But one man's pollution is another's livelihood.

With Election Day nearing, a high tide of cash is buoying printers, consultants, accountants, pollsters, newspapers, catering halls, hotels, advertising agencies and TV and radio stations on Long Island and around the country.

Campaigns have become more and more expensive, said Hofstra University's Center for Suburban Studies, a think tank. People have to raise larger and larger sums to run for office.

Guardino said that those funds can find their way to a smorgasbord of businesses, but especially the media.

Whether it's TV, weekly newspapers or radio, all those media outlets will see an increase during the political season, said Guardino, a former Town of Hempstead supervisor.

How much economic clout do political campaigns wield?

A study by PQ Media estimated nationwide spending on advertising and marketing communications alone at $2.68 billion for the general election year 2004, compared with $1.62 billion in 2002 and $1.2 billion in 2000.

Broadcast television accounted for 56.1 percent of political media spending in 2004, followed by direct mail, public relations, radio, cable television, newspapers and Internet advertising, which was up a whopping 853.8 percent versus 2000, according to the study.

On Long Island, Guardino said, the trend toward big-money campaigns increasingly is pushing candidates toward cable television.

[Cable and content provider] Cablevision gets a tremendous amount of revenue from Long Island campaigns, said Anthony Manetta, chief executive of Roosevelt Strategy Group, a Lindenhurst political consultancy.

In the race for Nassau County executive, both incumbent Democrat Tom Suozzi and Republican challenger Greg Peterson are running TV commercials.

All the advertising this year is on Cablevision's News12 and TV55, Manetta said. It hasn't gotten to the point where they're going to the city networks.

Still, Manetta estimated that the two candidates will spend $1 million to $1.5 million on Cablevision advertising alone.

What messages will that kind of money buy?

Predictably, Suozzi's Making the Grade commercial touts Nassau County's return to solvency and 10 bond upgrades, while Peterson's 30-second Slick ad features an irate suburban matron bemoaning higher property assessments as stealth tax increases. To punctuate her point, the woman drops a trash bag in the can, closes the lid and says, That's why I'm voting Republican.

By contrast, television played a smaller role in the unsuccessful 2003 election campaign of Edward Romaine for Suffolk County executive. Romaine's campaign spent $1.4 million overall and more than one half million dollars in media buys through Multi Media Services, a political consulting firm based in Alexandria, Va. Slightly more than $100,000 of that was devoted to TV advertising.

Others getting election funds from the Romaine campaign included: Villa Lombardi's, $12,524 for fundraising receptions; Suffolk Life newspaper, $24,745 for advertising; Mahoney Strimple & Goncharenko, $46,707 for consulting; and Manetta's Roosevelt Strategy Group, $6,000 for Web site design.

An Internet presence can provide a way to get the candidate's message out as well as a fund-raising mechanism, Guardino said.

I think most candidates have a Web site at a minimum, he said. I've heard some candidates have blogs. It's state of the art. It's not expensive as opposed to doing a TV buy. Some candidates have been very successful raising money from the Internet.

In 2006, Manetta predicted, television will play an even bigger role in New York and Long Island elections, with candidates vying for governor, state attorney general, U.S. senator and the House of Representatives.

Pushing the spending bar higher are privately funded candidates like billionaire businessman Thomas Golisano, whose name has been floated as a possible Republican gubernatorial candidate, Manetta said.

Golisano spent $77 million as a third party candidate, he said. You can only imagine what he'd spend as a major party candidate.

Joseph Mercurio, a veteran Democratic political consultant whose clients have included presidential candidate Gary Hart and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, said campaign money can create a big bump in printers' revenue.

Local printers get second and overnight shifts, he said. It's often lucrative.

Big-time campaigns, like Michael Bloomberg's mayoral run in New York City, may deliver print orders to other parts of the country, he said. I've even seen campaigns at that level going to foreign printers.

Political printing, however, can be a tough business, said John Mangano, owner of New Media Printing in Bethpage.

There are only two or three companies on the Island that specialize in political printing, he said. We're one of them. A lot of people see political printing as a good opportunity to make money real fast. It's not as easy as it looks.

Not including primaries, the political printing business is crammed in a span of about eight weeks, said Mangano, whose company is working on more than a dozen campaigns. This is the real crunch.

Tight deadlines have caused some printers to stumble, he added.

You can't bite off more than you can chew. I've seen a lot of guys try to get into it and not deliver. If you don't perform, you'll never see these people again.

Guarding confidentiality of campaign materials also is essential to maintaining trust, said Mangano, brother of Nassau County Legislator Edward Mangano, R-Bethpage.

We take steps to close our press room, close access to our shop, he said. We don't share with anybody. I go as far as not sharing with my brother who I'm working for.

H. David Goldman, of Presentations Plus in Farmingdale, said his 6-year-old company has done some work for the Bloomberg campaign, but generally had little success breaking into political printing.

I think you have to be politically connected to do business with them, he said of his company's pitch for work in Suozzi's previous run for county executive. We weren't playing on a level field.

Copyright 2005 Dolan Media Newswires