). For instance,candidates who lacks front-runner status, such as conservative commentator PatBuchanan in 1996, may exceed expectations in areas where they cultivate the support oflocal party organizations and leaders, but only to the extent that party officials are recep-tive to them (Trish 1999).

Party elite willingness to reciprocate candidate appeals to them depends on who iselite and who is the party. The traditional model of a party-in-government, party-in-the-electorate, and party-as-organization (Key 1964) may have underestimated the role ofactors outside this framework to pursue partisan electoral and programmatic goals. In addi-tion to campaign consultants, these actors include party-allied interest groups and theircampaign organizations (Herrnson 2009; Koger, Masket, and Noel 2010), partisan mediaoutlets (Koger, Masket, and Noel 2009), party activists and convention delegates (Masketet al. 2009), and political action committees (Grossmann and Dominguez 2009). This


diversity of activists vying for their preferred nominee has led the authors of one leadingtext to conclude that “[a]ctivists are now favored by the rules of the game, and officeholdersand party officials are comparatively disfavored” (Polsby et al. 2012, 247). For instance,candidates who can attract the endorsements of party elites and activist groups win greatershares of the vote than those who cannot, especially in Republican primaries (Steger 2007),and in contexts when endorsements come from a broader array of partisan elites than thosepredictably allied with the candidate (Cohen et al. 2008). That not all endorsements orparty activist support are equally consequential for presidential candidate success in presi-dential primaries has implications for the impact of consultants.

Many consulting firms have contractual relationships to their party’s affiliated organiza-tion, while others do not, and this variation creates an avenue for candidates to appeal to actorswithin the broader party network who are especially prominent within the party infrastruc-ture. National party committees have contracted with political consulting firms since the1990s for coordinated expenditure activities (Kolodny and Dulio 2003). Party-coordinated,as well as independent, expenditure campaign activities greatly increased after the passage ofthe 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) (Kolodny and Dwyre 2006). Thischange has presented parties with enhanced opportunities to build working relationshipswith consultants. I refer to consultants with recent contractual ties to a national party com-mittee as party-connected and those without such a relationship to the party as unconnected.The distinction is consequential in U.S. House primaries, in which candidates who hire firmsconnected to congressional party campaign committees have a greater chance of winning theirprimary than candidates who use firms without such ties (Cain 2013). This phenomenon issimilar to a congressional candidate benefiting more from endorsements of interest groupsclose to the party establishment than those outside of party networks (Dominguez 2011).

The rationale for selecting a party-connected firm is utilitarian. The candidate econo-mizes on consultant selection by using the party’s consultant choices as a shortcut to gaug-ing firm quality (Cain 2013). The candidate treats the party work of a consulting firm likean employer relying on the college degree of a job candidate as a signal of employee quality(Spence 1974). In congressional elections, candidates improve their vote share when theyuse firms considered by other consultants to be the most effective firms in the industry(Dulio 2004), and parties likely seek out these firms for their own electioneering needs.While it is not known whether presidential campaign staff scour Federal Election Commt-tee (FEC) records for evidence of prior party employment, national party committees fre-quently offer lists of preferred consultants to their candidates (Herrnson 1988; Luntz1988), and many consulting firms highlight party committees as clients on their web sites.

Every political consultant’s candidate selection calculus is shaped by financial and rep-utational considerations, but party-connected consultants who seek clients in presidentialnomination contests should also take into account the ramifications of their decision forparty unity around a nominee. Most political consulting firms are fly-by-night operationswith low profit margins and stiff competition, and are hesitant to contract with candidateswho cannot afford to pay their fees (Johnson 2007). Consultants try to maximize their win-loss records as well as work for candidates in competitive races (Sabato 1981). Yet these indi-vidual incentives may collide with a party’s collective pressure to avoid factionalism duringa nomination process, if it aligns them with outsider candidates who can alienate them from


other party elites. The party activists’ and leaders’ selection of candidates to support or rejectdefines party-centered campaign politics, and they do not tend to gravitate toward candi-dates “lacking a pre-existing position in the party” (Cohen et al. 2008, 231). If recent partywork signals the effectiveness of a consulting firm, then party-connected consultants shouldbe especially reluctant to damage their reputations working for presidential candidates whostand apart from party elites, unless they believe the candidate can win or wage a closerace—and they think their choice will not harm their standing with the party network.Unconnected consultants, in contrast, have less to lose and should be more likely to perceiveany presidential candidate, so long as he or she is able to pay them and has some prospect ofviability, as a suitable client.

Unlike endorsements, however, consultant work for candidates is not typically pub-licized to the electorate, and the news media should play a role in the dissemination toparty voters of which consultants associate with which candidates. The classic two-stepflow of information posits that as long as there are trusted opinion leaders who monitorthe news media and communicate political information to their peers, citizens gain suffi-cient knowledge to make efficacious political decisions (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee1954; Katz 1957; Popkin 1994; Zaller 1992). Horse-race media coverage can shape vot-ers’ expectations about who will win the nomination, which can in turn affect their pri-mary vote preference, especially in a close race (Bartels 1985). If the political news mediaobserves which consultants presidential candidates use, judges some consultants betterthan others due to their party connections, incorporates this information into horse-raceprognostications, and communicates these expectations to other political elites, not tomention the electorate, then consultant selection itself, beyond the electioneering skillset that consultants bring to campaigns, can become a means of elite persuasion.

