The Victory Lab (11 page)

Malchow returned to the areas with the most graduate degrees, and looked at what the Census data told him about their ethnic and racial mix. He found that these neighborhoods were clustered in Portland and had large Asian populations. Malchow called Wyden’s campaign to find out why this group, not the typical profile of a low-information voter, might be holding back from supporting the Democrat. For those who knew the city’s streets, the answer was obvious. Portland was receiving a stream of new Asian immigrants and it made perfect sense that those new to Oregon were still learning about the candidates and the issues. Chapman, the campaign manager, couldn’t even see Mellman’s crosstabs, because the computer files were so big that every time he tried to send anything more than the top-line horse-race number he crashed the campaign’s e-mail. But even if she had been able to open the file, the polls barely included enough Asian-Americans to show meaningful crosstabs for them as a single group—certainly not enough to see the granular pattern now unfolding on Malchow’s screen.

Malchow lumped together thousands of these new targets—four clusters of independents that were a combined 46 percent undecided, along with the Eugene area working-class Democrats—and proposed to Chapman that the campaign send them the most mail making the case for
Wyden, while abandoning outreach to those whose support had already been won or lost. Like many young Democratic operatives of the era, Chapman had come of age treating NCEC percentage scores as the essential guide for targeting voters. “They were the gold standard in this business for so long,” says Gail Stoltz, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s political director. Malchow’s way of viewing the electorate, as a congeries of people rather than a patchwork of precincts, was anathema. Chapman decided not to change the campaign’s voter contact program, and stuck to the more traditional methods of hunting voters. Thanks to Wyden’s deft handling of the novel vote-by-mail process and tactical miscues by Smith,
the Democrat won on January 30, 1996, by 18,220 votes, among the closest statewide elections in Oregon history.

Malchow couldn’t take credit for the victory, but he knew the narrow margin could help make the case that finding small pockets of votes should matter. He emerged from Oregon convinced both that his new statistical technique could change the way campaigns looked for supporters and that it would be a monumental challenge to get political decision makers to adopt it. “There were people who couldn’t get their head around CHAID,” says Jill Alper, who was then national coordinated-campaign director of the DNC. “It was unthinkable that you wouldn’t communicate with everyone.”

NOT LONG AFTER
the Wyden race, Malchow went to see Mark Penn, then Bill Clinton’s pollster and the White House’s leading strategist, with an unusual proposal. Malchow wanted the Democratic National Committee, with whom his firm had a seven-figure election-year contract, to impose experimental controls on the millions of pieces of get-out-the-vote mail it sent out. It was a peculiar moment in the cutthroat political profession: a consultant coming to his biggest client and asking, in essence, to have his work audited.

Malchow knew he was already becoming something of a gadfly, always agitating for a new way of doing things. Malchow’s employees tired of their boss’s constant tinkering. “At times it made it difficult to work for him because there wasn’t a lot of stability,” says Christopher Mann, who later served as vice president of Malchow’s firm. “We didn’t do things the same way twice because he would always want to try something new. It was hard to get into a routine with that.” This was an unusual character critique to level at a political consultant, since if anything they were known for holding on to such hardened styles—a favored tactical gambit, checklists verging on superstitions—that they were often accused of marketing one-size-fits-all strategies to customers.

Malchow was creative by nature, but a decade in direct mail had made him an obsessive believer in trial and error. The fund-raising cycle was by its nature a constant feedback loop. At each stage there were simple ways to test which messages and typefaces worked, and who should receive them: consultants would send out slightly different letters to multiple groups of recipients, and then identify which brought in the most money. The successful ones would become the standard, until it was time to tweak again. Malchow was fond of the game—deciding when to tap the house list to fund a prospecting effort, and then refining the pitch itself through each new cycle of mail—but he also loved the way it crescendoed to a pristine finality in an industry of messy uncertainties. It was easy for Malchow to measure the relative effectiveness of every paper and envelope that left his office: the one that brings in the most money is best.

But nothing else done within campaigns came with the same built-in accountability. Malchow felt that, through CHAID, campaigns had gained the capability to do something radical: speak to voters in small, refined batches instead of the broad swaths that broadcast television or radio markets represented. Yet there was no mechanism to measure whether they were actually generating votes. “We send a big postcard with Martin Luther King to African-Americans, but we don’t know whether it worked,” he complained to Penn.

In 1992, Malchow had made the same pitch for experimental controls to DNC officials. They were skeptical, dwelling on the possibility that the one essential component of a controlled experiment—removing a randomized sample from, in this case, urgent appeals to vote—could jeopardize Clinton’s strategy to win over voters. “What if we pulled ten thousand people into our control group and the election is decided by two hundred votes?” Paul Tully, the party’s political director, asked Malchow. His luck wasn’t much better four years later with Penn, who made clear he had little interest in testing the campaign’s voter contact programs. “I didn’t think he was invested in fighting the battle he would have had to fight to really do this. He would have had to go to all the players and say we’re going to do something different this time,” Malchow reflects. “If they roll their eyes, it’s not good business to battle over it. There’s only so much you can lobby people for something that they’re not interested in.”

Malchow felt the same way as he bounced around Washington conference rooms promoting his other agenda. In each new conference room, he would reveal a PowerPoint presentation that described his CHAID method and how he had tried to put it to use in Oregon. Some of the campaign operatives, party officials, and consultants who saw Malchow’s slides were intrigued, but none was sold. He came to realize that his foe was not only inertia, but also an institution that had developed a monopoly on the left’s campaign data. The National Committee for an Effective Congress scores that had thwarted Malchow’s efforts in Oregon existed for every precinct in the country, and a generation of Democratic operatives had been taught to treat the hundred-point figures with reverence. It was NCEC scores that made politics modern, the place where the guts of ward heelers were pushed aside by the statistical rigor of the computing era. Malchow’s proposal to throw out these talismanic scores, built from actual vote totals, and instead use polling to conjecture how an individual might vote looked—to nearly everyone in the Democratic campaign establishment—like alchemy.

