The Victory Lab (23 page)

But the microtargeting scores that Gage had built suggested that swing voters were precisely the right audience for the most visceral appeal of Bush’s candidacy. The targets would be ones Gage thought of as a persuasion reach: they were very likely to vote, but according to Gage’s numbers there was a less than 50 percent chance they would pick Bush. The anger points questions revealed this group of voters to be emotionally sensitive to the war on terror. Bush’s mail team knew they were setting off a bomb, but they had placed it so precisely that they could be fairly confident of its blast radius; they had drawn the circle so tightly there would be no downside. “If we lost them it wouldn’t be a big deal,” says Jarrett, the national director of voter contact. “This was to pull votes from Kerry.”

After election day, little was said about the bin Laden mailer or the complex research that had given Bush’s mail team the confidence to take on such a touchy subject before an unlikely audience. The popular
storyline among Democrats looking to explain Bush’s victory credited the campaign’s use of quiet communication to rile its base over issues like gay rights. Yet even though Bush allies pushed to get anti-gay-marriage initiatives on the ballot in key states, the campaign rarely found those fruitful topics for direct contact. “That’s been the big myth in that campaign: that we drove on the social issues which we really didn’t,” says Shuvalov. “Because Kerry was not going to challenge us on them.”

Gage, whose name had barely appeared in newspapers during the campaign, was profiled by the
Washington Post
in the weeks after the election.
The story noted his breakthrough as being able to calculate “Coors beer and bourbon drinkers skewing Republican, brandy and cognac drinkers tilting Democratic.” Those who worked on the microtargeting project knew that this detail, even if in parts technically accurate, completely misrepresented their work. They laughed at the fiction that the race had been won and lost through mastery of liquor store transactions. “The Bush campaign people were paranoid. As we talked about this publicly we had to make stuff up,” says Wszolek. “We had to give examples that were completely phony. It would drive the Democrats completely loony. We just wanted to keep them from knowing how accessible it is.”

GEEKS VERSUS THE GURUS

I
n September 2004, Mike Podhorzer walked two blocks from his office in the AFL-CIO’s megalith near Washington’s Lafayette Square to John Kerry’s headquarters, carrying a laptop loaded with PowerPoint slides whose numbers had troubled him for more than a year. As the deputy political director of the AFL-CIO, which was typically among the largest outside players in national elections, Podhorzer was one of Washington’s most eager consumers of polling data, searching for places where the group could invest labor’s money and manpower on behalf of favored candidates, who were almost always Democrats. In the summer of 2003, even as the party was far from selecting their nominee—Howard Dean led a desultory pack of contenders—Podhorzer noticed that George W. Bush was entering the campaign season with startling support from AFL households. “Bush was beginning to get more traction with union members than we wanted and than seemed justified,” he recalls.

This was not the first time a tough-minded Republican incumbent
charmed working-class whites: Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had also earned significant shares of the union vote, and each had been reelected overwhelmingly. Podhorzer knew 2004 would be close, which was all the more reason that the approximately 45 percentage points of the union vote that his polls showed Bush poaching from the Democratic nominee could be crucial.
Podhorzer expected to have an election-year budget of $44 million, and—in addition to the usual AFL program of mobilizing union voters already primed to vote for Democrats—he would have to invest in a significant new election-year priority: preventing defections by warning union members about the dangers of a second Bush term.

Podhorzer’s polls identified one-quarter of the AFL’s 13 million members as swing voters, regularly crossing party lines, but he had little sense of who exactly those holdouts were. The AFL had been relying on standard 1,000-person-sample national polls, which could only measure one or two subsets of the electorate at a time. The number of white men alone among those union swing voters amounted to a voter list roughly the size of Minnesota, an unwieldy and costly universe to approach directly with persuasive messages over the year and a half till election day. To boost the number and value of those demographic subsets, Podhorzer had the AFL’s pollsters call twenty thousand union household voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania. “With that much data,” says Podhorzer, “your ability to predict who was going to be vulnerable to Bush was a multiple of what it would be with any of the traditional targeting methods.”

As 2004 approached, Podhorzer used the information to reshape the AFL’s strategy with an eye toward minimizing the Bush vote. “We were taking anyone who would be willing to listen to why Bush was bad for unions and convincing them that Bush was bad for unions, as opposed to concentrating on turning out our most avid Democrats who were just as motivated and angry as Democrats everywhere,” says Podhorzer. But that strategy was not shared by the Kerry campaign and many of its allies, who remained almost monomaniacally focused on mobilizing the party’s base. In Ohio, that meant aggressively organizing the counties surrounding
Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, with their easily defined liberal precincts and large minority populations. “I felt like that was certainly part of the equation,” Podhorzer says. “But it was horribly ignoring voters we could get but weren’t even trying.”

And so on a day in September, Podhorzer gathered the data and hustled down I Street to visit the Kerry campaign. Because campaign finance laws stipulated that union dues could be spent only on communication with member households, Podhorzer was unable to reach many of the Bush sympathizers who the AFL’s polls indicated might be persuaded to vote for the Democrat. To reach its full potential, Podhorzer’s “swing voter project” would have to be undertaken by Kerry’s campaign—a shift in strategy that he also realized was rather unlikely. “At that point, it was totally unrealistic to think they were going to turn their whole program around because of a couple of PowerPoint slides,” he says.

