Summary

The previous chapters have shown how grassroots political action, typically understood as the exclusive purview of citizen organizers, has been adapted as a commercial practice deployed by consultants on behalf of corporations, trade associations, the wealthiest and most professionalized advocacy organizations, and electoral campaigns in their Get-Out-The-Vote efforts. Although the practice of political consulting has been around for centuries and professional consulting firms have been around at least since Whitaker and Baxter opened up their firm Campaigns, Inc. in the 1930s, it wasn’t until a variety of forces came together in the 1970s and 1980s that the field of grassroots public affairs consultants gained traction. These forces included the “interest group explosion” in which scores of new advocacy groups were founded, the rise of business political mobilization, and the widening gap between political partisans. This has now become a lucrative industry that is reshaping policymaking and Americans’ civic and political participation.

Businesses, finding themselves on the receiving end of negative public attention through public interest advocacy, social movement pressure, and the new regulatory agencies established in the 1960s and 1970s, began to find that they needed a grassroots force to respond. A more politically partisan public was, in turn, more receptive to messages about the role of government on partisan issues such as regulation, taxation, health, and environmental policy. Once the field of consultants was established, advocacy organizations and labor unions began to find that they, too, could benefit by outsourcing a certain amount of their member mobilization efforts to the grassroots consultants who borrowed their own methods of generating mass political support. Still, only the most large and wealthy associations could afford to do so.