Featur e
organization in Nepal, one of his field staffers was taken hostage by rebel forces. “Part of getting the person released—what
I
the captors wanted—was a copy of the data we had,” Rosner recalls. Rosner, an executive vice president at Green-
berg Quinlain Rosner Research, and his asso- ciates handed over the data and got the staffer released. This is the kind of story that you hear more
and more often in the consulting world. Inter- national work, which started as a venture solely for big-name media consultants and pollsters, has become commonplace—or at least a common opportunity—for campaign operatives across the political spectrum. For all the opportunities, though, there are risks. While consultants can often count on security with their American clients, that’s not always the case abroad. What’s more, opening an international practice—from picking the right clients to making sure the bill is paid—often offers its own adventures. The United States still has more elections
than any other country, not to mention a flex- ible system of financing campaigns (and paying consultants), but it’s clear that the appetite for political consulting abroad has only increased in the past decade. Even in countries with ad- vanced democracies such as Great Britain, po- litical consulting professionals are still a rarity. “Those two factors mean there is a sort of
permanent set of professions just like ours that work full-time on elections,” Rosner says.
SAFETY CONCERNS Republican media consultant Lance Copsey regularly travels to Iraq, where his firm has had a contract with the Iraqi government since 2004. While his work there started off as a joint venture between Iraq and the United States, Copsey—who has also worked in the former U.S.S.R. and Croatia during dangerous times—now directly contracts with the Iraqi government. Copsey began work on the country’s first constitutional election by building a television studio in the Red Zone and cutting 20 com- mercials in support of a constitutional amend- ment. He recalls feeling somewhat scared on his first trip to Baghdad in 2004, just after an American was kidnapped and the video of the hostage circulated. More than five years later,
t’s not often that a robocaller gets kidnapped, but it does happen. While Democratic pollster Jeremy Ros- ner was working with a non-governmental
Copsey now sees his trips as safe enough to con- sider bringing his wife. “It’s a place that you have to take your se-
curity very seriously,” he says. “If you’re in any place outside of the Kurdistan region, you have to take your security pretty seriously. The Kurdistan region is pretty safe, but you never want to be the easiest target.” James Fisfis, a GOP pollster who recently
merged with Wilson Research Strategies, has worked everywhere from Haiti to Angola and Li- beria. While many of his first clients came through the International Republican Institute, Fisfis now works with many different clients around the world on private contracts. His first posting came in 2003, when IRI asked him to serve for a year in Belgrade, Serbia shortly after former Yugosla- vian President Slobodan Milosevic started trial for crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Tribunal. After working for decades in a business where he was electing candidates, Fisfis had the opportunity to affect the way a country picked a new government. “After Milosevic, they were looking for something more stable and as history will show, not long after I was there, the prime minister was assassinated,” he recalls of his first posting. Other consultants cited more dire situations:
One remembers when an Ebola virus broke zout near his site in Africa, while another re- called being threatened by a group of kids while conducting focus group research in Liberia. It’s not always safe to be the person asking ques- tions of local residents, who don’t often get the memo that the consultant’s behavior is con- doned by local government or political parties. Field research can be particularly dangerous because of the person-to-person meetings in places where political questions are not always appreciated. “This is politics: If I go up to someone in a
different country and ask, ‘Who are you voting for in the next election?’ that’s not always well received,” says one pollster who has worked in several dangerous countries. Veterans of international campaigns note that
media consultants often advise in much more diplomatic situations, while several polling pro- fessionals interviewed for this story described traveling to do face-to-face interviews in less safe regions. Communications professionals can do much of their international consulting from the comfort of their own home. Trevor S. Fitz- Gibbon, a media consultant for several liberal interest groups and international clients, is cur- rently working with a group of students seek-
June 2010 | Campaigns & Elections 29
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