Nearly two months after the death (January 17) of 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 theatres, and the new-fangled venue known as radio to stop socialist-turned-Democrat Upton Sinclair from being elected governor.  They did. 

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