Late last October, while most of the news media were concentrating on the personalities and the bellowing of the candidates, there occurred one of those "hard disk" matchups which, in today's world of hi-tech politics, can determine the outcome of an election.

First, the staff of the Republican State Central Committee in Springfield directed their hired mainframe computer (which is stabled at the Precise Data Co. in Willowbrook, Ill.) to deliver the names and addresses of the roughly 100,000 Illinoisans who voted in the 1982 and 1984 but not the 1986 Republican primaries. The computer then saw to it that special brochures were mailed to these possibly malingering citizens, reminding them of the attractiveness of the party's 1986 nominees — down to and including the state legislative candidates. Meanwhile, the state Democratic party saddled up its own mainframe (on call in the offices of the Conotab Network firm in Houston, Tex.) for a slightly different mission. That computer was programmed to dispatch "mailograms" to some 600,000 Illinois households with a consistent record of voting in Democratic primaries. The messages explained in detail how to cast a vote for Solidarity party gubernatorial candidate Adlai Stevenson III and for the rest of the Democratic ticket — down to and including the state legislative candidates.

There was one potentially meaningful difference in the programming of the two mailings. Each Democratic document listed the names of the party's legislative and congressional candidaties in the recipient's district, whereas the Republican appeal was "generic" at this level on the ballot, without specifying the names of the district candidates. Although it probably didn't in this case, an election can turn on the ingenious ways that computers can be linked to other technologies to reach narrowly defined groups of voters with specially designed messages.

Modern, sophisticated communications technologies were slow in coming to Illinois politics. In many other states candidates began years ago to bring together elaborate computer databases, opinion polling, automated phone banks and laser-printed direct mail. Even now, the targeting ability of the computer system maintained by the Democratic party of Kentucky, for example, is considerably more advanced than anything in Illinois.

The reason that the state lagged in this field is no mystery. It has nothing to do with comparative technical development. The Chicago area was a pioneer in market research, advertising and telecommunications. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is one of the world's computer knowledge centers. The reason, rather, is that strong party organizations lived on in Cook County (for the Democrats) and in some of the larger downstate counties (for the Republicans) much longer than in other states. "Mayor Daley held back the sands of time," remarked David Axelrod, a former Chicago political reporter who is attempting to establish himself as a campaign consultant for midwestern candidates.

So far, Illinois has been in the position of importing its political expertise. The three capitals of the political consulting trade are Los Angeles, where the companies are sustained financially by a profusion of referendum campaigns (in a state that never had political parties in the Illinois sense); New York, the nation's television production center; and Washington, D.C., political nerve center of the western world.

In his technically ambitious and extremely expensive campaign for reelection, Gov. James R. Thompson hired a media adviser, Don Sipple of Bailey, Deardourff, Sipple and Associates in suburban Washington; a polling expert, Robert M. Teeter of Market Opinion Research in Detroit; and a direct mail consultant from California, Robert Gouty.

Overall, Teeter's polls cost about $250,000. He started with focus group interviews to understand the candidate's strengths and weaknesses, then did four statewide polls, each with a sample of 800 interviews, followed by daily "tracking polls" using a "rolling sample" of 150 telephone interviews in each of the last 17 days of the campaign to pick up any last minute swings." "Thompson had so much money [for polls], the rest of us watched him and then did what he did," said Stevenson adviser Axelrod, only half-jokingly. "We knew sure enough the polls had picked out drugs as a potent issue when Thompson immediately announced a state anti-drugs program and cut a drug commercial for television."

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Bringing in outside brain power — particularly from Washington — lends status to an Illinois campaign. Peter D. Hart Research Associates of Washington conducted two polls for Sen. Alan J. Dixon (D-Belleville) in 1985 and two more in 1986. Arthur J. Finkelstein & Associates of Irvington, N.Y., performed polling and various other consulting services for Dixon's opponent, former state Rep. Judy Koehler (R-89, Henry). Stevenson used the services of Information Associates, a new polling firm founded in New Haven by two graduate students at Yale University. Republican state Senate candidates hired a company from Lansing, Mich., the Market Resource Group. And one of the first acts of Democrat Shawn M. Collins of Joliet upon entering the 4th District race for Congress was to retain the polling services of Pat Caddell, whose firm, Cambridge Survey Research Inc., has a nice Harvard glow about it.

