Los Angeles County Political Mail & Campaign Printing

The first thing most LA campaigns ask is why not use a printer in Los Angeles. On a mail program, being near the press buys very little: artwork moves as a PDF, voter data as an export, proofs are approved online, and mail can be entered at the Los Angeles processing facility wherever it was produced. What a close race needs when a mailing goes wrong is one organization that handled the data, the printing, any piece-level verification and the postal entry, with a single reconciled record of what happened. If you want to stand next to the press, we are ninety minutes down the 5 and you are welcome.

The smallest campaigns we produce for are school board or water district seats mailing a couple of thousand households; the largest are congressional races across multiple counties. City council, mayor, community college board, county supervisor, judicial, Assembly, State Senate, congressional and ballot measure committees all go through the same production controls. A down-ballot race gets the same list processing and tracking as a federal one and can add the same piece-level camera verification, because when the margin is 200 votes a bad list costs proportionally more.

Los Angeles County campaign work has included races in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Glendale, Pasadena, Burbank, Santa Clarita, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach, Carson, Lakewood, West Covina, Covina and La Mirada.

For Los Angeles County mailings, entering at the Los Angeles processing facility rather than in San Diego usually shortens the in-home window materially, and for a GOTV drop those days are the whole point. We drop-ship where the volume justifies it and enter locally where it does not; the calculation is per mailing, based on quantity, class and the date the mail must land.

A Los Angeles city council district is roughly 260,000 residents; a county supervisorial district is over two million. Those are different production problems. A council race is a targeted universe with many versions; a supervisorial or county-wide program is volume with tight entry scheduling. Both are produced in Vista, and the difference is planning rather than capability.

Yard signs, bumper stickers, door hangers, palm cards, walk pieces, push cards, banners and campaign apparel are printed by the same team that produces the mail, on one purchase order and one schedule, from the same artwork. The door hanger a volunteer leaves on a Pasadena porch matches the postcard that arrived there that morning, and the candidate is not chasing three vendors for three delivery dates.

Most mailings cross three or four vendors. Every handoff is a place where a list changes, a piece goes missing, or nobody can say what actually happened. Plavidian runs all six steps itself, with one set of records.