However, consultants cannot expect candidates to hire them only as a type of eliteendorsement if their reputations are to resonate with party voters, so I expect a strongerrelationship between the use of party-tied consultants and presidential primary electionresults than that of unconnected consultants. Unless the front-runner is the only candi-date who is able to hire party-connected firms, such a relationship should be apparent atthe margins. The non–front-runner is analogous to a congressional challenger rather thana vulnerable House incumbent, 90% of whom readily attract enough resources to pay foreffective consulting firms, while a much smaller percentage of challengers hire top con-sultants and increase their vote shares (Dulio 2004, 162-64). Because candidates mustmake strategic allocations of resources across the long primary schedule and across manystates to maximize their perceived momentum as well as electoral outcomes (Gurian1986), any positive relationship of consultants to primary election results should be inde-pendent of elite opinion about candidate viability, unless consultant effects on the voteare merely artifacts of their client’s relative viability. While scholars have not yet studiedconsultant use in presidential campaigns in this manner, spending by candidates in presi-dential nomination races corresponds to increased vote share even if they were not front-runners with an advanced lead (Norrander 1993). The consultant effect on primary voteshare should also be independent of candidate spending, lest the impact be an artifact ofthe investment in the campaign operation overall. In short, to the extent that consultantsare a part of the extended party network, whose actors’ endorsements communicate party


preferences to voters independent of indicators of success like fundraising (Cohen et al.2008, 264), presidential candidates’ association with consultants closest to the partyshould appear to have an effect similar to endorsers, beyond spending or elite horse-raceevaluations.

Hypotheses

Because the use of political consultants by presidential candidates running for theirparty’s nomination should have two objectives in a two-step flow of information—to per-suade media elites and, ultimately, primary and caucus voters—I pose two hypothesesthat will be evaluated using separate dependent variables for elite opinion and primaryelection results. In the party-agent horse-race hypothesis, the more a candidate uses party-connected consultants compared to unconnected ones, the higher should be her standingin elite estimations of viability compared to her primary opponents. In the party-agent pri-mary hypothesis, the more a candidate makes use of party-connected consultants comparedto unconnected ones, the higher her share of the vote in primaries and caucuses.

Data

To test these hypotheses, I use the FEC’s candidate and party disbursement records ofpayments to consulting firms in the 2012 Republican presidential nomination races and, todetermine which firms qualify as party agents, I use FEC records of spending by the RNC toconsultants during the 2008 and 2010 election periods. Because the 2012 Democratic nom-ination race featured no realistic challengers to President Barack Obama, I limit this studyto the Republican contest. I classified consulting firms as party agents in 2012, if in 2008 or2010 they had been listed in RNC records as receiving payment for coordinated expendi-tures or generic committee work. All other consultants are considered, for the sake of theanalysis below, unconnected to the RNC. Limiting the classification of party agents to thoseconsultants who had worked for the national party committee no more than four years prioris consistent with the volatility of the political consulting labor market, which features fre-quent firm reorganization, personnel turnover, and firm collapse (Johnson 2007).

I first identified expenditures to political consulting firms in the 2012 Republicanpresidential race with FEC candidate spending records, and I then delineated consultingfirms from payees who do not fit the definition of consultants.2 A political consultant is a

2. I selected all Republican candidates who spent at least $500,000 during the entire 2011-12 elec-tion cycle. While the threshold was arbitrary, it limits the study to 13 candidates, 11 of whom were candi-dates on the ballot in at least one primary or caucus. I then collected all itemized expenditure records by thesecandidates dated from January 1, 2011, to June 30, 2012, as the last state to hold its primary, Utah, did so inlate June. This data set included 81,176 records with spending amounts totaling to $287 million for all 13candidates. To identify consulting firms receiving payment from candidates, I use a series of search terms thatrelate to types of disbursement descriptions typical of political consultant payees. The search terms are as fol-lows: *ad*, *communicat*, *consult*, *contact*, *direct*, *field*, *fundrais*, *internet*, *mail*, *mar-keting*, *media*, *message*, *online*, *phone*, *political*, *poll*, *public*, *research*, *strateg*,*survey*, *televis*, *tv*, *vote*, and *web*.


professional campaigner who works within an organized firm, rather than as an individ-ual entrepreneur and who is outside of the candidate’s inner circle and is hired to provideexpert advice on campaign strategy (Medvic 2003). This definition excludes vendors ofcampaign services, such as printers of direct mail or telephone robocall purveyors, who donot help candidates make strategic decisions to appeal to voters per se (Dulio 2004). Italso excludes solo entrepreneurs who are referred to as “consultants” in the expenditurerecords because they do not belong to a business firm. While a possibility remains thatsuch individuals provide candidates with strategic electioneering advice, they may alsofall into a category of actor distinct from consultants: campaign staff. Paid staff are opera-tionally closer to candidates for elected office than outside consultants, and their usagevaries across candidate types and competitive contexts compared to political consultingfirms (Herrnson 2004). Even if the expenditure description indicated “consultant,” theseindividuals may have instead been either paid staff, employees of vendors, or campaignspokespersons or surrogates.3 To exclude firms who do not fit the definition of a consul-tant and would better qualify as vendors or paid staff, I employed additional selection cri-teria based on professional affiliations.4 The additional criteria also helped distinguishstrategically oriented political consulting firms from entities used as accounting tools topay campaign staff.5 Using expenditure record search terms along with the added criteriaproduced a list of 367 firms who worked with GOP presidential candidates between thefirst week of January, 2011 and the end of June, 2012, which was the seventy-eighthweek of the two-year cycle.

