Stuart Spencer, a California political consultant who helped launch the career of Ronald Reagan, has died. He was 97.
Spencer managed Reagan's successful 1966 gubernatorial campaign in California, paving a path for Reagan's eventual rise to the presidency.
In the 1960s, Spencer and his business partner, Bill Roberts, were becoming known for their hard-hitting TV campaigns in California.
The pair ran moderate Republican Nelson Rockefeller's unsuccessful presidential campaign against conservative Barry Goldwater. It was Goldwater who, after being targeted by Spencer's operation in the primary, urged Reagan, “If I ran in California, I’d hire those sons of bitches Spencer-Roberts.”
Spencer had met Reagan in 1964, the year the former movie actor put himself on the political map with "A Time For Choosing," his famous speech extolling limited government in support of Goldwater.
In 1966, Spencer's career was made when Reagan conscripted him to run his first political campaign. “What is politics but a gamble, so we took one big roll of the dice," Spencer would recall.
The gamble paid off. Armed with his natural charisma and a law-and-order message, Reagan soundly defeated California's Democratic governor Pat Brown, whose tenure was rocked by the student protests at Berkeley and the riots in Watts. Reagan served two terms as governor before setting his sights on the presidency.
Spencer worked for Gerald Ford's failed 1976 presidential campaign, which saw Ford clash with Reagan in the Republican primary.
The Reagans invited Spencer back into their circle when Reagan ran successfully for the presidency in 1980, and Spencer would remain a close adviser to Reagan for the rest of his career.
In a tribute, the Reagan Foundation called Spencer the "best political strategist of his era" who was "renowned for his sharp intuition, innate sense of judgement and his all-around 'gut instincts.'
A self-described moderate, Spencer drifted from his party as it moved further right. Spencer accused Reagan's Republican acolytes of whitewashing his record, including his signing of a liberal abortion bill as governor of California and an amnesty for illegal aliens during his presidency.
As Spencer saw it, Reagan was a pragmatist rather than a conservative ideologue.
"A lot of those people running out there don’t really understand what he did. It’s just a matter of attaching themselves to a winner," he said.
Later in life, Spencer made a complete break with his party over its embrace of Donald Trump. In 2020, Spencer cast his first vote for a Democrat in decades, backing Joe Biden, and later supported Kamala Harris in 2024.
