Nearly two months after the death on Jan. 12 of Stuart K. "Stu" Spencer at age 97, pundits, politicians, and political prognosticators — not to mention his fellow political consultants — are still talking about the man who paved the way for election campaigns to be run as the high-tech, media-centric operations they are today.
His name is also inevitably linked to that of Ronald Reagan, whose campaign for governor of California Spencer ran in 1966 and who was a major strategist in his two winning races for the White House in 1980 and '84.
The almost exclusively volunteer operations — albeit with some part-time paid staffers — that elected state and federal officials for generations began to change in 1934 with California Republicans hiring the firm of Whitaker and Baxter (Clem Whittaker and Leone Baxter, later married) to deploy mass mailings, motion picture spots in theaters, and the newfangled venue known as radio to stop socialist-turned-Democrat Upton Sinclair from being elected governor. They did.
By the 1960s, however, Stuart Krieg (the German word for war) Spencer and partner Bill Roberts, historian Greg Mitchell observed, were part of the second generation of political consultants who "came of age [when] television penetrated every home. These political technologists utilized opinion polling and computers and began selling their candidates in a more systematic fashion."
Attracted by politics, Spencer and Roberts in the late 1950s gave up their respective jobs — Spencer as parks and recreation director for the city of Alhambra, Roberts as a television set salesman — to chip in $500 apiece and launch "Spencer Roberts" in a dingy office above a travel agency.
"Such a business [one of only three full-time political consulting firms in California at the time], they reasoned, would bring in good money, not have to depend on a single patron or politician (an arrangement conducive to a long career) and provide Republicans with the organizational skills lacking from current campaigns," wrote Matthew Dallek, author of "The Right Moment," about Reagan's election as governor of California.
Spencer and Roberts were right. They elected several members of the Los Angeles City Council in 1961; oversaw the reelection of moderate GOP Sen. Tom Kuchel in '62; and in 1963, won two special elections for Republican candidates in U.S. House districts where Democrat incumbents had died.
Both Spencer and Roberts were unabashed centrist Republicans, so it was only natural they would quarterback the campaign of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller against conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona in the crucial 1964 Republican presidential primary. Slamming Goldwater as an extremist and tying him to the right-of-center John Birch Society, they made it a close race. But in the end, Goldwater eked out a 51% to 48% win over Rockefeller and thus secured the nomination.
A year later, almost incredibly, Spencer and Roberts sat down for lunch with one of Goldwater's best surrogate campaigners as he pondered running for governor of California in 1966. They found Ronald Reagan "nice and pleasant," very charismatic, retentive, and with more depth than Goldwater. When the actor decided to run, Spencer-Roberts took on his campaign and, in an obverse of they way they hit at Goldwater as an extremist, took pains to keep groups such as the John Birch Society away from Reagan — who, in turn, famously said of so-called extremists: "They're buying my philosophy, I'm not buying theirs."
First-time candidate Reagan was nominated in a landslide and then won the governorship by about 1 million votes over incumbent Democrat Pat Brown.
As he cordially dissolved his partnership with Roberts, Spencer continued to be a major, behind-the-scenes player in presidential politics. In 1976, he helped incumbent President Gerald Ford beat back a challenge from his friend Reagan because, Reagan adviser Ed Meese recalled, "[His] grudge was against the Reagan administration in California ... in particular, against [Reagan adviser Mike] Deaver, whom Spencer believed had bad-mouthed him with potential clients and damaged his consulting business."
On Spencer's advice, the Ford campaign seized upon Reagan's promise to cut $90 billion from the budget and attacked it in a way that foreshadowed the current assault by liberals on the plans of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The $90 billion speech, in Meese's words, "would sink Reagan politically." The Californian lost the New Hampshire primary to Ford by fewer than 1,000 votes and, although he rebounded in subsequent primaries, lost the nomination at the national convention by a 1,187-1,070 vote.
But in 1980, Ronald and Nancy Reagan had overcome any animosity toward Spencer and he was back in the Reagan camp. In October of that year, Spencer gave the GOP hopeful a boost at a time when the race with Jimmy Carter was close: He suggested Reagan promise to name the first woman to the Supreme Court, which he did. In 1984, Spencer orchestrated President Reagan's reelection announcement and was a major strategist in the campaign that led to his carrying all but one state and Washington, D.C.
At a time when most of his contemporaries were contemplating retirement, Stu Spencer was going strong. Having pushed friend and fellow Westerner Sen. Pete Domenici, R.-N.M., as George H.W. Bush's running mate in 1988, he ended up traveling and advising eventual nominee Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana.
In 1993, I was discussing with Spencer his personal favorite for president in 1996: former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. When I asked who was backing Cheney, he shot back: "Have you talked to Gerry Ford?" and volunteered to arrange an interview with the 38th president. Two days later, I was on the phone with Ford, and he not only voiced support for his onetime chief of staff but unhesitatingly suggested others with whom I could discuss a Cheney candidacy.
The last few election cycles were not good ones for Spencer. He loathed Donald Trump and the populist and nationalist direction in which his party was headed. Spencer voted for a third-party candidate against Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, and voted for Joe Biden in '20 and Kamala Harris in '24.
The political winds of time had clearly passed him by. But the zeitgeist of modern campaigning — now involving digital and social media — was clearly set in motion decades ago by the man from California. Perhaps the best postmortem on Stu Spencer's legacy and what was to come in politics was offered by his friend Ronald Reagan shortly after his election as governor: "I'll never run for office again without the help of professional managers like Spencer and Roberts."
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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