Democrats had entered 2004 with new electoral machinery in their corner. Rocked by their close loss to George W. Bush in 2000 and challenged by new campaign finance laws enacted two years later, nearly a dozen key liberal activist groups—led by the AFL, and encompassing the labor, environmental, and feminist movements—formed the America Votes coalition to coordinate mobilization efforts in key states so they weren’t competing to knock on the same doors but could expand their range. (Conservative reporter Byron York would later describe it as part of a “vast left-wing conspiracy.”) A separate entity, America Coming Together, was established to administer voter registration and turnout. ACT was legally restricted from coordinating its efforts with the Democratic campaigns it wanted to help, but a division of labor between the two became clear. In Ohio, which Kerry had designated as his one must-win state, field presence belonged almost entirely to ACT, which concentrated its efforts in the thirteen most Democratic counties and ignored the rest of the state.

This was the strategy that concerned Podhorzer, who worried that the approach reflected “an overconfidence in the liberal mind that only a fool would vote for Bush again, so therefore all we had to do was base
turnout.” He returned to the AFL dispirited by his exchange with the Kerry campaign and his sense that Democrats had chosen to ignore winnable votes in part because the statistical methods used to identify them were not properly understood by campaign decision makers. “At the time,” says Podhorzer, “all of this just sounded like alien talk to most people.”

So Podhorzer started dialing others who he thought spoke his language. He called some of the AFL’s consultants, including Hal Malchow, its mail vendor, and Celinda Lake, one of its pollsters. Others were Podhorzer’s peers at other liberal groups. Podhorzer thought they all had two things in common: they shared a scientistic approach to politics, and they all trusted him. “My motivation,” Podhorzer told them, “is winning elections, not having trade secrets.” In the end he invited about a dozen people to join him for lunch at the AFL’s headquarters, which faced down the White House with a southbound stare that reflected either a sense of menace or a patronizing promise of protection, depending on who occupied the Oval Office. The soft-spoken Podhorzer, whose beard and glasses gave him a professorial mien, was barely recognized outside the building, but he knew the return address would give him clout. “I’m not naïve,” says Podhorzer. “Convening people to come to the AFL is different from just convening people to come to a generic meeting. So people came.”

The group included few of the brand-name consultants whom campaigns liked to unveil in press releases as a way to establish their credibility to donors and media. “It’s not the big names on the door,” says Maren Hesla, who directed the Women Vote! program at EMILY’s List, an independent group that works to elect Democratic women. “It’s all the—God love them—geeky guys who don’t talk to clients but do the work and write the programs.”

Even after Kerry’s loss, the group continued meeting about every three weeks, becoming known to its participants as “the geek lunch.” Conversation flitted from the obscurely technical to the phenomenological (what does it really mean to say a voter is persuadable?). Just about the only thing they didn’t discuss were the day-to-day tactical and messaging
questions that so occupied small talk among Washington consultants. Podhorzer began to imagine that the group could be capable of great things: a Manhattan Project for developing electioneering superweapons. At the same time, he knew it would be valuable to establish just how little of that kind of expertise there was within the existing political-industrial complex. Podhorzer assembled a sample of more than fifty party operatives and surveyed them each month for opinions on which of three possible mail pieces would prove most effective. It was, in a way, a version of the “insiders poll” that the
National Journal
had recently launched to document the views of Beltway lobbyists and consultants on political issues of the day, except Podhorzer was less interested in exalting the views of experts than in exposing them as hokum.

The secret ballots in Podhorzer’s insiders poll seemed to divide rather consistently: about one-third of the vote each time for each of the three mail pieces. “You came to the conclusion that either one-third of the people were geniuses, or that basically none of them really had a clue,” he says. “The same people wouldn’t be right from month to month. And that just reinforced my belief that this empirical approach was far better than a guru approach where someone came in and said ‘This is the piece you had to send’ because of some theory they had about the election or the candidates or about how human beings think.”

THE GURUS WERE
the celebrated political wise men whose practices had become the industry default, thanks to their success serving up a cocktail of lore and myth, anecdote and inertia, able to so thoroughly intoxicate the candidates who paid their bills. Throughout the 1990s, politics was awash with cautionary tales of a guru culture out of control. When California businessman Al Checchi decided to run for governor in 1998,
the wealthy neophyte enlisted two of the Democratic Party’s most famous consultants. For his polling, Checchi retained Mark Penn, a gruff,
territorial infighter who had successfully battled for control of Bill Clinton’s 1996 campaign and had been credited with helping to mastermind Clinton’s ultimately easy reelection. Checchi’s media consultant, Bob Shrum, was known as an eloquent narrator of lost causes. As a speechwriter for Ted Kennedy he had drafted the candidate’s “dream will never die” concession speech in 1980; he later taught himself to make ads, although his firm developed such a knack for picking losers that many in Democratic circles began to joke of a “Shrum curse.”