To distinguish firms with party connections from those without them, I searchedthe RNC’s expenditures records for 2008 and 2010, and noted whether any consultantswho appeared in the 2011-12 candidate expenditure records had also been paid by theRNC in the earlier years. The result was three types of spending per candidate: party-connected consultants, unconnected consultants, and all other spending. Table 1 presentsthese sums for each of the 13 observed candidates during the preprimary and primaryperiods, as well as the percentage of total spending composed of expenditures to the two

3. For example, the Herman Cain campaign paid one Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, a.k.a. Joe thePlumber, $10,000 for “field consulting.”

4. The firm is required to satisfy one of four conditions: it is listed in the directory of the AmericanAssociation of Political Consultants, the political consulting trade association; it is included in the PoliticalPages directory of Campaigns & Elections, the industry’s trade journal; it is mentioned in a Campaigns &Elections feature from its November/December 2012 issue entitled “The Influencers 500,” which high-lighted prominent consultants and their firms; or it maintains a working web site that indicates its work pro-viding strategic campaign advice to candidates for elected office. Many firms did not satisfy the first threecriteria, and reference to company web sites was the primary means of differentiating consultants from ven-dors or staff. For example, Michele Bachmann spent $26,871 on “telephone calls” to a firm called 3AM Com-munications and $27,106 on “telephone calls” to a firm titled MDS Communications Corporation. Theformer characterizes itself as a strategic political consulting firm on its web site, while the latter emphasizescommercial telephone call services with such features as “fulfillment.”

5. For example, Mitt Romney paid nearly $41 million to a payee named American Rambler Produc-tions LLC for “polling,” “media production,” “media placement,” “online advertising,” “communicationsconsulting,” and “strategy consulting,” all common descriptions of political consulting activities, but thefirm did not appear in any of the three listings, and its web site https://arp.mediasilo.com/ (accessed Septem-ber 9, 2013) contained only a log-in for employees and no content describing its services. Media reportsdescribed American Rambler Production as a vehicle for paying top Romney staff, and its name is derivedfrom a model of automobile of the company owned by Romney’s father, which implies a closeness to the cam-paign an outside consulting firm would lack (Maremont and Barry 2012).


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types of consulting firms. The candidate who relied most heavily on any consultants wasthe front-runner Romney, though he relied twice as much on unconnected firms as con-nected ones. Of the runners-up, there was wide variance in the degree of consultant spend-ing. Three candidates stand out who relied relatively more than others on firms connectedto the RNC: Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann, Texas Representative RonPaul, and Santorum. Notably, while Representative Paul would seem an unlikely user ofpolitical consulting firms close to the national Republican Party establishment, his mediaspecialist, Strategic Media Services, Inc., was his sole party-connected firm. Nevertheless,he made an $8 million investment in its services. Table 2 shows counts of each type and thepercentage of party-connected consultants used by each candidate. Gingrich was tied withTexas Governor Rick Perry in the number of party firms they hired, but Gingrich toppedall in his reliance on unconnected firms, with Perry not far behind.

The analysis below aggregates candidate spending by each of 78 weeks between thestart of 2011 and the end of June 2012, and it is helpful to present the trends of week-by-week spending overall, as well as by consultant type. Figure 1 shows the weekly aggre-gate sums across all 13 candidates of all spending as well as expenditures to the two kindsof consultants. Note that the fifty-third week corresponds to the first week of 2012 andthe January 3 Iowa Caucuses. The overall spending trend is generally increasing from thestart of the invisible primary until the first few weeks of the early primaries and caucusesbefore a decline that is reversed after the seventieth week. Spending on party-connectedfirms peaks around the sixtieth week before it trails off, while unconnected consultantspending peaks in the seventy-fifth week. As a point of reference, the last contest won bya candidate other than Governor Romney was Louisiana’s primary, which Senator Santo-rum won on March 24, 2012, during the sixty-fourth week of the campaign. Candidates’expenditures to party-connected consulting firms crested while the nomination was stillcontested, while that to unconnected firms peaked only after it was no longer in anydoubt. The uptick at the tail end is predominantly for overall spending and unconnectedconsultant expenditures by Governor Romney and reflects his transition toward the gen-eral election campaign.

TABLE 2Counts of Consulting Firms of Each Type and Percentage Party Connected of All Firms Used

Name Party-connected Firm Count Unconnected Firm Count Party-connected %

Bachmann 6 13 46%Cain 3 10 30%Gingrich 6 25 24%Huntsman 2 11 18%Karger 0 1 0%Mccotter 0 4 0%Paul 1 4 25%Pawlenty 4 16 25%Perry 5 20 25%Roemer 2 5 40%Romney 6 14 43%Santorum 3 17 18%


The pattern of the number of consultant payees across the weeks of the campaign isdifferent than the distribution of campaign expenditures to them. Figure 2 plots that dis-tribution by summing across all candidates on a weekly basis, to display the numbers ofconsultants actively being used by candidates over time. While there is considerable noisein consultant use from week to week, a bimodal distribution is apparent, with one peakin the middle of 2011 and another at the start of 2012, with unconnected consultingfirms more frequently used than connected ones. The two figures show that GOP candi-dates had consultants of both types on the payroll in early to mid-2011, but they paidthem more as the campaign intensified around the beginning of the primary schedule in2012, during the fifty-third week of the cycle. Nevertheless, consultants are a presence inpresidential campaign organizations during the invisible primary. The timing of the firstpeak of consultant payees at the twenty-sixth week of 2011 corresponds to notable eventsof the preprimary season: the second of their televised debates—and the first to feature

FIGURE 1. Weekly Republican Presidential Candidate Spending; January 2011 to June 2012.

