The Victory Lab (9 page)

AFTER COMPLETING HIS TERM
at the Institute of Politics, Hal Malchow was more certain than ever that he wanted to make a career out of winning votes. He approached elections with the same self-discipline that led him to devour thick volumes of American history in continuous stretches and to eat his meals by clearing out one ingredient from his plate at a time:
all the fried okra before moving on to collard greens, all the potato before touching his steak. Malchow had a mustache and bushy hair, and spoke in a voice that began as a thick southern treacle but accelerated into a staccato yawp as he got excited. “Hal has strong core values and beliefs, but it was the love of the game that most enthralled him,” says Hank Klibanoff, a journalist who with Malchow shared a Jackson house that became a way station for itinerant political operatives coming to work on Mississippi campaigns. “Loving the game meant mastering the mechanics of the game.”

Even an understanding of the latest voter contact strategies failed to make Mississippi politics a friendly place for a reform-minded liberal. Malchow’s candidates always seemed to lose. After managing several such races, never winning more than 40 percent of the vote, Malchow grew dispirited and decided to become a lawyer, which he thought would at least help him earn enough money to stay involved in politics through other channels. He enrolled at the University of the Pacific, but was rarely engaged by his law-school studies. Then, in his third year, Malchow took a mandatory corporations class. The gamesmanship between the people who wrote the byzantine rules and regulations governing companies and the people who set out to elude them mesmerized Malchow in much the same way that Reese’s electioneering machinations had. “All of a sudden you have all these cases where people have these wild, creative financial schemes,” he says. “And I’m a creative person, so I’m looking at this thinking, ‘That’s fun! I can do that.’ ”

Upon graduation, Malchow became a securities lawyer at one of the leading firms in Jackson, a job that consisted largely of writing the fine print for life insurance programs administered by local auto dealers. Malchow found this, and just about everything related to the practical application of the law, to be tediously unimaginative. He kept an eye on politics by faithfully reading the weekly edition of the
Washington Post
and distracted himself by drawing
Loophole
, a cartoon strip about the fictional Simon Legree School of Law, which was syndicated in forty student newspapers and had begun when Malchow had found himself similarly bored in
law-school classes and started caricaturing his professors and their teaching styles.

In early 1982, Malchow found a more socially productive distraction. Blocks from Malchow’s law office, the state’s governor, a progressive named William Winter, was
hard at work trying to modernize the country’s most backward education system through compulsory-attendance laws and the introduction of public kindergarten classes.
When legislators blocked Winter’s reforms, Malchow—along with much of the state’s business community—was disgusted. “It was the rabble who was opposed to this,” he says. “But the rabble in Mississippi, especially at this time, was a healthy majority.” Malchow gathered a few friends with the goal of knocking off some of the old bulls in the state legislature.

The group, which called itself Mississippi First, found office space in a Jackson house where it shared a phone line with what seemed like the entirety of the state’s liberal community, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mississippi Gay Alliance. Malchow and his volunteer allies approached each of the state’s living former governors, who had little in common politically other than an enduring hatred of the legislature, and convinced three of them to share the rosters of donors they had kept on index cards. It was the first time anyone had ever assembled a thirty-thousand-person political mailing list in Mississippi, and Malchow began plotting how to shake down its names for his new cause. He hired people to type up the names and addresses, and raised enough money to buy an Apple II computer, which ran on floppy disks with such little storage that it took 110 of the disks to keep track of donors spread across Mississippi’s eighty-two counties.

Malchow had heard of Richard Viguerie, who had built a financial foundation for the Reagan Revolution in the late 1970s by collecting mailing lists of right-wing groups and conservative magazines and bombarding them with contribution requests. Malchow had also heard of Morris Dees, an Alabamian who played a similar role on the left, and probably even had some of Dees’s handiwork filed away in his office. Malchow had kept the
fund-raising letters he received—one sent for Sargent Shriver’s 1976 presidential campaign, another for Jimmy Carter’s reelection—all of which he assumed had come to him because his name was on the
Washington Post
’s national subscriber list.

