Politics

The life and times of opposition researchers

Alexis Levinson Political Reporter
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The past few weeks of the Republican primary race have seen a constant barrage of damaging political information about the candidates on the airwaves. Meet the guys who dredge up that kind of information.

Alan Huffman and Michael Rejebian are opposition researchers, the guys that campaigns hire to look into their opponents’ backgrounds and find things that could be used against them. In their new book, We’re with Nobody, Rejebian and Huffman chronicle their adventures as opposition researchers, digging into the back-stories of candidates in races all over the country.

“We wrote this book because we always thought it was an interesting story and we had some good stories to tell. We both think it’s a side of politics that most people don’t know about,” said Rejebian in a phone interview with The Daily Caller. “We’re in a town somewhere, no one ever knows we’re there, and we do our job.”

The title of the book comes from the question always asked of them when they arrive at the local courthouse to ask for records of political candidates — “Who are you with?” — a question they have adeptly learned to dodge over the years. It also comes from the fact that even though they’re working for a campaign — almost always a Democratic campaign, in their case — they remain very objective and independent.

That’s especially important since opposition research doesn’t just get done on the other guy; they also have to dig into the candidate who’s paying them.

“We basically see everybody naked,” Huffman said. “And it doesn’t always endear us to the campaigns that we work on because we’re going to have to try to find their weaknesses, just as we do their opponent’s.”

Huffman described the job as “creating a comprehensive profile.”

“You’re definitely looking for the negatives — it’s like watching the opposing football team scrimmage, so you can find their weaknesses are, and you do the same for yourself so you know what they’re getting and how they might attack you,” he said. “But the truth is, if a candidate has a lot of strong positives, even if it’s the opponent, we’re going to mention that in the report too because it’s useful knowledge — you need to know what are his strengths.”

The book is not a tell-all — no names are mentioned, and in fact, the two claim they don’t even remember them. They’ll immerse themselves in a certain candidate’s tax returns and legislative record for a week or two, and then they pick up and move on to the next job.

“Getting to the bottom of things is our job… and [then] we leave town, we move on to the next race, and sometimes it may be awhile before we even hear what happened,” Huffman explained.

The book describes hours spent in a courthouse, paging through transcripts of town meetings, looking for that one little piece of information that could be useful.

They struggle to describe the juiciest piece of information that they’ve ever come across.

There was the guy who cut the amount he paid in child support at the same time as he loaned money to his political campaign. Then there was the politician who beat up his girlfriend at an airport.

Satisfying as this information may be to find, there’s no telling if it will have an effect on the race. The first turned out not to matter; the guy got elected anyway. The second one ended the potential candidate’s campaign before it even started.

“In most cases there’s no silver bullet that kills somebody,” Huffman explained. “It’s a lot of little things; it’s the little shrapnel that adds up to really take somebody.”

In one recent race they worked on, there was a lot of shrapnel.

“This guy had just done everything wrong,” said Huffman. There was so much information to use that “it was like, a birthday party,” Rejebian recalled.

“It was the gamut,” Rejebian added. “He didn’t pay his taxes, they sold the lien on his house at auction. When this guy was a judge, he sentenced a child molester to serve a year in prison. The guy, because he didn’t serve what the maximum sentence would have been, he gets out and he kills a Catholic priest.”

“This was our Willie Horton — you just don’t get those kind of things every day,” Rejebian went on. “When he was in state office, he took a recreational vehicle intended for a disaster response to a NASCAR race with some of his buddies and wrecked it on the way back.”

“It was almost this fictional character for us,” Huffman chimed in, laughing. “If we could’ve sat down and drawn up a candidate that could keep us busy and happy for an entire season, this guy would’ve been it.”

Huffman and Rejebian are sticklers for facts. Anything that they submit in their final report must have documentation to back it up: they refuse to take anything on hearsay.

“Unless it leads to documentation it’s ultimately useless to us,” Huffman said.

They refuse to rely on the Internet, selecting instead to check out records in person, something they describe as a necessary precaution. Often, they find that certain records have never been digitized. Other times, the online documents are simply wrong.

“Plus,” Huffman said, “it does also give you a feel for what matters in that place,” a crucial part of their work, since what resonates with voters can vary depending on the culture of a place.

The Internet has changed their business dramatically, though, by providing new avenues for broadcasting information.

“There’s less accountability in many ways for what is being put forth as factual information about the candidates, and so something becomes true merely by repetition,” Huffman said. In part, he said, this is why they decided to write the book.

“People don’t know. They get a link forwarded on Facebook, and they forward it to someone else and all of a sudden the thing goes viral, and no one ever questions whether or not there is factual basis; whether there is documentation; what is the original source of this information,” Huffman said. “And because we’re such sticklers for that we kind of felt that we had a bit of a responsibility to sort of be instructive.”

The two have watched this presidential primary in awe, looking at the sheer amount of money spent on negative ads, and by extension, the amount spent on opposition research.

“You do read all these stories about super PACs and how much money they’re pumping into advertisements, but people need to remember that those ads don’t get on TV without the opposition research that happened in the beginning,” Rejebian pointed out. “So those PACs are paying for opposition research as a starting point… You’ve got opposition research, the information we come up with goes to the pollster, the pollster designs his test questions based on that, sees what tests the best, and what tests the best ends up on TV.”

But for Rejebian and Huffman, what they do is not just about mudslinging and dirty politics: it’s about giving the voters the information they ought to have when deciding whom to vote for.

“It’s a rewarding job,” said Rejebian. “People call it digging up dirt, I guess that’s a term that you can use for it, but it’s digging up the truth. We don’t make this stuff up. We’re just out there trying to put the facts together and put together the story of a candidates life for our campaign and then they take it from there.”

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Alexis Levinson