Who’s placing those South Dakota push-polls? These things are never easy to get to the bottom of. But we’ve done some sleuthing. Several South Dakotans asked who it was that was calling them and the 
survey callers identified themselves as being with Central Marketing of New York City or Central Marketing Incorporated (CMI) of Manhattan in New York City. Well, with some help from some intrepid TPM readers we located CMI, which is located on Irving Place in Manhattan. So we called them up and asked about their polling in South Dakota. The gentleman we spoke to took a message and said we’d hear back from his boss. When we didn’t, we called back. Then we were told that if we wanted to know more about what they were doing in South Dakota we should call a number they proceeded to give us. That number turned out to be the number for Diversified Research, a Republican polling firm located in Irvington, New York.
Did firm A (CMI) subcontract the work to firm B(DR)? Or vice-versa? I suspect B hired A. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
So I called up the number CMI gave me. The woman who answered the phone told me I had called Diversified Research and that the person I needed to talk to about the South Dakota business was “Ronnie” and that I could leave a message for him with her. I did. I didn’t hear back. Late this afternoon I called again. “Ronnie” had left for the day.
Who is Diversified Research? Good question. 
This NRCC press release from 2000 seems to show they were doing polling for the NRCC in that cycle. But what’s the New York angle. It made me think of reclusive but celebrated Republican operative Arthur Finkelstein. Finkelstein is known in political circles for running nastily negative campaigns and particularly for setting up his candidates with various phrases tagging opponents as liberals. (This brief bio aptly calls him “the godfather of dirty tricks.”) Here’s a brief clip from a 1996 article in Time …
For Arthur Finkelstein, this week might have been a vindication: Bob Dole finally started labeling Bill Clinton a “spend-and-tax liberal,” using a crude but often effective strategy known as “Finkel-think” by some Dole advisers, because the secretive Republican strategist has been deploying it on behalf of his clients for 20 years. In 1992 Finkel-think helped New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato squeak past “hopelessly liberal” challenger Robert Abrams; in 1994 it helped a blank-slate state senator George Pataki unseat Mario (“too liberal for too long”) Cuomo. Now Finkel-think has taken hold of Dole.
Last year D’Amato tried to bully Dole into giving Finkelstein total control of the campaign. Dole refused. These days, Finkelstein is exercising a kind of remote control. The Senator’s latest brain trust is dominated by “Arthur’s Boys”–such Finkelstein proteges as admakers Alex Castellanos and Chris Mottola, communications director John Buckley and pollster Tony Fabrizio. And Dole is rushing around the country chanting the Finkelstein mantra. “Liberal! Liberal! Liberal!” he cried in St. Louis, Missouri.
Okay, so enough about that. Point being he’s big on the hopelessly liberal stuff and he’s got some very sharp elbows.
Now interestingly enough, according to this listing, Diversified Research and Arthur J. Finkelstein & Associates are located at the same address in Irvington, New York.
More tomorrow.
