The Victory Lab (14 page)

In early 1999, Gerber and Green waited restlessly for local election authorities to update New Haven’s individual voter histories to reflect who had cast a ballot in November. They were in an unusual situation for a pair of political scientists: they did not know what they would be arguing, if anything at all, when it came time to publish the results. But they already had a hunch. In the days before the election, Gerber and Green were able to patch into the North Dakota call center they had hired to dial voters, and they were amazed by how perfunctory the exchanges were. The caller often sounded like he or she was rushing through the script to get to the end before the recipient hung up. (Most political call centers are paid based on the number of “completes” they fulfill.) Even when the caller successfully reached the end of her script, the academics listening in heard little that made them think the voter was being engaged by the appeal, or
even listening. “There’s no way this can work,” Gerber told Green as they eavesdropped on one call.

He was right. When the results of the experiment came in, the phone calls showed no influence in getting people to vote. The direct-mail program increased turnout a modest but appreciable 0.6 percentage points for each postcard sent. (The experiment sent up to three pieces per household.) But the real revelation was in the group of voters successfully visited by one of the student teams: they turned out at a rate 8.7 percentage points higher than the control sample, an impact larger than the margin in most competitive elections. When Gerber and Green reread Rosenstone and Hansen, they began to question whether the authors had fully accounted for the historic drop in turnout during the late twentieth century. Maybe the issue wasn’t just that Americans were being mobilized by campaigns any less, but that even the new forms of individual contact lacked a personal touch. A message that may have once been spoken at the doorstep would now come facelessly by phone or mail. The professionalization of such consulting services, and the growth in campaign budgets to employ them, meant that it was often easier to find paid workers to deliver a message than it would be to recruit and manage volunteers.

Other academic research had shown that in-person appeals were particularly effective in encouraging other “prosocial” behaviors, like recycling newspapers or donating blood. How to get people to undertake activities that offered no individual-level benefits but helped the community as a whole was a conundrum that theorists called the problem of “collective action,” and it sat at the center of most rational-choice explorations of why people vote (or don’t). In their experiments, Gerber and Green concluded, the costs and benefits of voting had not been appreciably altered by the volunteers’ visit, but it had certainly changed whatever internal calculus people used when deciding whether to go to the polls. “There’s nothing about that which should make you more likely to vote,” says Green. “It was a collective-action problem before I showed up, and it’s a collective-action
problem after I showed up.” But now his experiment was pointing to a potential solution: maybe one way you could get people to vote was simply to have other people ask them to.

The Yale researchers began turning their findings into an article with an understated title, “The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment,” that reflected the modest pragmatism of their accomplishment. What had started as a pilot study to settle internecine disputes within their discipline turned out not to yield any bold theoretical insights. Instead, Gerber and Green had stumbled into almost embarrassingly practical but valuable lessons in street-level politics. They sent their paper to the
American Political Science Review
, the discipline’s most prestigious venue and the same one where Gosnell had published his work seventy-five years earlier. The paper was rejected. “In short, its findings are entirely confirmatory of previous work. The paper does not offer any new theory about voter behavior,” an anonymous peer reviewer wrote. “That said, I think the study is useful, and I wish the authors luck in getting it published elsewhere.”

Gerber and Green successfully appealed the decision and in September 2000 their study appeared in the journal, but then only under the secondary designation of “research note.” But the fusty peer review standards did not much concern the campaign professionals whose methods were under examination, and who welcomed the Gerber-Green study with the same mixture of dread and flattery that washing machine dealers likely felt when the inaugural
Consumer Reports
came out. Political operatives had been trained to view political scientists with skepticism, even hostility. They saw academics as intellectual snobs with no practical experience, conjuring abstract models on college campuses far removed from the chaos and urgency of real campaigns. “Those smart guys speak that smart language. They collect smart theories to properly arrange their smart facts. Then they publish smart papers to make sure people know they are real smart,” says Tom Lindenfeld, a former Democratic National
Committee campaign director and one of the party’s leading field tacticians. “The rest of us just know what works.”

The Gerber-Green experiments, though, were hard to overlook. The findings assailed many of the consulting class’s business models and provoked a minor civil war within it. Direct-mail vendors happily used the Gerber-Green findings to suggest that candidates would be wasting their money on phone calls. “It created a furor because what it effectively was saying was that a lot of the expenditures weren’t getting you bang for the buck,” says Ken Smukler, a Pennsylvania-based consultant.

As word of the New Haven findings circulated, battered photocopies of the article passed from one hand to the next like social science samizdat. “A lot of what gets done on campaigns gets done on the basis of anecdotal evidence, which often comes down to who is a better storyteller. Who tells a better story about what works and what doesn’t work?” says Christopher Mann, a former executive director of the New Mexico Democratic Party. “It might be that their phone script made a difference—or it might be that one was Alabama and one was Arkansas and they were fundamentally different races.”

