The Victory Lab (16 page)

The materials spread out before select members of the RNC, congresspeople, and other party grandees who attended were meant as a
sobering tonic after months of intoxicating triumphalism. Hazelwood had asked the RNC’s research department to scour newspapers for accounts of what liberal allies had done on Gore’s behalf the previous fall. Their six-page compendium—bearing the headline “What the Bad Guys Did?”—documented the way Democrats had learned to mobilize like an infantry, from the forty field staffers that the NAACP dispatched to battleground states to a Service Employees International Union phone bank with thirty-six lines, computer-assisted dialing, and the ability to make one thousand calls an hour, all within the trailer of a purple eighteen-wheel truck that volunteers called “Barney.” What most awed Republicans was the turnout strategy from Hillary Clinton’s successful run for Senate the previous year. A copy of the document found its way into Hazelwood’s hands, and she studied its careful assignment of activity by paid and volunteer staff, plotted over a six-month period down to the block level. “We were obsessed with her plan,” Hazelwood says.

Hazelwood was astonished at how different this looked from the way that Republicans prepared for election day. Reagan’s new right showed the movement’s core to be an assemblage of enthusiastic constituencies—religious true believers, free-market enthusiasts, military loyalists committed to a hawkish foreign policy. Even though conservatives scorned Democrats as beholden to unions and other identity organizations, Republican strategists started thinking about their party as a coalition of distinct interest groups, all invited to march in lockstep at election time. In the late 1970s, Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail fund-raising innovator, had acquired lists from ideologically sympathetic institutions—religious book clubs, righty magazines, and gun clubs—and mailed their members on behalf of conservative causes, with dire warnings about the liberal threat. In the 1980s, thanks in large part to Viguerie’s success cultivating small donors, the Republican National Committee had built up a permanent financial advantage over the Democrats. Party leaders made heavy investments in burnishing the party’s brand through television ads and pushing issues over talk radio. Yet when it came to directly getting their voters to the
polls, Republican strategists hewed largely to Viguerie’s approach of subfranchising the work to coalition allies, trusting outside groups to know their followers.

In 2000, Hazelwood had served as the RNC’s coalitions director, overseeing three dozen networks, including sportsmen and Hispanics. Meanwhile, the Bush campaign focused on seven major coalitions, including agriculture and social conservatives. The campaign collected membership directories from the farm bureaus and megachurches whose ranks were packed with active Republicans, and then developed a strategy for communicating with each set of voters on the issues they could be expected to care about (agriculture subsidies, prayer in school). But the coalitions rarely had significant manpower of their own to offer, and certainly not on the scale of what Democrats got from labor unions, so when Republicans wanted to put out pre-election reminders by phone they had to use paid call centers. When it came to their party’s turnout strategy, Republicans would chuckle that GOTV stood for “Get on Tele Vision”—a joke about the lack of an available workforce and the diffusion of their supporters. “When Democrats walk a precinct they’re going to hit more votes than we are. It’s just the nature of it,” says Adrian Gray, who worked as a regional political director for Bush in 2000 before joining the White House staff. “We had to take geography out of the equation.”

One of the biggest problems, as Dowd laid it out in room 2000, was the voters Republicans took most for granted. Christian conservatives were the Republican counterpart of the Democrats’ labor base, but task force members griped that they lacked the “intensity of organization at the grassroots level” that the unions had. Dowd presented exit poll data showing that after Republicans took back Congress in 1994, the share of voters who identified with the religious right slipped. (One of Dowd’s slides showed that while unions and religious conservatives each represented about 20 percent of the voting-age population, 26 percent of those who voted in 2000 were union members and only 14 percent were religious conservatives.) If capturing both houses of Congress diminished
the conservative base’s appetite for power, task force members wondered, what messages could mobilize it when the movement was represented in all three branches of government, as it was now?

Dowd was interested in a debate over issue message and strategy, but he thought there were more basic matters to address. How could Republicans tailor narrow messages to their base if they did not know, in individual terms, who the members of their base were? And how would they deliver those messages if the party had no protocols for voter contact? Republicans, he decided, had to figure out what made people vote. “I had heard enough of these stories, but where’s the fucking data? Everybody always bullshits all the time about
Oh, this won the campaign!
” says Dowd. “We just knew that a systematic approach was the only way we could really judge it, and rate differences as opposed to stories, anecdotes.”

Dowd had quit graduate school at the University of Texas in the 1980s to work on campaigns, but the former political science student prided himself on paying more fealty to academic research than did many of his consulting peers. At the end of 2000, as Dowd tried to catch up on reading that had piled up during the campaign thrum, he came across the article in
American Political Science Review
in which Don Green and Alan Gerber recounted their New Haven experiment. The findings that in-person contact worked better than mail and phones confirmed Dowd’s instincts. The article also convinced him that the academics’ randomized-trial method was one the party could adopt to run its own experiments and develop a new set of best practices for turnout. “One of the incentives for doing tests was to change the culture of allocating resources,” says Hazelwood. “To convince our campaign managers and general consultants to take money out of their media buys and put it into the ground, we needed real results and real tests.”

