The Victory Lab (15 page)

OVER THOSE DECADES
, the Democrats started to approach field operations with a new seriousness. The reason had a lot to do with Paul Tully, a chain-smoking former Yale offensive lineman who had made his name in Democratic circles organizing the Iowa caucuses for Ted Kennedy in 1980. Four years later he strategized Walter Mondale’s path to the party’s nomination, and he became a mentor to dozens of young operatives who were inspired by the way that he brought a quantitative rigor to Matt Reese–era advances in electioneering. “Paul was always poring over numbers and looking for an interesting hook,” says Doc Sweitzer, who was Tully’s partner in a Philadelphia-based consulting firm in the early 1980s. “So many consultants aren’t good at this because they never took a math class. That made him different from guys who come from the political-hack side.”

Tully was one of Ron Brown’s first hires when Brown became the Democratic National Committee’s chairman in early 1989. Democrats had suffered three straight presidential losses and were seen as hopelessly divided. Compared with the regimented Republicans, the Democratic Party of the 1980s resembled a loose alliance of identity-based groups
and organized labor—too undisciplined and varied ideologically to rally around broad, thematic election-year messages. Brown, who was close to Kennedy and had worked on Jesse Jackson’s campaign in 1988, thought that only the DNC could rise above the party’s fractiousness. He relegated the ethnic and racial caucuses, imagining the committee as the permanent presidential campaign organization. (Tully made clear he didn’t think the DNC’s agenda included electing Democrats to Congress, a branch of government to which he referred collectively as “the midgets.”) Committee operatives, he decided, would spend the four-year cycle between votes compiling binders stuffed with opposition research and state-specific strategy plans, ready for handoff to whichever candidate Democrats nominated at their 1992 convention. The fact that Brown had hired Tully as his political director—and Tully had accepted the job, which many thought beneath him—was an immediate signal to the Washington political community of Brown’s seriousness.

“Up until that point many people had thought of the DNC as a party in some European sense,” said Mark Steitz, who had worked with Brown on Jackson’s campaign and
joined the committee as its research director. “He made clear to us that every day our job was to come in and figure out what we could do to win the presidential election in 1992. Anything else—improving the image of the Democratic party, making the coalition of people in the Democratic party happy with one another—we could spend time on, but only if it was in the purpose of electing a president in 1992.”

Late in the day, Tully would often stop at the National Committee for an Effective Congress’s office on the other side of the National Mall, and lose himself in the maps and files overnight. When he returned to the DNC in late morning, he would spend hours on the phone with people around the country, gathering information on what was happening in their states. “I’m in the information business!” he would pip, by way of explanation. Precinct-level data was getting richer and richer, and when Tully was dispatched to Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1992 to coordinate Bill Clinton’s campaign he had a new trove of numbers at his disposal. After its 1990
count, the U.S. Census for the first time introduced data on block groups—previously tabulated only for cities—for every county nationwide.
That gave analysts a granular unit, around four thousand people, for measuring education and income, often complementary measurements of socioeconomic status. Fresh Census numbers matter, especially in dynamic areas like the Sun Belt, where populations churned so much that data became stale by the end of a ten-year cycle. An early user of computers for campaign work, Tully was obsessed with finding new sources of information—especially economic data that could pinpoint political terrain that had become more competitive during a recession—helpful to a Clinton war room working to discern where its voters were.

Six weeks before election day, the forty-eight-year-old Tully, whose perpetual energy had been sustained by voluminous amounts of coffee, cigarettes, and pizza, died of a heart attack in his Little Rock hotel room. “
He had worked for four years on this—he had every map, every target, he probably knew the name of every swing voter in the country,” Clinton strategist James Carville told the
New York Times
for its obituary. On election night, the laminated necklace credentials granting access to the campaign’s boiler room said “270 for Tully,” a reference to the number of electoral votes necessary to win the presidency. (Clinton ultimately won 370.) “The Republicans’ orientation towards data at the time had been more advanced,” says Celinda Lake, a Clinton pollster. “Tully was the first person who really tried to drive innovation on data on the Democratic side.”

Tully had left the DNC a new apparatus designed to specialize in turnout. The national and state parties, legislative campaign committees, and statewide and congressional candidates were all required to chip into a single fund that would run unified GOTV operations for the entire Democratic ticket. These so-called coordinated campaigns handled all of the voter contacts and IDs (and the heavy election-day machinery of phone banks and vans) so that instead of duplicating the same contacts Democrats could widen their universe of targets. As Bill Clinton antagonized liberal interest groups in his first term with his support of welfare reform
and the North American Free Trade Agreement, party leaders saw a well-organized turnout operation as key to rousing the “base vote,” referring largely to urban minorities, before his 1996 reelection.
Party efforts were boosted by a new “Labor ’96” program, led by the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions, which made a conscious effort to reassert themselves in Democratic politics by turning out voters directly rather than merely writing checks to favored candidates.

A sense was settling in that the parties simply approached election day differently. Democrats, whose voters tended to be packed into dense settings where door-to-door contact was highly efficient, equipped their canvassers with clipboards and maps outlining friendly precincts that targeters at the National Committee for an Effective Congress had flagged for “blind pulls,” indiscriminately yanking voters from their home. Republicans imperiously ran voter contact operations from afar, their typically better-funded campaigns blasting messages over television and relying on a well-networked coalition of satellite groups—gun owners, churches, farm bureaus—to talk to their members through voter guides. One side practiced politics as though it were a series of Great War infantry battles, the other as though directing the Kosovo air war from a command center hundreds of miles away, disinclined to muddy a single boot on the ground.