Gerber and Green had identified the first tool that was able to satisfyingly disentangle cause and effect and demonstrate what actually won votes. “It became really obvious to me very quickly that my quibbles about what had been going on in campaigns were being addressed with field experiments,” says Mann. The next year he applied to graduate school at Yale so that he could study with Gerber and Green, who were eager to have someone with Mann’s political experience as they plotted new field trials. “They had a very clear sense that what they had done to that point was just scratching the surface,” says Mann. “They had an idea that there was an audience for this stuff among campaign folk. But they needed to understand how to ask the questions that mattered to campaigns and not just academia.”

In the fall of 2000, Gerber and Green were invited to speak to the
Carnegie Corporation, one of many civic-minded institutions that had added dwindling voter turnout to their list of concerns over the course of the 1990s. Because the tax code allowed nonprofit organizations to run registration and turnout drives as long as they did not push a particular candidate, organizing “historically disenfranchised” communities (as Carnegie described them) became a backdoor approach to ginning up Democratic votes outside the campaign finance laws that applied to candidates, parties, and political action committees. Major liberal donors got into the GOTV game: Project Vote organized urban areas, Rock the Vote targeted the young, the NAACP National Voter Fund focused on African-Americans. “You were seeing much more energy devoted to turnout,” says Thomas Mann, a Brookings Institution scholar who hosted an event with Gerber and Green in a Capitol Hill committee room at the time. “They were putting resources into it, and didn’t have a very good way of measuring the effectiveness of it.”

When Gerber and Green stepped into a conference room at Carnegie, they unwittingly stumbled into an epic battle for resources within lefty interest groups. Ground-level field organizers had been losing their share of budgets to broadcast ads and commercial-style marketing campaigns, for what the organizers believed was no reason other than that mass-media platforms looked sexier. The Gerber-Green study demonstrating that door-knocking delivered results was the redemptive evidence for which they had long waited, salvation with footnotes. “Someone off to my right whispered, ‘This is like the Beatles,’ ” Green recalls of the Carnegie visit, the air particularly electric for a think-tank session. “It was only beginning to dawn on me why we were heroic figures.”

THE TWO PERCENT SOLUTION

I
n the early afternoon of November 7, 2000, Karl Rove began to panic. The first wave of national exit polls had been released at midday, and as the numbers arrived at Governor George W. Bush’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, they foretold catastrophe. Rove, the campaign’s chief strategist, was worried. He summoned his regional political directors one by one into his office to ask what they were hearing from each of their states.

Matthew Dowd, who oversaw Bush’s polling operation, was not as shocked as Rove. Dowd had prepared for a tough election day. Typically campaigns cease their polling on the Thursday prior to a vote, just before voters become hard to reach on their home phones over the weekend. Even then, there is little room for strategic adjustments; a campaign manager who learns on Friday that the dynamics of a race have shifted has few tools left to use. It is usually impossible to find a block of advertising time still for sale, and the closing spots have already been cut and delivered to stations. At best, the manager can reroute the candidate’s weekend itinerary,
order a final burst of new robocalls, or try to shuffle GOTV resources. But the headlines would force Dowd to break from standard practice. On Thursday, Dowd learned that a Maine television station had unearthed a driving-under-the-influence charge that had been lodged by local authorities against Bush twenty-four years earlier. Unbeknownst to Rove, Dowd ordered up two more nights of polling in three crucial states.

What had been a slight advantage for Bush at the end of the previous week disappeared. In Michigan, Bush had trailed Al Gore by one to two percentage points on Friday; when Dowd awoke to new numbers on Tuesday his candidate lagged by five points. Bush’s three-point lead in Florida on Friday was gone; the state had become dead even. Maine moved from a toss-up to out of Bush’s reach. As Dowd looked closely into the polls, he saw why margins had closed: social conservatives, who had always been a bit skeptical of Bush, had lost enthusiasm for him after the drunk-driving revelation.

As election day wore on, the updates Rove was getting from the regional political directors grew more dire. From around the country came increasingly fearsome reports of Democratic field operations outmatching their Republican counterparts. “We found out there were state parties that lacked sufficient volunteers to get the job done,” says Rove. “We recognized we were having a problem. It just became a bigger problem than we had anticipated because of the impact of the DUI.”

When the polls started to close on the East Coast, the consequences of this tactical gap grew evident to Dowd. The county-by-county returns in battleground states delivered the dénouement in a narrative that had been foreshadowed by the weekend polls. While Bush had suffered slightly depressed turnout among voters who should be the Republican base, Democrats—though never particularly enthused about Gore’s candidacy—still showed up in force. Even before the first planes of lawyers set off from Austin to Florida, a consensus developed at Bush’s headquarters that Democrats had turned the election into an effective tie because of their mobilizing prowess.

A few Republican strategists were prepared for this. Some had even quietly suspected that the opposition’s surprising strength in the 1998 congressional elections could be attributed to what appeared to be a newly toned turnout muscle of Democrats and their labor allies. But Republicans readily accepted this disparity as a fact of life, just as Democrats cursed their opponents’ advantage in financing their campaigns. Now the outcome of a presidential election hung perilously in the balance as a result. “That was a little bit of a shock to the Republican system,” says Curt Anderson, a longtime Republican consultant who worked on Bush’s campaign. “They were better equipped to communicate with their voters and get them to the polls. We’d been doing the same thing over and over again for twenty years.”