The Victory Lab (18 page)

Gage’s first job at Market Opinion Research mostly amounted to grunt work, but the ambitious young man—with intense blue eyes, broad cheeks, and the parted, slicked-back hair of an early Hitchcock protagonist—thrilled at how it put him at the center of the action. “
I had the best of both worlds. I got to follow a brilliant tactician from the back of the room,” he said. “And I got to work with the best pure researcher in the business.” But less than a year after joining Market Opinion Research, Gage was laid off. It was a cyclical business, following the double-time rhythms of the political calendar. Encouraged by the academic orientation of the firm’s leaders, Gage went back to school for his master’s degree. Then, in the fall of 1975, he was summoned by Steeper to help with the polling for Gerald Ford’s presidential campaign. Gage was rehired as a twelve-thousand-dollar-per-year assistant analyst, effectively an apprenticeship to Steeper. Gage would gather the raw data collected by the firm’s Detroit phone room and wait for Steeper to come over to his desk to weight the samples, or watch
as Steeper proofread his survey questions. Then Gage would run the numbers to the departments responsible for coding or entering the collected data onto mainframe computers.

This infrastructure necessary for what was known as “survey research” kept newcomers out of the business. Throughout the 1970s, there were three major Republican polling firms, who divided the country by region, an arrangement enforced by gentlemen’s agreements and basic economics. Lance Tarrance of Houston dominated the South; Richard Wirthlin, who had worked on Ronald Reagan’s campaigns for governor, owned California; and Teeter the Midwest and the Northeast. Even as the high cost of long-distance calling made it expensive for any of the three to expand outside their home regions, the lack of competition allowed them to take on ambitious projects.

Gage, who rose to be a vice president of Market Opinion Research, presided over a culture of innovation. In the mid-1970s, the firm perfected the method of rolling nightly samples that became known as “tracking polls,” which for the first time empowered a campaign to measure daily changes in a candidate’s standing and how fast it was rising or falling. Later Gage worked with an Oregon manufacturer to develop handheld “perception analyzers,” which allowed researchers to monitor a viewer’s instantaneous response to words and images by turning a dial to reflect support or disapproval. These so-called dial sessions became the dominant tool for campaigns trying to understand how particular phrases or ideas from speeches and debates resonated with voters. “They weren’t a polling firm,” says Mike Murphy, a Michigan media consultant who worked with Market Opinion Research. “They were a research firm that used polling.”

By the mid-1980s, as the personal computer supplanted the mainframe and the expense of phone calls dropped, polling became just another political consulting service. Falling costs grew the customer base to nearly everyone in politics: even state legislative candidates would routinely commission a poll to help them prepare campaign strategy. Amid the boom, academic training no longer amounted to much. Many of the top Republican
polling firms were filled with former operatives who lacked statistical expertise but had an instinct for political strategy and a Rolodex full of potential clients. Polling was a growth industry, and it offered Beltway types an easier lifestyle. Unlike field work—which usually required settling down in a single district for weeks or months—a pollster could stay in his or her office in suburban Virginia, lining up dozens of campaigns each election season and corporate or lobbying clients to occupy the off years.

In 1986, Market Opinion Research did nearly $10 million in business and was
one of the thirty largest research companies of any kind in the country. The firm was preparing to serve as lead polling consultant to the presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush, whom Teeter had befriended when Bush was chairman of the Republican National Committee. But even as Teeter’s firm sat atop the political world, it became harder to sustain the ambitious agenda or culture of scholarly inquiry and technical entrepreneurship that gave Market Opinion Research its early character. “Profit and loss in a polling firm is basically a function of volume—how many interviews you do,” says Will Feltus, who worked alongside Gage at the firm. “Research is not a profit center.”

Even Bush’s victory could not ensure Market Opinion Research’s future. Teeter had signed a contract to sell the company after the campaign and cash out of the business, and his employees scrambled to stick together after a new owner swept them out. In 1989, Gage, Steeper, and three other members of senior management formed their own firm, Market Strategies. Political clients may have given the firm its prestige—Steeper was the chief pollster for Bush’s reelection, with Teeter serving as the campaign’s chairman—but the business was increasingly coming from other sectors. For Market Strategies’ first two years, politics and policy delivered half of the firm’s revenue; a decade later, that figure had fallen to one-quarter. Polling in the political world had become a static enterprise; innovations in using data to measure and track personal opinions were all taking place in commercial research.

Gage still enjoyed the scrum of politics, keeping ties to Michigan’s
Republican circles and
dabbling in election season punditry for Detroit television stations. “He was always thinking about the practical problems facing a campaign,” says Steeper. But by the late 1990s,
Gage’s portfolio had become stocked with corporate clients like the American Forest and Paper Association, and the work he most wanted to do looked like a distraction from Market Strategies’ core business. “Gage wanted to come up with these one-off projects that sometimes were profitable and sometimes were not at all profitable,” says Brent Seaborn, who started as an intern in the firm’s atrophying Washington office. “He’s always trying to think of the new idea, which for Market Strategies was a difficult position to be in, because Market Strategies wanted you to fill out a spec sheet, conduct a poll, present the results, and cash the check. They were a very big company and they had a very good routine.”

The engines of the firm’s growth were customer satisfaction and relationship management, interlocking concepts winning fans in the corporate world. Relationships between salespeople and customers were once considered an ineffable part of business, where commerce mingles with courtship.
But in the 1980s, some companies started to track all of their interactions with individual customers—every purchase made, service call placed, rebate submitted, product returned—and farmed out the volumes of data to outside firms for analysis. Electrical utilities and health-care providers, in particular, would hire Market Strategies to question their customers about their views of the company (often monthly surveys of thousands of respondents) and use the results to determine managers’ pay. Along the way they marshaled as much information as they could about the people who used their services and how they responded to different stimuli. “The concept is ‘know your customer,’ ” says Gage. “When you touch him, know how you touched him. Did the touch cause him to do something you want him to do?”