After watching his candidates fail to raise the funds they needed to run their campaigns, Malchow was enthralled by the letters. “I thought it was fascinating: you could send letters out and get money back,” he says. “This seemed like a pretty cool concept to me.” He took the letters and tried to ape their style—language so excitable that recipients would be moved to immediately open their checkbooks in response—as he raised the alarm about Mississippi’s perpetually obstinate legislature. “It’s time to fight back,” Malchow wrote. One night, he invited twenty volunteers to help stuff his new four-page letter and a return mailer into envelopes, before affixing labels that emerged from a dot-matrix printer tethered to the computer where Malchow kept his list of names. By the end of the evening, only 1,200 envelopes had been stuffed. It took Malchow a month to complete all 30,000, and only then because someone informed him that professional mail shops had machines to fold and stuff envelopes. The first day that Malchow checked the post office box that Mississippi First had rented, he found ten letters. Nine could be described as hate mail, with copious use of “communist” and “nigger-lover.”

Ultimately, though, the group got six hundred contributions from the letter, a 2 percent response rate that Malchow later realized was considered a solid return in the direct-mail world. The group cashed the checks and began dispersing the money to legislative challengers it supported. One day, the group’s president, Brad Pigott, entered a meeting waving a copy of
The New Kingmakers
, a just-published book profiling the era’s influential political consultants, including Viguerie and Dees. “Look at this,” Pigott said. “Viguerie says you’re supposed to mail them again!” The book described Viguerie’s practice of alternating between tapping a prospecting list—a collection of new names with typically a low response rate—and his house list of previous donors who usually constituted a movement’s true believers.

Now, following Viguerie’s example, Malchow wrote to his six hundred again, this time with an even more dire appeal for money. The house list responded as Viguerie believed it would: Malchow got a 15 percent response rate. In the end, Mississippi First collected $100,000, about half of its total budget, through Malchow’s letters, and helped to defeat six committee chairmen each with more than two decades in the legislature.
Even before the election in 1982, the legislature acquiesced to Governor Winter’s progressive agenda, approving his education bill as well as political reforms that had not even been on the Mississippi First agenda. “No one in the world had ever sent thirty thousand people a piece of mail talking about what a bunch of ignorant degenerates the legislature was, and it freaked them out so much they passed everything in the next session,” Malchow says. More than that, the victory convinced Malchow of the unique power of political mail to galvanize activists behind a cause.

The next year, Malchow traveled to Nashville to meet with a young congressman named Al Gore, who was looking to follow his father into the Senate. Gore liked Malchow but wondered how he would justify to his donors the decision to hire a campaign manager who had lost all three of his races. “Al, you tell ’em that everybody in the state says you think you have this campaign wrapped up and in the bag,” Malchow said, “and that you hired the best and hungriest son of a bitch in America.”

After Gore’s win, Malchow moved to Washington in search of his next client. He was afraid he would become pigeonholed, and he was eager to find a race in a state like Illinois or Pennsylvania where he could show he was more than just a southern operative. Malchow printed up business cards and made the rounds pitching candidates as they came through Washington in search of a campaign manager, but never clicked with any of them. In 1985, he was living in a basement efficiency apartment, overdrawn on his credit cards and down to twenty-five dollars in his bank account, beginning to worry that he had been rash in leaving the South. Then Malchow got a call from Tim Wirth’s embryonic Senate campaign in Colorado, offering a three-thousand-dollar-per-month contract to do the
campaign’s fund-raising letters. He forgot about the campaign manager jobs and promoted himself instead as a consultant who knew how to raise money through the mail. He signed up five Senate and gubernatorial campaigns nationwide over the next year.