FIGURE 2. Weekly Counts of Republican Consultant Payees; January 2011 to June 2012.


Romney—occurred during the twenty-fourth week on June 13, 2011 (Zeleny andRutenberg 2011).

Model

To use this data to assess the hypotheses, I develop two time-series, cross-sectionallinear regression models, in which the time units are weeks and the time-invariant observa-tions are candidates. The first model assesses the relationship between consultant use andelite prognostications of candidate viability, and the second model evaluates that of consul-tant use and candidate vote share in the primaries and caucuses. Two separate models aremore appropriate for testing hypotheses here than a single two-stage model because of thelarger number of candidates considered by elite prognostication than those who formallyentered the race and gained primary ballot or caucus access. The first model controls for thetiming of candidate entry, while both control for when candidates suspend their cam-paigns. The vote share model controls for elite estimates of campaign competition similarlyto congressional election vote models (Abramowitz 1991; Erikson and Palfrey 2000).

In the first model, the dependent variable is a measure of news media perceptions of thecandidates’ horse race. I use “The Friday Line” rankings of the Washington Post’s “The Fix” col-umn, which ranked candidates’ likelihood of winning from one to 10, with one signifyingthe most likely to win the party’s presidential nomination. The information sources and deci-sion calculus for the rankings are as follows: “These rankings come from conversations with avariety of Republican strategists—those aligned with potential candidates and those not—aswell as an analysis of fundraising potential, quality of staff, name identification, organiza-tional ability and natural on-the-stump talent” (Cillizza 2010). Although consulting firmsare not mentioned explicitly, as staff are not identical to consultants, this description nonethe-less suggests that consultant–candidate relationships should be relevant in The Fix’s prognos-tication effort to the extent that it is a component of organizational ability.

The Friday Line was published on 19 Fridays between January 28, 2011, in the fourthweek of the campaign, and April 13, 2012, in the sixty-seventh week of the cycle. Duringthat time, 17 candidates were ranked at least once, and these included potential candidateswho never formally entered the race and did not file FEC reports indicating campaignexpenditures: Haley Barbour, Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin,John Thune, and Donald Trump. Of the candidates who reported expenditures to the FEC,those whom The Fix ranked at least once included Michele Bachman, Herman Cain, NewtGingrich, Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, and RickSantorum. I conduct the analysis on those candidates who were ranked at least once,6 and Icoded the weeks in which they were unranked as 0s and inverted the ranks so that 1s arerecoded as 10s, now the highest value, and vice versa. The model of media perceptions ofthe 2011-12 horse race includes 323 observations for the 17 candidates across 19 weeks.

6. Candidates who reported campaign spending but who were never ranked—such as Fred Karger,Thad McCotter, and Buddy Roemer—are excluded and not ranked as 0s, as it is unknown whether these can-didates went unranked because their campaigns and candidacies were unpromising or so that The Fix couldlimit The Friday Line to a ranking of no more than 10 candidates.


The dependent variable in the second model is complicated by several weeks withmore than one primary or caucus. To maintain the candidate as the time-invariant unit ofanalysis, I average across each candidate’s vote share per week during the 2012 primaryand caucus schedule. Drawing upon the Associated Press’s reports of primary results andcaucuses’ candidate preference votes from contests across all 50 states and the District ofColumbia, the schedule was spread across 17 weeks, beginning with the Iowa caucuses inthe first week of January and ending with Utah’s primary the last week of June, and themedian week was the second to last week of March. Of the 13 candidates who spent atleast $500,000, all but McCotter and Pawlenty, who had exited the campaign by then,appeared on the ballot in at least one primary or caucus.

There are three variations of each model to assess alternative measurements of consul-tant use. In the first version, the weekly number of each candidate’s party-connected andunconnected consulting firm payees serves as the two major explanatory variables to assessthe hypotheses. I include a control for weekly campaign spending in this version of themodel. In the second version, candidates’ weekly spending to each type is included instead,and I control for spending to payees other than political consultants in this version. AsTable 2 showed, there is a wide variation of the percentage of consultant spending to party-connected firms versus the unconnected kind, so I also add a third version that uses this vari-able and controls for weekly spending to any type of consultant. The three measures—con-sultant usage counts, payment amounts, and payment share to party-tied consultants—arenot included in the same version of each model to avoid multicollinearity such that a candi-date cannot make a payment to a consulting firm without it also counting as a payee.