One homegrown pollster who is trying to break into the Midwestern market — J. Michael McKeon of Joliet — understands why candidates are drawn to what he calls "the Ivy League types." "You've got to have credibility when you raise money," he points out, "and bringing in people who are recognized by the PACs is one big way to do it." Another factor cited by Greg Baise, Thompson's campaign manager, is "you're always smarter if you're from 15 miles across the border."

In legislative races, the common practice is for interest groups to commission polls in key districts. McKeon, for instance, does a lot of work for the state AFL-CIO. Richard Day, who has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois and now operates a survey research firm in Evanston, is favored by the Illinois Education Association. Professional and business management organizations underwrite similar polling efforts — sometimes combined with highly effective telephone canvassing — for Republican candidates. The comparative paucity of Republican polling operations based in Chicago (explained partly by Thompson's domination of the GOP scene for 10 years) is undoubtedly one of the reasons why Richard Wirthlin is reportedly planning to open a Chicago office of his Decision/Making/Information firm. Originally a California company, DMI burst into prominence as Ronald Reagan's pollster and because of Wirthlin's imaginative development of computer models to simulate the electorate and project probable voter response to events and issues.

The thinking behind what the campaign technicians are trying to do has changed very little since a politician from Springfield whose name was Lincoln offered this advice:

"Organize the whole state so that every Whig can be brought to the polls . . . divide the country into small districts and appoint in each a subcommittee . . . make a perfect list of the voters and ascertain with certainty for whom they will vote . . . and on election day see that every Whig is brought to the polls." Survey sampling is nothing more than finding out what people think and which groups are persuadable. This intelligence is then used to do what's necessary to motivate the people who are for you, persuade the persuadables, and not stir up the others. Richard Day's polls told Democratic candidate Mary Lou Kearns of St. Charles in the 14th Congressional District that voters in certain parts of LaSalle County were worried about nuclear safety. Next step: Blanket those sections with literature emphasizing her determination to do something about the problems of nuclear power. Hart's "benchmark" polls for Dixon, more than a year before the election, revealed in a systematic fashion what the candidate's advisers suspected — that his public identity was blurred, largely because of his back-and-forth ideological positions. Next step: In August, before the campaign is really underway, buy $300,000 of Illinois radio time for commercials to reinforce the voters' sense of who this man is.

Finding out what the voters want to hear is one thing. Reaching them with the right message is another.

Baise's campaign for Thompson was an impressive demonstration of how to target voters and then follow up with repeated phone calls and direct mail.

First, the 8,500 (out of approximately 11,000) Illinois precincts were identified that had given at least 48 percent of their vote to Republican candidates in recent years. Then, to get what Baise describes as "a finer cut," the analysis further isolated the much smaller number of precincts that "drive the Republican vote." especially in a low-turnout election. "We did all our direct mail and phone banking into these precincts,"Baise explains. "We gave up on the others. Knowing where your voters are is absolutely crucial to a Republican candidate in Illinois."

Starting September 15, the hired phone bank operators began calling households containing nearly one million voters in these targeted precincts. Those calls produced a list identifying some 400,000 households in which one or more occupants expressed support for the governor. Callers also inquired about state legislative candidates. If a Thompson voter was undecided about the state Senate, for example, that voter received a letter from Thompson giving reasons why the GOP Senate candidate was worthy of support.

On the Saturday before the election, all 400,000 Thompson households were contacted again by phone and reminded to vote. Just before the voting, another 75,000 follow-up calls were made in suburban Cook County and the collar counties. The entire phone bank operation cost more than $750,000.

That list of Thompson households is a valuable contribution to the Republican voter database in Illinois. Both parties now have on computer tapes the names, addresses and certain other information about virtually every registered voter in the state. The Republican voter file grew out of a voter registration drive orchestrated by Baise for the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1984. House Speaker Mike Madigan (D-30, Chicago) began assembling similar lists for use by Democrats in key House races in 1982.

In 1985 the General Assembly facilitated the process by passing a bill requiring that county clerks provide to the State Board of Elections, on compatible computer disks, voter lists complete with the record of which primary elections individuals voted in. Two clerks — in DeKalb and Morgan counties — refused to supply the primary election voting information. They were advised by their state's attorneys that the information might violate voter privacy. The State Board of Elections

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has not decided what to do about the problem. The usefulness of the voter files for targeting purposes derails, of course, on the data that is loaded into the computer. In Illinois both the Republican and Democratic systems can tell not only which primaries you voted in but also your phone number, the size of your household, the average income level in the census tract where you live, the ethnic origin of your surname (in certain cases) and whether you're a senior citizen (the age information is derived from driver registration records). The Republican system is somewhat more fully "enhanced," the term used by computer experts. One example is the list of hunters and sportsmen incorporated into the databank. By using a coding system, it is possible to store in the compter information about anything on a list somewhere, simply by acquiring the lists and matching them to the names — church affiliation, working farmers, working mothers, union membership, home ownership.