The field of consulting was booming, with more and more specialists offering their services to campaigns. The term
political consultant
was coined by Joseph Napolitan, who designed his first television ad in 1957 for a mayoral candidate in his native Springfield, Massachusetts, and oversaw much of the strategy for Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign eleven years later. In 1969, Napolitan convened the first meeting of the American Association of Political Consultants, taking a field whose most notable practitioners had been PR men and Madison Avenue agencies dabbling in politics and giving it an economic identity and professional code. By 1972, Napolitan was already defending his neologism. “
To me, a political consultant is
a specialist in political communication
,” he wrote in his 1972 book,
The Election Game and How to Win It
. “That’s all there is to it, and I don’t think it’s anything very macabre or Machiavellian.”

Direct mail was one of the political industry’s first clearly defined specialties. Fund-raising had taken off amid the campaign finance reforms implemented after Watergate, which placed the first limits on individual contributions. No longer could large donors write unlimited checks to campaigns: gifts were capped at one thousand dollars per person. All of a sudden, campaigns had to build a base of donors before they could even begin plotting how they would assemble a coalition of voters. While some campaigns and political committees relied in part on telemarketing, the most lucrative way to raise money was through poison-pen letters rousing donors to fear an opponent and dash off a check for protection.

The maturity of the direct-mail sector, and the introduction in the 1970s of discounts for presorted bulk shipments for nonprofit purposes, opened up a conduit for candidates to approach voters with customized messages. Campaigns had long dropped off leaflets and handbills on doorsteps, but they had never trusted the postal service to handle them. In
1982,
candidates spent $100 million on direct mail, according to an estimate at the time, with Republicans taking the lead in crafting messages too specific to have worked on television or radio. In New York, wealthy gubernatorial candidate Lewis Lehrman ran a $1 million mail program that split the state’s independents into two groups—upstaters in Republican-leaning districts, and downstaters in areas that skewed Democratic—and gave a specific pitch to each. Catholics and Jews received different letters, the latter of whom were told “Lew Lehrman speaks our language.” Republican congressman Stan Parris broke his Northern Virginia district into fifty-three different categories, and sent a total of 1.3 million letters—
nearly ten for each person who ended up casting a ballot. Lawyers, teachers, and policemen, their names culled from lists maintained by professional associations, got appeals targeted to their interests. Voters in Alexandria learned that Parris had won federal money for the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, while those in Mount Vernon were warned that Democrats were planning to place a prison nearby.

Malchow looked on with admiration as some of his Democratic peers developed a new genre of persuasion mail known as “the California style.” Their brochures were colorful and irreverent, eager to win a laugh if that’s what it took to get a voter to pay attention to a political message. “No one had ever seen mail like that,” says Malchow. With the California-style innovators as his models, Malchow in 1989 launched a new firm, the November Group, that would specialize in persuasion—helping to define the mail vendor for the first time as a central figure in a campaign’s operations. “Those who succeed will need the eyes of an artist, the words of a poet, and the elegant equations of a mathematician,” he later said, with only a bit of cheek. “Of all the professions in all parts of the universe, there is only one place where all these skills reside together.”

For inspiration, Malchow often looked past his fellow political consultants and toward commercial marketers, who had made the mail-order catalog business into a dominant force in American retailing. Their ability to manage and manipulate databases was built on algorithmic
breakthroughs that allowed marketers to get more out of their statistics. Malchow, however, had failed trigonometry his senior year in high school and managed to get through college without ever taking a math course. “I just wasn’t interested,” he says.

But he was drawn to the challenge of continual self-improvement, so in the early 1990s he started taking night classes in topics like statistics and pre-calculus at George Washington University and traveling up to New York for multiday seminars put on by the Direct Marketing Association, a trade group that catered to commercial vendors rather than political firms. There Malchow was introduced to CHAID, a statistical technique designed to locate relationships among a large number of potentially intersecting variables at once. (It stands for Chi-Square Automatic Interaction Detector.) It was notable for its simplicity to users. CHAID software on a desktop computer was arranged as a decision tree: click on a population of men and it will sprout a series of branches showing their views broken down by race, each of which can be clicked to subdivide those groupings by income—all the way until the smallest sliver of the electorate can be revealed.