After 15 years of learning his craft working for some of the biggest names in the political consulting business – Peter Hart, Geoff Garin, Fred Yang, Rich Schlackman, Stan Greenberg – André Pineda opened his own firm with the goal of offering high-quality, cost-effective and research-based communications advice to carefully chosen progressive clients.

Pineda’s move has been good for his clients. In the 2006 cycle, 8 of his clients won against only 2 losses. His incumbent clients were undefeated while his challengers went 2 and 1. One of his independent expenditure clients took out an incumbent Republican congressman. Meanwhile, the work he has done for his advocacy clients has opened the door with legislators and other policymakers while earning countless interviews with both the print and electronic media, including the New York Times, Newsweek and NBC News.

The blog on Pineda’s home page has proven an effective way to disseminate information that is beneficial to his clients. In one example, the press was portraying Pineda’s candidate as the inferior challenger to the incumbent. A Pineda Consulting poll revealed that Pineda’s client was 20 points ahead of the other challenger in the race. Once Pineda released the results of his poll on his blog, other blogs in the state took the numbers and ran. These impartial blogs generated so much buzz that the largest daily newspaper in the district was compelled to do a rare story on an internal poll. Not surprisingly, the other challenger’s fundraising dried up. Soon thereafter, he dropped from the race.

Because Pineda’s website has such a high Google ranking, people doing searches for information about Pineda’s clients - and their opponents - are almost sure to land on www.pinedaconsulting.com. From floating trial balloons to testing messages to seeding news stories, the Pineda Consulting blog gives clients an effective, efficient means of communicating, especially to information elites and political insiders.

The attributes that make Pineda Consulting distinctive include:

• All work done in-house. From developing the questionnaire to running the data to writing the reports, Pineda does the work. Only the phone calls are outsourced. Having worked for all the big firms, Pineda knows first-hand how much of the work is done by junior staffers instead of the principals. In contrast, every deliverable Pineda’s clients receive is executed from start to finish by Pineda, quickly and with painstaking attention to detail.
• Cost-effective. Pineda’s DC experience combined with his lack of overhead allows him to provide big-firm research without charging big-firm prices.
• Bilingual research. The son of Central American immigrants, Pineda contracts with a bilingual phonebank in Miami and a professional translator in Mexico City to ensure seamless, precise results in both English and Spanish.
• International scope. Pineda Consulting has conducted focus groups in France, Germany and the Netherlands in order to help his technology clients gain competitive advantage. At Greenberg Research, Pineda worked on behalf of political and corporate clients from the Americas, Europe and Asia. Pineda also won competitive selection by the European Union to a program designed to give “young leaders” from around the world a first-hand appreciation of the EU’s goals, policies and peoples.
• Gets the numbers right. At least twice in 2006, the results of Pineda’s campaign polls have generated surprise if not outright skepticism. In one, Pineda’s client - a challenger - was down 32-49 to a long-time, well-financed incumbent. The poll, however, placed a spotlight on the path to victory. Less than 3 weeks later, the campaign was surprised to learn that the challenger had tied the incumbent at 39. Two weeks after that, Pineda’s client walked away with a 214 vote margin. In another example, a poll conducted on behalf of a statewide independent initiative by Pineda Consulting showed a legislative candidate down by 7 points. The candidate’s own polling had her campaign feeling confident; a poll by another independent expenditure conducted at the same time as the Pineda Consulting survey showed the same candidate up 7. Less than 2 weeks later, the candidate lost. From strict adherence to methodological best practices to accurate turnout modeling, Pineda gets the numbers right.

With his free time, André loves nothing more than to travel the globe with his wife, Araceli Ruano. When his clients’ polls are in the field and she’s busy improving the health and education of Latin American children as the CEO of the ALAS Foundation, he rides his bike and reads. Recent books have included: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Sacred and the Profane and The Elephant and the Dragon.