Dowd knew a serious experimental regime would threaten many of the party’s longtime consultants and vendors, especially media specialists whose overfed campaign budgets had starved Republican field operations. He didn’t much care. “Having come from the Democratic side, I wasn’t
aware of all these people,” he says. “I didn’t have a stake in it.” But Hazelwood, who had worked in Republican campaigns her whole career and was married to one of their leading direct-mail vendors, did. It would be her job to insulate the party’s culture from the jolt Dowd was about to deliver. To reduce the likelihood of internecine conflicts that could follow among consultants whose interests were newly pitted against one another, Hazelwood decided it would be important that their research agenda look like a party-wide effort, at once centralized and collaborative. Hazelwood’s e-mailed invitations to meetings of the 72-Hour Task Force did not need to spell out a warning that the 2004 campaign budget would be shaped by the task force’s decisions, and that it was better for any consultant to be inside the room than outside it. “It was Karl Rove’s baby and they wanted to be part of that,” says Hazelwood.

Every week or two throughout the spring of 2001, around forty Republican consultants, summoned by Hazelwood’s e-mail, would arrive in Washington, traveling from across the country at their own expense. The group slowly compiled a list with dozens of possible research queries, many skeptically addressing “things we all thought we knew,” according to Hazelwood, and others with questions no one had ever thought to ask. They would test the value of a message sent by phone as opposed to mail, obviously, but what about two phone calls versus one, or two phone calls versus two mailed brochures? Did a piece of mail followed by a phone call have a different impact than the opposite sequence? Did it matter whether the caller or door-knocker was a volunteer or a paid contractor? What could the party do to increase new registrations and take advantage of opportunities to cast an absentee ballot or participate in early-vote programs being introduced in several states?

Unlike Dowd, who had worked in media and polling, Hazelwood saw a particular value in the experiments beyond the findings themselves. Because Republicans lacked the tradition of in-person canvassing that ran deep in Democratic culture, Hazelwood worried that field organizers would have trouble convincing volunteers to take on unfamiliar, and
often charmless, duties. A scientific study with measurable effects could help show field-workers that their tasks were crucial to the broader effort. “They were crying out for this data, all of the time asking: ‘Why are we doing this?’ ” she says, recalling her interactions with grassroots activists she tried to enlist in 2000 as part of her coalitions work. The next time those questions came up, “we could say: ‘I know it sucks in Florida walking in the summer, but look at these tests—it improved turnout.’ ”

Hazelwood mapped out a rough schedule for the next three and a half years. She wanted to complete the tests quickly so that Republicans could start to rebuild their electioneering operation in 2002, when one-third of Senate seats and a majority of the nation’s governorships would be in play, and perfect them in time for 2004. For those seeking to shift the balance of power in the United States, 2001 offered a meager roster of elections. But for those seeking to learn how campaigns work, it amounted to fertile experimental terrain.

THE FIRST WEEK
of October 2001, eight RNC staffers drove from headquarters seventy miles to the northwest of Washington, D.C., and came to a halt, as though looking to settle just beyond the periphery of the capital’s influence. They had journeyed through dense inner-ring Virginia suburbs, and then past the blossom of office parks and new housing developments that marked the quickly emerging communities demographers like to call “exurbs” and that White House strategists saw as friendly turf nationwide for Bush’s moderate, family-oriented conservatism. The caravan settled in Winchester, the redbrick seat of bucolic Frederick County, in the Shenandoah valley. The RNC staffers found an empty storefront between a local Republican headquarters and an Irish pub and began to turn it into a field office in a place where the national party had never before had a direct presence.

As in much of rural Virginia, Republicans had taken Frederick County’s
votes for granted ever since they broke for Richard Nixon in 1968. With its network of politically involved churches and active gun culture, there was little chance of the area going blue. But it was also a place where the Republicans’ laissez-faire approach to base turnout may have limited their vote totals at the expense of statewide candidates. A few months earlier, Hazelwood had approached Timmy Teepell, who had succeeded her as coalitions director, to propose that he design and oversee the most ambitious experiment on the task force’s docket. Hazelwood had prepared to make a large investment to test how a new approach to coalition organizing could benefit Republican performance. What would happen if the RNC overwhelmed one of its strongholds with both paid contact and volunteer operations?

Virginia had one of the few gubernatorial elections on the calendar, a race whose stakes would matter to social conservatives. For comparison, Teepell selected two counties whose size and demographics were similar, and where coalition allies had a large footprint: Frederick, in the northwest corner of the state, and Roanoke, to its south. (In 2000, Bush had carried both counties with more than 60 percent of the vote.) In one, the RNC would try to maximize its presence; in the other, they would stay away and let the state party proceed with its normal efforts on behalf of its gubernatorial nominee, who was Attorney General Mark Earley, and down-ballot candidates. “Frederick was closer to my home, so we used that as the test and Roanoke as the control,” says Teepell, who commuted to Washington from suburban Loudoun County. “I had three kids and wanted to sleep in my own bed.”

Teepell’s eight-person team, comprising the RNC’s entire coalitions department, arrived in Winchester in time to spend the last five weeks cultivating the conservative base there. Teepell was given the standard binder of research that the party had prepared on Democratic gubernatorial nominee Mark Warner, a former telecom entrepreneur who in an earlier Senate race had built a statewide reputation as a probusiness moderate with the potential to win crossover votes. The material that polls showed
was most likely to provoke social conservatives was an unearthed clip from a Warner speech to a Democratic convention seven years earlier when Warner, the party chairman, attacked the state’s conservative activists as extreme. In Frederick County, Warner’s quote became grist for four targeted mail pieces (“Mark Warner described the views of people of faith and homeschoolers as ‘threatening’ to America”), four paid phone calls, and two ads on local Christian radio stations.