Upending the party’s culture of precinct targeting with individual-level modeling would require what Malchow called a “battle royal” with
Mark Gersh, a brilliant but headstrong New Jerseyan who had worked on Capitol Hill before joining NCEC in 1978. Gersh built the committee into an indispensable player in Democratic campaigns, personally emerging as such an unrivaled expert in political geography that Gersh assumed a lucrative sideline helping broadcast networks call winners and losers on election night. When Malchow heard about a conference being planned in Las Vegas for Democrats rethinking get-out-the-vote strategies after the 1998 elections, he called friends to wrangle an invitation—but was told Gersh would never let him near it. “You get this model, and it’s hard for anyone to rearrange the model,” says Malchow. “All the parties at the table have a financial interest in the model.”

The development of the political consulting profession meant that campaign conference calls were filled with an ever-increasing number of specialists all fighting to expand their slice of a limited pie. For the phone vendor, more phone calls were a natural solution; for the media consultant, a bigger ad buy would always do the trick. Everyone had an interest in promoting their own tool and whatever theory of the electorate helped to make a case for their tactics. They usually got paid for each piece of mail or phone call they put out, or a percentage of each ad buy they placed. But it was never a fair fight. It didn’t hurt that the television was the one place where a candidate, retiring to his hotel room at the end of a long day on the trail, could actually spot his investment.

As he shopped his newfangled targeting system, Malchow was selling an investment that would either be invisible to candidates or seem redundant to them. After all, the significant cost in targeting was for a large-sample survey that overlapped with what pollsters were already being paid to do—and the best he could promise is that it would rearrange the campaign’s existing mail strategy. When Malchow explained CHAID targeting to pollsters, he realized that they not only played little role in planning a campaign’s mail program but often considered themselves rivals to it. Even though they served dramatically different functions for a candidate, pollsters and mail vendors fought for a share of the same budget.
What interest did a pollster ever have in making the mail program a more efficient investment?

Malchow found few takers even when he began offering his targeting service at cost, charging campaigns only the five thousand dollars in call center fees. “Everything he said made perfect logical sense to me. But he had a hard time selling it to other people—getting them to change the old tools they were using and people were comfortable with them. And a lot of people didn’t understand what Hal was saying,” says Anil Mammen, who worked for Malchow at the time. “Convincing people to ignore people they would otherwise mail or contact people they would otherwise ignore is a major hurdle. You’re making an argument that’s counterintuitive and your evidence is something they haven’t seen before.”

If you wanted to build a business designed to resist learning from itself, Malchow was discovering, it would look pretty much like the American electoral campaign. Candidates, who effectively serve as chairmen of their corporate boards, tend to come in two types: those who have won their last race and think they have cracked the code, or those who have never done it before and understand little about the increasingly specialized work done by campaign professionals. “Their job is to run government,” says Mellman. “They certainly aren’t immersing themselves in the tactics and techniques of campaigning, and nor should they.”

Meanwhile, the candidate sits atop an evanescent multimillion-dollar business that has only one goal: market share on a single Tuesday. Election outcomes end up being treated as their own measure of political success, even though everyone involved knows that the final tally is shaped by factors both bigger and smaller than the acumen of any particular person involved. As soon as the votes were counted in Oregon, Wyden’s campaign, and its
late tactical shift from attacks on Smith to positive issue-based ads, was memorialized in triumphant terms. Smith’s is recalled for having squandered a financial lead and structural advantages. Yet the result was decided by only eighteen thousand votes, such a marginal difference that a labor conflict distracting one of Wyden’s union allies could have inverted the result. (Smith
was elected to the Senate later that year to succeed Hatfield, and served two terms before losing his seat to Democrat Jeff Merkley in 2008.)

“There’s only winning and losing,” says Malchow. “You could run the best campaign for a loser against a huge headwind and against a whole lot of odds come close—and you’re still a loser. If you do something different, everyone will point at the thing you did different and say that’s why you lost. So if you’re the campaign manager you don’t do anything different. If you follow the rule book strictly they can’t blame anything on you.”

The paper trail that might illuminate what actually happened—the binders filled with polling data, the hard drives filled with databases accounting for every direct contact made with a voter—usually ends up in the nearest Dumpster. Often no one even convenes a postmortem among the staff operatives, consultants, and candidate to talk about what went wrong and why. “There’s a real penalty for having a nickel left in the bank,” says Laura Quinn, a deputy chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore. “So if you have any money left over for post-election analysis you must have done something wrong—that’s the theory.”

And then everyone goes on to the next campaign. Malchow never worked for Wyden again.

In January 1999, Malchow was summoned to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to meet with the brain trust for Gore’s nascent presidential campaign. Malchow’s PowerPoint peregrinations had brought him a fair bit of notice, if little new business, among Democratic operatives. Now he was being invited to make the biggest pitch of all: trying to sell a front-running presidential candidate on the value of an altogether new system for targeting a national voter contact program. Malchow had some credibility in Gore’s world, thanks to his successful management of the Tennesseean’s first race for Senate fifteen years earlier. Back then, Gore didn’t flinch at Malchow’s proposal to invest in three computer terminals for the Nashville headquarters and hire a computer programmer to develop software to manage the candidate’s schedule and track donations. From that experience, Malchow considered Gore one of the smartest people he had
ever met, if ultimately less suited to politics than other intellectual pursuits. (“In some senses, I think he ended up in the place where he was least talented,” Malchow says. “His confidence in his political judgment was never as high as his confidence in a wide range of other interests. This is why he was often overly cautious in his campaign strategies.”)