Venezuelan politics suit Bay Area activists' talents
Locals help build Chavez's image, provide polling data
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, August 21, 2004
Bringing liberal activists' political skills to the rough-and-tumble world of Venezuelan politics, Bay Area pollsters and political consultants have played a key role in helping President Hugo Chavez win his historic election victory against a powerful opposition movement backed by the Bush administration.
While Bay Area activists have long been involved in Latin American issues, Sunday's referendum on whether Chavez should be recalled is the first time since the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua that they have been on the winning side. This time, the victory is partly theirs.
The fight features a bitter duel between two polling firms closely linked with the Democratic Party. Oakland pollster Evans McDonough, which was under contract to the Venezuelan government, was the only major polling firm operating in Venezuela whose pre-election polls and exit poll predicted a landslide win for Chavez, who won by 59 percent to 41 percent, according to official returns.
Rival pollster Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, a Washington, D.C., firm that was former President Bill Clinton's chief poll-taker and was hired by the Venezuelan opposition, issued an exit poll Sunday that got the results reversed. More than four hours before the voting ended, the firm issued a press release with the headline "Exit Poll Results Show Major Defeat for Chavez." It claimed Chavez had been defeated, 59 percent to 41 percent.
The opposition tried to use Penn Schoen's exit poll to justify its claim that the official election tally must have been falsified, and it claimed that former President Jimmy Carter and officials of the Organization of American States, who verified the results as accurate, were dupes of Chavez.
In the middle of the fray has been Michael Shellenberger, president of Lumina Strategies, an El Cerrito public relations firm that was hired by Chavez in June to help repair his poor public image in the United States. Shellenberger, who previously worked on campaigns to save the Headwaters Forest and against Nike over sweatshop labor said that the Penn Schoen survey was unreliable because the actual polling was carried out by a Venezuelan opposition group, Sumate, that received U.S. government funding and was itself a key organizer of the referendum.
Alex McDonough, a partner in the Oakland polling firm, which works for Democratic clients including Jerry Brown and Don Perata, said his own exit poll found Chavez winning by 55 percent to 45 percent -- a result that Shellenberger says he used on election night to convince correspondents in Caracas that the opposition's use of its poll results to claim victory was false.
"The opposition has seemed more interested in using polling to affect the results themselves, rather than in using the data to help their campaign strategies," McDonough said.
But pollster Doug Schoen defends his work by echoing the opposition's claims. "There's a simple answer for this, and it's fraud," he said. He cited media reports of the opposition's claims that the Venezuelan elections institute doctored the vote-counting software.
Carter, however, says elections monitors have completely disproved the fraud charges. "There is no evidence of fraud, and any allegations of fraud are completely unwarranted," the former president said in Caracas on Tuesday.
Venezuelan election officials agreed to a sample audit of the vote, but the opposition refused to take part in this review. Results were due to be released over the weekend, but BBC news quoted officials as saying preliminary results uncovered no fraud.
Another Bay Area ally of Chavez is Deborah James, who left her career as an activist with San Francisco's Global Exchange in February to become executive director of the Venezuela Information Office, a lobbying and public- relations agency funded wholly by the Venezuelan government. Her eight-person team has badgered liberal members of Congress and the media to press the Bush administration to back off its support for the opposition.
"Our argument is that this is the first Venezuelan government in 50 years to use its oil wealth to benefit all its people, rather than just the elites, so as a result the country is going to grow its middle class and it will be a stabilizing influence on Venezuela and the whole region," she said.
Now, with Chavez firmly ensconced in power and enjoying billions of dollars in new government income because of soaring oil prices, Venezuela may become the next big hope for U.S. liberals looking for social justice abroad.
"I haven't met anybody who has come down here (from the United States) and hasn't been totally overwhelmed and shocked at how this government is incredibly dedicated to improving the lives of poor people. We have teachers come down here and see how 1.2 million people have been taught how to read and write" through the government's adult literacy campaign, James said.
"Anybody who is interested in global justice for poor people in the Western Hemisphere should be paying a lot of attention to Venezuela."
E-mail Robert Collier at rcollier@sfchronicle.com.
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