During election season, political reporters always want to know every single detail about the inner workings of a campaign. Polling, focus groups, strategy sessions... all of it. But we rarely see how these kinds of decisions are made.

This afternoon on the newsmagazine version of The California Report, you can hear how we finally got that chance.

For the final seven weeks of the fall campaign, I got the chance to watch some of how a statewide campaign works, with access to the team behind the $10 billion education bond, Proposition 1D. The only ground rules were that the story was embargoed until after the election.

After watching and listening to several focus groups, reading the internal polls, and listening to strategy conference calls, it becomes clear that political professionals take their cues from the techniques largely created by Madison Avenue's advertising industry.

But it also became clear that a lot of voters were, well, grumpy this year. In regards to Prop 1D in particular, several focus groups in both southern and northern California became gripe sessions that wondered where had all the earlier money gone when it came to education ballot measures?

Prop 1D, the $10 billion infrastructure bond, will provide money for better classrooms. But voters want improvements into what happens inside those classrooms. As for infrastructure... in the words of 1D strategist Gale Kaufman, "that's not sexy." And that reality required Kaufman and the Prop 1D team to position the ballot measure in broad terms, and not the narrow realities of the bond offering.

Click here for stations and airtimes for today's story; the story will be online here later this afternoon.