This corporate data-hoarding was creating a major imbalance between the information available to commercial marketers and those in politics. A voter file might have a half-dozen categories of information for
each person: gender, age, when they last moved, how often they vote. Consumer databases stockpiled hundreds of them, such as whether they had recently taken a cruise or had registered for a hunting license. When he had started in polling in the 1970s, Gage saw commercial marketers trying to learn from their political peers, who had after all pioneered the study of public opinion. Two decades later he was frustrated to find that the roles had clearly flipped. “Back in the seventies and eighties, there was this view that there were really smart new things in campaigns then being adopted by business,” says Gage. “Now all the smart stuff is happening over there.”

AS HE STOOD
on the porch of Mackinac Island’s Grand Hotel in September 2001, Dowd recognized the approaching figure of Gage, who at fifty-one maintained a hockey player’s large build even as his white hair thinned into unruly curls sloping off the back of his head. The Michiganders did not know each other well, but they shared a common instinct that campaigns had a lot to learn from consumer research. Dowd’s father had worked in marketing for Dodge and had told his son about how automakers used data-mining services to sift through the hundreds of pieces of information on each possible customer. The data miners would profile individual buying practices and then clump people into clusters based on their tastes and habits. When Gage told Dowd he thought it would be possible to target voters the same way, it immediately clicked. Gage was proposing, in essence, the same technique Dowd’s father had used, but this time with Bush as the product instead of sedans.

Gage left Mackinac Island with Dowd’s enthusiasm ringing in his head. One thing that always depressed political creativity was the uncertainty that anyone would pay for a fresh way of doing things: campaign practices were so hardened, and campaign budgets so predictable, that consultants would rarely invest in new methods until they had seen them successfully demonstrated elsewhere. When he heard the 72-Hour Task
Force declare that one of the major impediments to effectively turning out Republican voters was that the party could not locate them, Gage assumed it was a problem the commercial world had already solved. “They just had bad customer files,” Gage says of his party. “They didn’t know who their customers were.”

That year, the Michigan Republican Party had approached Gage and a longtime collaborator, media consultant Fred Wszolek, with a similar challenge. The 2002 midterm elections loomed, poised to feature a busy ballot with races for all statewide offices, including governor. Even though Michigan was a presidential battleground, Republicans felt they always started from way behind when they had to rely on mobilizing votes from friendly precincts. Voters did not register with a party, so every Michigander was effectively an “independent.” In precincts without a clear partisan character, the state party would hire phone banks to identify voters where it could afford to, and rely on coalition partners like the National Rifle Association and Christian Coalition to augment its roster of targets. But in working-class Michigan, this amounted to a fatal math for Republican candidates: there simply weren’t enough voters in non-Democratic precincts or on coalition membership rolls to meet a statewide vote goal. “There were 1.2 million people, and we needed two million votes to win,” says Michigan Republican Party executive director Michael Meyers. “So we all knew we had a problem of ‘how do we get to two million’ and the phones weren’t going to be able to fill in an eight-hundred-thousand gap.”

The flip side of that problem was that the party basically wrote off precincts that voted reliably for Democrats. In sections of populous Macomb County, a historic Democratic edge meant that the state Republican Party gave up directly contacting voters altogether. Gage imagined his job as developing “search-and-rescue” tools, using data to spot sympathetic bodies in a disaster zone and plucking them out to the polls. “We could say, over here on Elm Street in Sterling Heights, Michigan, this person needs a life jacket, and a helicopter comes in and pulls ’em out, takes ’em to the polls,” says Gage. “Otherwise he never would have been touched in any way.”

Such a tool would have immediate application in races around the country. With Dowd’s tentative support, and the RNC’s demonstrated seriousness about its 72-Hour initiative, Gage knew that any targeting breakthrough he could make in time for Bush’s reelection could prove extremely lucrative, and he started to think of the Michigan project as a “beta test” for the bigger contest two years later. He took the five-million-person state voter file and tried to match it to available consumer data from Acxiom, one of a few large commercial data vendors who maintained profiles of nearly every American. He found that 80 percent of Michigan voters matched up against an Acxiom record, which included hundreds of variables, from marital status to pet ownership. In May 2002, Gage commissioned a massive survey to ground those personal details in the political realities of a campaign year. He randomly selected a “test set” of five thousand households from the Acxiom records and called them with around twenty questions about the 2000 election, Michigan politicians (like outgoing governor John Engler and the various figures plotting to replace him), and issues that played a role in state politics (like abortion and the role of unions). Gage had algorithms find patterns linking personal characteristics with political beliefs so that he could use what he knew about his test set to predict how the other five million voters likely approached politics.

In August 2002, the month of Michigan’s primary elections, Gage got a call from Mike Murphy, who had left Michigan to become one of the country’s top ad makers. Murphy had been lead strategist on John McCain’s 2000 race and was now playing a similar role for Mitt Romney, a former venture capitalist and management consultant running to be governor of Massachusetts. Murphy was familiar with the work Gage was doing in Michigan and thought it could be especially useful for Romney, who could build a winning coalition in the liberal state only by sorting through independents and conservative Democrats to identify what he considered the “subtribes” open to crossing over to back a Republican. He summoned Gage to Romney’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, nestled
between the start-ups that had sprouted from nearby MIT, and suffused with a similar spirit of innovation.