Each model contains control variables particular to the parameters of the relation-ship between the consultant use variables and the respective dependent variable. In thehorse-race model, I control for whether the candidate was undeclared and had not yet for-mally entered the race. This dichotomous variable accounts for the distinction betweencandidates who made no expenditures in a particular week because they were not yet, orever, active participants in the race and those candidates whose campaign spending expe-rienced a lull. The coefficient on this variable is expected to be negative, unless The Fixignores campaign spending and consultant use in favor of exuberance for the potentialcandidacies of politicians on the sidelines. In addition, I include a variable for weeks oncecandidates had suspended their campaigns or announced that they would not officiallyenter. This variable is also expected to be negatively correlated with Friday Line rankings.

In the vote share model, I also include this candidate exit variable as well as accountfor the number of primaries or caucuses in which the candidate participated per weeksuch that the greater ability of a candidate to win ballot access should be positivelyrelated to vote share. This model also includes the Friday Line horse-race rankings as anindependent variable to assess whether consultant use has a positive effect above andbeyond elite expectations.7 Lastly, in both models, I control for the cumulative number

7. The Washington Post published the rankings on Fridays, which does not neatly align with the tim-ing of primaries and caucuses, so it was necessary to weight each ranking in this model by the distance inweeks before the primary or caucus week at hand. To this end, I divided each ranking by the number of weeksit preceded the next contest week such that rankings from the prior week are divided by one and by seven forthe most distant week.


of prior primary or caucus vote wins a candidate had achieved in earlier weeks to accountfor electoral developments that should more clearly shape subsequent media expectationsand primary or caucus results than campaign spending or consultant use alone.

The estimation of each model requires a test and potential correction for a seriallyautocorrelated error term, a likely element in any longitudinal model of phenomena inU.S. presidential election campaigns. Elite and mass opinion of candidates and expecta-tions about their ballot box prospects continually update with new information that crys-tallizes attitudes and preferences over time such that prior beliefs can typically predictfuture beliefs with reasonable accuracy as election day approaches (Erikson and Wlezien2012). Campaign events, such as primaries, are focal points to which candidates adjustand react to over time (Steger 2007). However, while a LaGrange multiplier test revealedthe presence of first-order serial autocorrelation of errors in the regression of the Washing-ton Post candidate rankings, it was not found in the model of primary and caucus voteshare. To account for serially correlated error terms in the first model, such that correlatesof early evaluations impact later ones, I use Prais-Winsten regression for a panel-corrected standard error model that accounts for first-order autocorrelation of errors(Beck and Katz 1995), and for the vote share regression, I use a fixed-effects model (Beck2001).8 Descriptive statistics for all variables in each model are in respective tables in theAppendix.

Results

Table 3 presents the results of the estimation of the regressions of the candidaterankings on the alternative measurements of consultant use—weekly counts of consul-tant payees versus weekly sums or proportions of payments to them, according to partyrelationship—and it reveals support for the party-agent horse-race hypothesis. Regard-less of how weekly consultant use is measured, reliance on party-connected consultingfirms corresponds to a more elevated standing than do unconnected consultants. Eachweekly party-agent consultant payee corresponds to about half a ranking score, or 2.4times that for each unconnected consultant. A candidate who made payments to 1.9party-connected firms in a week is expected to be a full rank ahead of a candidate whohired no consultants, while it would take the hire of 4.6 unconnected firms to have theequivalent rank unit boost. Similarly, when consultant use is measured via paymentamount, the magnitude of the coefficient on connected firm spending is also more thantwice that of unconnected firm spending. However, tests on the equality of the party-connected and unconnected coefficients in model version A and B do not quite justifyrejection of the null hypothesis of no difference in the effects of either consultant type.

The use of the party-connected consulting firm, though, corresponds to a greaterexpected benefit than that of the unconnected kind at key moments in the long

8. The basic form of the Prais-Winsten regression equation is yi;t5xi;tb1�i;t, where �i;t5q�i;t-11mi;t.This model accounts for the autoregressiveness of the error term. The basic form of the fixed effects model isyi;t5xi;tb1fi1�i;t; which accounts for candidate heterogeneity with candidate-specific intercept terms.


presidential primary season. Figure 3 shows the marginal expectations from the productof the coefficient on each type of consultant and the weekly mean of each type’s count.Figure 4 presents the equivalent weekly expected benefit from each type with regard toconsultant spending from the coefficients of these two variables in column B. Averageweekly consultant use and spending predict modest marginal changes that are only a frac-tion of The Fix’s rank increments. The small relative advantage of the presence of party-connected consultants compared to unconnected ones is especially noticeable toward the

TABLE 3Prais-Winsten Regression: Panel Corrected Standard Errors with AR-1: Dependent Variable 5Washington Post (The Fix) GOP Presidential Candidate Rankings, 2011-2012

A B CCoef. Coef. Coef.

Indep. Var. (S. E.) (S. E.) (S. E.)