The efforts Tully had inspired were solidified in legend only one election later. The most revered Democratic operative of 2000 was not Gore speechwriter and strategist Bob Shrum or campaign manager Donna Brazile, but Michael Whouley, an elusive Bostonian whose job description was often given as “field general.” His cult extended from the party’s most junior field organizers to the political reporters to whom he refused to grant interviews all the way to Gore himself, who fanned his aide’s aura of mystery. Newspaper profiles were filled with accounts of his tricks, notably the rush-hour traffic jam Whouley had been accused of instigating on the day of the New Hampshire primary to keep supporters of Gore’s primary rival, Bill Bradley, from the polls. The Whouley mythology courted a component
of the party’s often smug self-conception: Democrats won their elections through hard work and street smarts. It was, in essence, a labor theory of value in politics, favorably contrasted with the top-down capital-intensive efforts of the right. “It’s just a cultural difference,” says Tom Bonier of NCEC, who spent the fall of 2000 working on Democratic campaign efforts in Michigan. “They just don’t do this the way we do.”

Bush may have carried the election, but Democrats had won the ground game. Republicans had shown themselves highly disciplined about every part of politics but the voting. Next time, many Republican strategists worried, they might not be so lucky, or able to count on lawyers and judges to carry them through. Now they had one of their own in the White House, and if they wanted to keep him there they had four years to catch up in the crucial game of turning out votes.

EVEN BEFORE GEORGE W. BUSH
moved into the White House, Matthew Dowd installed himself in an office at the Republican National Committee in Washington. He had spent the previous two decades working exclusively on Democratic campaigns, and even though he had been detailed to the RNC by George W. Bush’s closest adviser, Karl Rove, the party’s Capitol Hill headquarters still felt a bit like enemy territory. Dowd was an Austinite whose entry into Republican politics had come on local terms: not as the result of any ideological shift but from a confidence in the charismatic power of Bush. Dowd had been assured that his tour of duty at the RNC would be a brief one, offering him a chance to resettle in Austin before being called up for Bush’s reelection. “Dowd was in the enviable position of being on the outside with a lot of time to think about stuff,” says Sara Taylor, who became a regional political director at the White House. “He was the guy sitting in the room with no dirt on his hands.”

While the Bush campaign leadership litigated the outcome of the 2000 election, Dowd looked ahead to 2004. He saw a country more riven
than ever before along partisan lines. The phenomenon of ticket-splitting was effectively dead. In 1984, one-quarter of voters had cast a ballot that included both Democrats and Republicans; in 2000, only 7 percent had. The next campaign would be a “motivation election,” as Dowd put it in the first strategy memo of Bush’s reelection. Swing voters had entranced presidential strategists for a generation, Dowd thought, but those mercurial centrists were shrinking in number. A new premium should be placed on finding and mobilizing those who already identified with Republicans. It would be easier to grow Bush’s market share by expanding his base than by chasing new votes in the middle.

Bush’s reelection campaign was about to inherit two of the most valuable advantages in American politics: an incumbent president’s unchallenged control of a national party committee and the ability to raise hundreds of millions of dollars.
At the White House, an exultant Rove envisioned using the four-year term to plot a partisan realignment of the electorate just as his hero, Mark Hanna, had engineered one on behalf of William McKinley a century earlier. Rove believed Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” with its focus on education and immigration reform, could sand off the hard edges of post-Reagan Republicanism and create a long-lasting home within the party for Latinos and moderate suburbanites, two of the country’s fastest-growing demographics.

Dowd had an agenda that was at once more historically modest and practically ambitious. His long, ovaloid head was perennially racked with worry, a condition that friends attributed to having been raised as one of eleven children in a Michigan Catholic family.
Rove dubbed him “our dour Irishman,” and now Dowd’s almost primal sense of fatalism focused on the political moment. Perhaps the president’s leadership will trigger a permanent shift, thought Dowd, but it would be foolish to plan on it. In fact, Dowd’s analysis glumly foretold an indefinite era of ideological deadlock. “We would go into the election assuming it would be as close as 2000,” says Dowd. “What are things we could do differently that might affect a point or two?”

The RNC’s chief of staff, Jack Oliver, enlisted his deputy, Blaise Hazelwood, to help assemble an “Election Day Operations Task Force” to investigate an answer. Hazelwood, a twenty-nine-year-old veteran of presidential, statewide, and legislative campaigns, was known as one of the most disciplined and discreet operatives at party headquarters. Hazelwood had started working for the party in 1994, just out of college. After November, she was supposed to be laid off as part of a routine downsizing between elections. But when Curt Anderson, the party’s political director, would arrive at headquarters at 6 a.m., he would find the coffee made and Hazelwood hard at work. “She was on the list to be fired but she would not let herself be fired,” says Anderson. “What I found is you can’t ever fire her.” Hazelwood had long, dark, wavy hair and a tentative manner on the few occasions she spoke to large crowds, as though nervous that saying too much could lead her to give away valuable secrets. But her obsessive attention to detail, and her perpetual willingness to work eighteen-hour days without complaint, made her a perfect candidate for a project Dowd realized would require epic feats of organization and indefatigability.

They named the project the 72-Hour Task Force, a reference to the closing three days of a campaign during which Dowd believed Republicans were being repeatedly outmuscled by Democrats in the quest to make sure supporters voted. By happenstance the task force’s first full meeting, in mid-March, took place in room 2000 of the party headquarters. The reminder of the previous November had its uses, Dowd thought. Many of the party’s most influential consultants had worked on Bush’s presidential campaign, and Dowd worried they were insufficiently chastened by the outcome. Bush had lost the popular vote nationwide by half a million votes, had carried six states by a margin of five percentage points or fewer, and his election had been secured only by thirty-six days of epic litigation and petty political maneuvering in Florida. “We basically got through on the skin of our teeth,” Dowd said.