Serious privacy questions are raised by some of the data in other states. In California, for instance, consultants asked their computers to churn out lists of voters who are probably gay -- on the premise that two people of the same sex living by themselves in the same household are likely to be gay if they are in certain age groups.

The Illinois databases acquired their geodemographic classifications frrom companies that pulled this information out of the 1980 census. One such firm typed 260,000 American neighborhoods into 40 different "clusters," based on life-style as well as income. When multimillionaire Sen. Jay Rockefeller ran in West Virginia, his consultants divided the entire state into "message groups" that received different sets of self-mailers-this one for coal miner families, that one for upscale urban folks, etc.

Not all candidates need such targeting. Dixon, for one, draws votes across the spectrum, so his campaign focused on counties where he had run well in the past. Computers can do a job more quickly than an army of volunteers — producing address labels, for instance. Gary LaPaille, chief of Madigan's staff, says that more than seven million pieces of literature were sent out of Springfield in behalf of Democratic House candidates. "Instead of sitting in headquarters stuffing envelopes, this enables volunteers to be out doing door-to-door and shopping center campaigning," he says. Laser printing makes it possible for computers to mass-produce what look like hand-written personal letters to voters. Candidates in Illinois have barely peeked under the flap of this tent. What was probably the most elaborate use of the technique occurred in 1982 for Republican Dan Crane's reelection campaign in the 19th Congressional District. (He won, but was defeated two years later.) In Champaign County, where the Republican leadership was unenthusiastic about Crane, who is from Danville, voters in "persuadable precincts" received seemingly hand-addressed letters in pastel-colored envelopes, not from the candidate but from the candidate's wife with a snapshot of the family enclosed. The letter started off, "Hi, I've wanted to drop you a line for the longest time ..." and ended, "Please write when you have time and tell me what's new." The pitch for the congressman was sandwiched in between — a brilliant, if sneaky, exercise in modern political advertising.

Because as many as 20 percent of the voters change their addresses every year, keeping the Illinois databases current will require diligent (and expensive) attention. LaPaille estimates the cost of updating the Democratic list at between $85,000 and $100,000 before the next election.

In the last campaign, Madigan invited Sen. Vince DeMuzio (D-49, Carlinville), the Democratic state chairman, and Senate President Philip Rock (D-8, Oak Park), for the Democratic senatorial campaign committee, in effect to "buy into" his computer system. For the first time, the state party was able to provide the county parties with precinct "walk sheets" identifying Republican and Democratic primary voters.

Whether the Democrats' database continues in the custody of the troika remains to be seen. "We can't be a state party without a voter file," says DeMuzio. LaPaille describes the arrangement as a partnership with Madigan the managing partner. Should Madigan elect to run off with his voter tapes in the event of factional warfare within the party, like a boy running home with the only baseball bat, his power would be (indeed already is) enhanced enormously. As to the Republicans, Dave Koltun, communications director of the Republican committee, said that their databank would be kept up to date and presumably would be made available to all Republican candidates on a fee basis.

Many of these telecommunications toys are much too expensive for all candidates to have their own. If this means that the state parties become the responsible bodies for maintaining the databases, one of the serendipitous effects could be to help revitalize them. When Daley was leader of the party in Cook County, he would not tolerate any rival Democratic power centers within the state. For many years, there was no state party. And on the other side, most Republican governors have been more concerned with their personal organizations than with the building of a strong, enduring state party.

What seems indisputable is that the age of hard-disk politics has finally arrived in force in Illinois. As David Axelrod puts it, "All these old-line pols have become believers." There will never be another precinct captains' election, in Chicago or anywhere else. But it would be ironic if, because of the underdeveloped political consulting industry in Illinois, the new communications technologies are the inadvertent means of bringing the state parties back to life.

Tom Littlewood. head of journalism in the College of Communications, University of Illinois, was previously Chicago Sun-Times bureau chief in Springfield and Washington, D.C.

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