Campaign Expenditures (in $100k) 0.082‡

(0.038)# of Party-connected Consultant Payees 0.525**

(0.308)# of Unconnected Consultant Payees 0.215**

(0.127)$ to Party-connected Consultants

Payees (in $100k)0.299‡

(0.123)$ to Unconnected Consultants

Payees (in $100k)0.129

(0.145)$ to All Consultants Payees (in $100k) 0.175**

(0.085)$ to Other Payees (in $100k) 0.107‡ 0.110‡

(0.046) (0.045)Party-connected Proportion

of $ to Con. Payees1.194**

(0.618)Undeclared Candidacy 20.701** 21.027‡ 20.835‡

(0.333) (0.290) (0.295)Suspended Candidacy 23.685‡ 23.798‡ 23.761‡

(0.254) (0.258) (0.255)# of Prior Primary/Caucus

Vote Victories0.247** 0.174 0.167

(0.136) (0.135) (0.132)Constant 4.263 4.656 4.442

(0.285) (0.248) (0.249)

N 323 323 323Wald v2 688.28 649.10 744.68R2 0.545 0.534 0.541q 0.695 0.612 0.590

* p < .1; ** p < .05; ‡ p < .01 (one-tailed).


end of 2011, in the weeks leading up to the Iowa caucuses in the fifty-third week of theelection cycle, while the relative marginal benefit from expenditures to party-tied firms onstanding with elite media is strongest in 2012 once the primary season has officially begun.This boost corresponds to the attrition of candidates from the field, but it indicates that atas the primary season progressed, those who remained and were judged contenders by theWashington Post tended to be bigger spenders on party-tied consultant than on other consul-tants. Perhaps equally important as the endurance race was the kickoff of the primary sea-son, and candidates whose campaigns sustained a more active presence of consultants withcontractual ties to the RNC than those without such connections were especially poised forsuccess on the eve of the first caucuses and primaries.

Perceptions of electoral viability were demonstrable predictors of candidates’ rela-tive electoral success during the GOP primary and caucus season. Table 4 presents theestimation of the vote share model, with columns A and B referring to the version of themodel in which consultant use is measured via payee counts per week, while columns C

FIGURE 3. Marginal Expected Benefit to Candidate Rankings from Weekly Mean Party-connected and Unconnected Consulting Firm Payee Counts.

FIGURE 4. Marginal Expected Benefit to Candidate Rankings from Weekly Mean Party-connectedand Unconnected Consulting Firm Payment Amounts.


and D refer to the version using weekly candidate payment sums to consultants as the keyexplanatory variables of interest, and columns E and F refer to the alternative specificationof proportional consultant spending to party-connected firms. Columns A, C, and E

TABLE 4Fixed Effects Regression of Presidential Primary Results: Dependent Variable 5 Weekly Meanof Republican Presidential Candidate Primary and Caucus Vote Share, 2012

A B C D E FCoef. Coef. Coef. Coef. Coef. Coef.

Indep. Var. (S. E.) (S. E.) (S. E.) (S. E.) (S. E.) (S. E.)

Campaign Spending (in $100k) 0.002** 0.002**(0.001) (0.001)

# of Party-connectedConsultant Payees

0.017** 0.020**

(0.008) (0.009)# of Unconnected Consultant Payees 20.007 20.007

(0.005) (0.005)$ to Party-connected Consultants

Payees (in $100k)0.0048** 0.0049**

(0.003) (0.003)$ to Unconnected Consultants

Payees (in $100k)0.0055** 0.0052*

(0.003) (0.003)$ to All Consultants

Payees (in $100k)0.005‡ 0.005‡

(0.002) (0.002)$ to Other Payees (in $100k) 0.001 0.001 0.001 0.001

(0.001) (0.001) (0.001) (0.001)Party-connected Proportion

of $ to Con. Payees0.007 0.015

(0.021) (0.021)# of Primaries/Caucuses with

Name on Ballot0.003 0.002 0.003 0.002 0.003 0.002

(0.003) (0.003) (0.003) (0.003) (0.003) (0.003)# of Prior Primary/Caucus

Vote Victories0.013‡ 0.012‡ 0.013‡ 0.011‡ 0.013‡ 0.011‡

(0.002) (0.001) (0.002) (0.002) (0.002) (0.001)Suspended Candidacy 20.100‡ 20.114‡ 20.091‡ 20.113‡ 20.091‡ 20.111‡

(0.021) (0.019) (0.021) (0.019) (0.021) (0.019)Weighted Washington Post

Rankings0.005* 0.007** 0.007**

(0.003) (0.003) (0.003)Constant 0.100 0.123 0.099 0.131 0.096 0.125

(0.022) (0.018) (0.022) (0.017) (0.022) (0.017)

N 128 128 128 128 128 128R2 overall 0.882 0.871 0.879 0.863 0.880 0.865R2 within groups 0.619 0.610 0.613 0.597 0.613 0.599R2 between groups 0.947 0.926 0.952 0.921 0.952 0.925

* p < .1; ** p < .05; ‡ p < .01 (one-tailed).


include the Washington Post “Fix” rankings as independent variables, and the positive andsignificant (though marginally so in column A) coefficients on these variables reveal thattheir variance helps predict weekly vote share with reasonable accuracy.

The use of party-connected consultants, though, corresponded to higher averageweekly primary and caucus vote shares beyond what would be expected by elite prognos-tications alone. Consistent with the party-agent primary hypothesis, the weekly numberof party-tied consultants was positively related to vote share, while the counts of uncon-nected consultant were not, and their use appears negatively correlated in both the esti-mates in column A, which controls for the candidate rankings, and column B, which doesnot. Unlike the relationship between consultant use and the Washington Post prognostica-tions, the distinction between party-connected and unconnected consultant use is quitestrong. The test on the equality of the coefficients on consultant use in column A pro-duces an F-test statistic value of 5.17, which allows rejection, at conventional levels, ofthe null hypothesis of no difference between the use of the two types of consultants. Theuse of party-connected consultants was associated with GOP candidates winning votes inthe 2012 primaries and caucuses, while that of unconnected firms was not. Figure 5presents the marginal expected impact to weekly vote share from the mean weekly countsof payments to the two types of firms. Candidates running in the early contests made aflurry of payments to both kinds of consultants, so the expected difference in the consul-tant impact on vote share has a higher magnitude during the first few weeks of the sched-ule but then declines as candidates made fewer payments to unconnected firms and moreto party-connected ones until both types drop off after Romney had secured the nomina-tion. The presence of party-connected consultants on a candidate’s team was most conse-quential when candidates were first testing party voters’ support in early 2012.

