The Death of My Friend and Mentor, Stu Spencer

Stu Spencer made Ronald Reagan California's Governor and then our President. The last personal keeper of the Reagan flame, Stu despised Donald Trump and mentored a generation of Latinos in politics.

There have only been three political consultants in my career that I would describe as rooted in principle and integrity - all three of them were acknowledged in my book, “The Latino Century”. First among them was a man named Stu Spencer, a man who established one of the first modern political consulting firms and most notably took a washed-up B-level actor named Ronald Reagan and made him a California Governor and US President. He was my friend, my mentor, and the last man alive who knew Ronald Reagan’s politics and beliefs better than anyone else.

Stu Spencer died yesterday at the age of 97.

There’s a lot to say about Stu and his life and I don’t feel qualified to cover it all here. As I process the loss of my friend I will reflect on two things that distinguished him - first, his lifelong commitment to the Latino community and his willingness to mentor a 20-something Mexican-American kid in politics thirty years ago. I owe so much of the consultant I became and the career I’ve had to him. Second, he opposed Donald Trump from the day he came down the golden escalator. Immediately recognizing the threat he was to the party he loved and the country he helped Reagan build. Whenever I doubted my own sanity, and when nearly all of the Republicans I had worked with for three decades abandoned Reagan Republicanism I looked to Stu who assured me that it was certainly not us who had lost our minds.

“He was remarkably crisp in his thinking until the very last days,” his wife Barbara mentioned when she called this morning to give me the news. I made a point of going to see Stu at his home in Palm Springs more regularly as he grew older, knowing that the time I got to share time with him, hear his stories, and get advice might be the last. He called regularly to discuss politics and share his insights on the news of the day. Just a few months ago I went out to the desert to interview him for a podcast series I worked on with UC Irvine’s School of Social Ecology called “Red County, Blue County, Orange County” about the rise and fall of Conservatism in Orange County over the years. Stu could remember the intricacies of meetings he held with Reagan’s kitchen cabinet and the internal politics between GOP mega-donors in the 1960’s. It may well have been the last long-form detailed recorded interview anyone had with Stu Spencer.

“I want to have donations sent to a scholarship organization for Latinos in lieu of flowers, Mike,” Barbara said. “Stu would have wanted that.”

She was, of course, right. That’s exactly what Stu would have wanted.

My journey of friendship began with him not long after I graduated from college. As a 26-year-old political director of the California Republican Party, I had been hired in part to help the GOP “fix” its Latino problem. I was fresh out of Georgetown University with a thesis on Latino voters under my arm and an overly optimistic view of what could happen in politics as everyone that age in politics should be.

I received a random phone call into my office one day and picked up the line. A gruff older voice rang out over the phone “Is This Mike Madrid?”

“It is,” I responded.

“This is Stu Spencer,” the voice said. “I’d like to buy you lunch.”

A legend in national politics was calling a young Latino kid out of nowhere and for no other reason than to offer me help, and guidance and to be a sounding board in a party he knew would be far more difficult for me to navigate than my bright-eyed rose-colored glasses could perceive. I cleared my schedule and drove out to meet the legend himself. We became fast friends who shared joys, victories, losses, and defeats over the next 25 years.

That same year I also met a big wig LA Times political reporter named Mark Z Barabak. It was Mark who got the nod from the LA Times to write about Stu’s passing and reflected accurately and solemnly as only he can in the following mention about Stu Spencer’s commitment to ensuring that no one equates Donald Trump with Ronald Reagan’s legacy. Until his last days, Stu Spencer was virulently anti-Trump:

In a Republican Party that turned sharply rightward and increasingly valued combat over compromise, Spencer was a throwback, a self-described moderate who respected and even befriended members of the partisan opposition and political press corps. As the decades passed, Spencer found himself increasingly estranged from his lifelong party.

He was no fan of Donald Trump, taking particular umbrage at those who tried wrapping him in the Reagan mantle.

Spencer never voted for the real estate developer and reality TV star, casting his ballot for a third-party candidate in 2016 and voting for Joe Biden in 2020 — the first Democrat whom Spencer supported for president since Harry Truman in 1948. He voted for Kamala Harris in 2024.

Spencer considered Trump “a demagogue and opportunist” and suggested if Reagan were alive he’d be sickened by Trump’s outlandish behavior. “The way he treated women,” Spencer said in a 2021 interview. “All those people he robbed of money.” (As a businessman, Trump was known for not paying contractors.)

Spencer spent the last several decades of his life as a kind of Cassandra, offering advice many in the Republican Party chose to neither hear nor heed.

There’s so much more to say about Stu. He was an architect of the Republican Party that defined a generation and changed the world. He was an innovator who saw a new industry unfolding that he helped define. He was a consultant who brought out the best in his candidates. He was principled, visionary, and kind.

But on this day, a day heavy with the dark news of his passing, I’m going to remember Stu Spencer for what mattered most to me: He was my friend.