Stuart Osnow says that he and Jerry Skurnik are the oldest living couple in New York politics. But though they have been business partners for 20 years and friends for even longer, the two had to be coaxed into staying near each other for long enough to pose for a photograph together.

"We're never in the same room together," Osnow explained.

Many of those they work with call Osnow and Skurnik "No Overlap," Osnow explains, because the two naturally gravitate toward, and manage, different aspects of the company.


But in their office suite in the Woolworth Building, their voices do overlap, and frequently.

"There's nothing that he does," Osnow began describing their roles.

"Very little," Skurnik interjected.

"That I do," Osnow finished.

The secret to the success of their lengthy professional relationship, they say, is their complimentary personalities and skill sets.

Prime New York, their two-man data service company, provides political and grassroots campaigns with lists matching constituents' ethnicities to voting histories. These lists can be used to profile the ideological leanings of neighborhoods and organizations.

Skurnik and Osnow met on then-Mayor Ed Koch's 1982 gubernatorial campaign.

By the mid-1980s, they each had separate consulting businesses sharing a small office space in Time Square. They talked about merging their respective operations with John Sabini, who instead became the Queens County Democratic Chair following Donald Manes' suicide, launching a career in government.

Originally thinking of being general political consultants, Skurnik and Osnow were given the idea of making the company a list business by Scott Stringer over dinner in Chinatown after a campaign event for one of Osnow's clients.

With only one other list business around for competition at the time, Osnow and Skurnik quickly found clients and, as their almost-partner Sabini now says, they have become the list service name brand.

"They can deliver the [data] sort you want right away," he said.

Until recently, most Prime New York's work for campaigns involved printing labels and mailing cards. Campaigns often ordered many different lists for many different mailings over time. Today, campaigns get everything at once.
Beyond election season, Prime New York also matches voting lists to membership lists for organizations, from grassroots campaigns to labor unions looking to see how their members feel about issues.

Stringer, who still speaks with pride about his role in the firm's origins, said Skurnik and Osnow have done well with the idea he inspired.

"They deal with everybody-Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives," Stringer said, pointing out that sometimes opposing candidates order similar lists from the firm, "and yet everybody has a great fondness for them."

For years, Prime New York printed mailing labels or cards or printouts of constituent voting lists for clients. Most of this data, generated by partner company Voter Contact Service, headquartered in Hawaii, can now be downloaded from the internet or e-mailed to a client as a file.

At first, Osnow worked with the computers and used to make all their orders because he knew computer lingo, Osnow said, but not before Skurnik, leaning back in his chair, cut him off.

"I'm a political guy, not a computer guy," he said.

Once done by fax or expensive dial-up modem calls to Hawaii, now orders are placed through an automated system online. With these well within Skurnik's technological abilities, Osnow has been freed to help troubleshoot client problems. He also concentrates on sales, mailings and e-mail blasts.

Skurnik specializes in helping clients understand the voter lists they have purchased. Among his specialties is helping pare down mailings by analyzing voter lists to determine likely voters.

Their interests diverge outside the office as well. Osnow, a clarinet and saxophone player, is on the board of the Brooklyn-Queens Conservatory of Music. Skurnik, meanwhile, is partial to trips to Las Vegas casinos.

They have connected through Osnow's eight-year-old twins, going to Mets games together and making an annual trip to a conference in Hawaii.

And looking at their own business, they agree that there is clear room for improvement: the method of using last names to determine a voter's ethnicity must be refined, they both say, to avoid confusion between Caribbean and African-American last names or Soviet and Eastern European ones. Different ethnic groups tend to have different voting patterns.

But there is little opportunity for such time-intensive projects, with all the new lists to generate and match. They expect 2009 to be a busy year, with the volume of candidates expected. That candidates with smaller constituencies tend to use more lists will boost business as well.

"If we had a 20th anniversary shirt made," Osnow said, "it would say, 'Term limits are good for business, but bad for government.'"