This conclusion about the divergent effects of the counts of payments to the twotypes of consultants cannot quite be drawn with respect to candidate spending on consul-tants during the primary season. In this case, the coefficient on unconnected consultantspending was marginally greater than that for party-connected firms, but the F statistic

FIGURE 5. Marginal Expected Benefit to Weekly Vote Share from Weekly Counts of Paymentsto Party-connected and Unconnected Consulting Firm.


on the equality of these two coefficients was only 0.03 such that we cannot reject the nullhypothesis of no difference in the effects of spending on the two types of firms. Plottingacross time the weekly marginal expected benefits from party-connected and unconnectedconsultant spending shows that the relative advantage to spending on the former timepreceded that of the latter type, which skyrocketed very late in the nomination campaignschedule. Notably, as Figure 6 shows, the largest gap in which the expected weekly bene-fit for party firms exceeded that for unconnected firms occurs in the sixty-sixth week,which corresponds to the Wisconsin primary on April 3, 2012, in which Romney’s vic-tory secured the nomination against Santorum’s challenge.

The subsequent and significant advantage from spending to unconnected consul-tants occurred only after the nomination campaign was effectively over, and it and thespike in party-agent firm spending during the week of the Wisconsin primary—that is,the sixty-sixth week—can be attributed to the Romney campaign’s disbursements toconsultants. I disaggregate the marginal expected benefit and plot the net predictedadvantage per candidate (i.e., the difference between the product of each’s weekly spend-ing to party-connected firms and the coefficient of 0.0048 from column C of Table 4 andthat for each’s unconnected firm expenditures and respective coefficient, 0.0055) acrosstime in Figure 7. Prior to the sixty-sixth week, Gingrich had spent marginally moremoney on a weekly basis on unconnected consultants, while Santorum, Paul, and Rom-ney typically spent more on the services of party-agent firms than the unconnected kind.Gingrich was the first of the final four candidates to drop out, and no candidate’s consul-tant spending choices point to a decisive benefit to party-connected firms until Wiscon-sin. Prior to that point, spending more money on consultants connected to the partyfavored Paul, Romney, and Santorum, while the opposite strategy favored Gingrich, ifonly briefly. With the exception of Gingrich, the candidates who sustained Republicanintraparty presidential competition did so with investments in the services of consultingfirms with contractual ties to the GOP.

FIGURE 6. Marginal Expected Benefit to Weekly Vote Share from Weekly Mean Expendituresto Party-connected and Unconnected Consulting Firm.


Discussion

The results reveal that consultant effects in presidential campaigns, at least amongRepublicans in 2012, diverge by the contractual relationship of consulting firms to thenational party committee. Like endorsements by party-aligned political elites in primarycampaigns, the party-connected consultant effect on primary and caucus results demon-strate that political actors who are enveloped within the expanded party make decisionsthat appear consequential for the nomination function traditionally performed by partyorganization. The question remains whether it is the party that determines these effectsor whether the party’s consultants retain autonomy to choose which candidates to serve,with implications for party control over the nomination.

Political consultants, even those with ties to the national party committee, did notautomatically line up behind a front-runner in 2012, and in their willingness to workwith other presidential candidates, they helped foster intraparty competition. A diffusionof party-connected consultants to a variety of candidates other than the presumed front-runner, Romney, corresponded to both heightened elite beliefs in the viability of severalcandidates and the ability of two initially unheralded candidates, Paul and Santorum—who were unranked and ranked tenth in the January 2011 Washington Post rankings,respectively—to achieve surprise second and third place finishes. Political consultingfirms that had worked for the RNC did not avoid taking risks in the 2012.

While this study has concentrated on a single party’s nomination fight, some insightsabout the expanded party network can be drawn with a comparison of consultant decisionsas party elites in 2012’s Republican race to those of party elites in past presidential nomina-tion contests of an outparty that featured several challengers against a presumed front-runner. In the 1984 Democratic race, Gary Hart ran an outsider campaign and brieflythreatened the assumed coronation of former Vice President Walter Mondale but struggledto win the support of party insiders, and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson attempted withlittle success to appeal to Democratic insiders (Cohen et al 2008, 198-203). Similarly in

FIGURE 7. Net Expected Benefit to Weekly Vote Share from Weekly Candidate Expendituresto Party-connected and Unconnected Consulting Firms. [Color figure can be viewed in theonline issue, which is available at wileyonlinelibrary.com.]


http://wileyonlinelibrary.com

1996, party leaders and activists rallied around Senator Bob Dole, after a brief bid by fellowinsider Senator Phil Gramm, and discounted the quixotic effort of conservative pundit PatBuchanan (Cohen et al. 2008, 217-20).

