committed more than $220,000 for a University of Connecticut professor’s 30-month project to study ways to

But in that project, Dr. Kenneth
Dautrich, a polling expert and
confidant of Rell’s chief of staff, has
also been studying something else:

How best to frame the Republican
governor’s positions to win approval
from state voters.

While the Office of Policy and
Management has paid to compensate
UConn for Dautrich’s time, the
professor has peppered Rell’s chief of
staff, M. Lisa Moody, not just with
budget ideas, but also with political

That political input included the
convening of a focus group as Rell
was drafting her budget proposal in
December 2008, a slew of suggestions
on Rell’s political messaging, and
help from the veteran pollster in
crafting and analyzing a political
poll conducted this spring by the
governor’s exploratory campaign

manage public sentiment - on
everything from income taxes to
leadership qualities to the public’s
opinion of a potential political rival -
have been a closely guarded secret in
the Rell administration, presumably
to avoid criticism that the governor
has employed the professor to provide
political guidance on the public dime.

But The Day obtained
correspondence and documents
related to the project this week, after
a monthslong effort to obtain more
information about Dautrich’s work
under state open records laws.

Those documents show that
Dautrich’s recommendations have
seemingly helped shape Rell’s public
positions through the longest budget

standoff in modern memory, and
while voters wait to hear whether she
will seek another term in 2010.

Dautrich, who once ran UConn’s
Center for Survey Research and
Analysis and now teaches public
policy at the university, has worked
for more than 15 months to assemble

to help the cash-strapped state.
The project arose out of years of
correspondence with Moody, Rell’s
powerful chief of staff, Dautrich said
in an interview.

messaging and tactics, helping
to craft rhetorical devices for her
public remarks and encouraging the
governor’s aides to hold firm on some

positions, like resistance to raising
income taxes, which his research
showed to be unpopular.

For instance, in mid-December, 2008,
as Rell and her staff were preparing
a budget proposal that would seek to
close a growing multi-billion-dollar
budget deficit without resorting
to tax hikes, Dautrich, with help
from UConn students and using his
taxpayer-funded budget from the
government streamlining project,
convened a focus group of nine
voters at a small research facility in

The purpose, he wrote to a Rell
aide before the meeting, was “to
probe a lot on things like ‘what do
you expect from good leaders?’ and
‘what kinds of decisions would give
you confidence in Connecticut’s

later to Moody and the aide, Matt
Fritz, that advises Rell to hold firm
on her pledge to avoid tax hikes,
warns of the relative popularity of
Attorney General Richard Blumenthal
- at the time a rumored Democratic
gubernatorial candidate - and reports
that participants were especially

well-disposed toward one of Rell’s
favorite metaphors: the comparison
of Connecticut’s budget woes to that

Connecticut state government and
households was well received by
group members,” Dautrich wrote