Political consultants most analogous to party insiders did not behave in the 2012GOP race as Republican insiders did in these races. Instead, they took their chances onalternatives to the front-runner. Of course, 1984 and 1996 preceded the BCRA and theexpansion of national party activities that rely on consultant services, and party-connected consultants as I have conceptualized them here may not have been nominationplayers then. But in the 2004 Democratic race, in the first post-BCRA year, insiders wav-ered and initially rallied around Vermont Governor Howard Dean, who outraised hisopponents but underperformed in the Iowa caucuses, before turning to Senator JohnKerry (Cohen et al. 2008, 226-30). To the extent that party-connectedness elevates someconsultants within the party network, it may also allow these consultants to enhanceintraparty competition, if not factionalism.

The party organization, at least with regard to the RNC in the 2012 presidentialnomination contest, does not control its consultants, however, and political consultingfirms, to the extent they are part of an expanded party network, maintain autonomy toexert influence over party decision making.9 This was especially the case for unconnectedfirms, who were perhaps more willing to carry risks in their presidential candidate clien-teles than connected firms. Many of them eagerly worked with candidates who ultimatelyunderachieved, such as Bachmann, Gingrich, Pawlenty, and Perry. Yet several firms con-nected to the RNC also worked with these candidates. Clearly, the Republican Party didnot discourage its consultants from working with opponents to the front-runner, eventhough candidates who kept the primary race alive benefitted more from these firms thanthose the party had not recently contracted with.

However, a lack of control over its network of allied actors, especially its contractualagents, may become problematic for the achievement of party goals. If “parties resist candi-dates who are unacceptable to important members of their coalition” (Cohen et al. 2008,339), then the willingness of candidates to hire political consultants, especially those whohad worked for the party organization, as part of a strategy to signal their viability to elites,may direct resources and the spotlight to undesirable candidates. If such a strategy is profit-able to consultants and not harmful to their reputations, then the autonomy given by theparty to its consultants may enable a vain quest for resources and attention by candidateswhom party voters are quick to reject. The party organization hiring decision may benefittheir consultants more than the party itself. Party networks may not serve to coordinatetheir own shared interest in choosing a strong nominee with minimal cost to their brand.

Of course, the party establishment may not mind horse races if its preferred candi-dates succeed at the end, but it may worry about its consultant contracting policies if

9. The National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senate Com-mittee “blacklisted” one of their connected consulting firms, Jamestown Associates, for its work for an out-side group, the Senate Conservatives Fund, which has targeted incumbent Republicans in primaries,including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2014 (Roarty 2014). There is no indication that thisfollows a general practice, rather than the specific instance of the Senate minority leader applying leverage forself-protection.


electoral rules and candidate ambition threaten party cohesion. In 2012, the diffusion ofconsultants across a wide field of Republican candidates did not, ultimately, prevent thefront-runner from winning the nomination, but his shift from party-connected consul-tants to unconnected ones after he had secured the nomination with his victory in Wis-consin suggests that he valued the former type when the party’s elites and electorate wereat stake but the latter type once they were not. Through that week of the primary season,Romney had spent $21.7 million on the services of political consulting firms, 60% ofwhich was paid to party-tied firms. Subsequent to his decisive victory in Wisconsin andthrough the Utah primary at the end of June, his campaign spent $15.9 million on con-sultants, only 28% of which went to party-connected firms. Consultants’ party-connectedness may matter less for general election than primary election presidentialcampaigns.

Nonetheless, the pursuit of party-tied consultants presents a considerable expenseto candidates, and the dynamic may not be identical under the Democratic Party’s nomi-nation rules. Its system of proportional allocation of delegates based on relative voteshare, which encourages candidates to stay in the race to accumulate delegates over thelong schedule (Green and Kingsbury 2011), holds two possibilities. One, the effectsobserved here should be heightened if candidates believe that to win any threshold-exceeding vote share in many races, they need a campaign team with the DNC’s consul-tants. Alternatively, if fewer primary outcomes are decisive, the costs of hiring manyparty-tied firms may not be worth the benefit of narrowly winning a primary and most orall of its delegates, as in a GOP primary.

In 2012, the GOP did not rein in its consultants in a way more reflective of a party-centered than candidate-centered race. Unless the party imposes discipline on its con-tracted consultants, their own financial and reputational incentives to seek presidentialclients risk extending the travails on the long road to the balloons and confetti of theconvention.

Appendix

TABLE A1Candidate/Week Descriptive Statistics of Variables in Table 3 (N 5 323)

Var. Mean Std. Dev. Min. Max.

Washington Post (The Fix) Friday Line Rankings 2.814 3.618 0 10# Party-connected Consultant Payees 0.322 0.749 0 4# Unconnected Consultant Payees 0.638 1.393 0 7Campaign Expenditures (in $100k) 2.562 6.843 20.016 54.057$ to Party-connected Consultants Payees (in $100k) 0.304 1.348 20.010 13.406$ to Unconnected Consultants Payees (in $100k) 0.293 1.049 0 10.907$ to Other Payees (in $100k) 1.965 5.713 20.016 54.057Undeclared Candidacy 0.489 0.501 0 1Suspended Candidacy 0.449 0.498 0 1# Prior Primary/Caucus Vote Victories 0.164 1.190 0 16


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