The Victory Lab (17 page)

Because he came out of the world of coalitions organizing, Teepell tended to think of politics not as an activity conducted in well-bounded geographic spaces but as one that pulsed through networks of people linked by common interests. Teepell had his team make a list of the local communities he called “social precincts,” and when it became time to recruit volunteers he had his staff fan out to gun shops and church events. “You may have a neighborhood that tends to vote a certain way,” he says. “You can also have a homeschool cooperative who think similarly about the same issues, but because they are across the region you can talk to them when they come together.” Teepell arrived in Frederick with a particular interest in marshaling those homeschool families, many of them Christian conservatives opting out of secular schools. His own political career had begun as a homeschooled fifteen-year-old going door-to-door for Republican candidates in his native Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Now he looked at families like his—who tend to be exceptionally well networked because parents organize extracurricular-style activities to bring homeschooled children together—as an ideal volunteer constituency. A coalition-based volunteer strategy, more broadly, was based on a similar logic: finding people who are used to being active together and assigning them a new political mission.

As his staffers recruited new volunteers and oversaw phone bank shifts and printed out walk lists for them, Teepell obsessively tracked their work to report back to Washington. Over the course of the month, volunteers spent a combined 407 hours at the door identifying voters and 459 hours persuading them there, leaving behind doorhangers with a picture of a crawling baby under the slogan “Protect Virginia’s Values.” From a
phone bank, volunteers added 305 hours on IDs and 314 on persuasion. On election day, 75 volunteers were assigned to rouse voters at their doorstep while 53 did it by phone.

Warner beat Earley statewide, in one of two governor’s races the Republicans lost that night. But there was a glimmer of good news for those monitoring results in the RNC’s political department. Earley ran five points stronger in Frederick than he did in Roanoke, four points of which their later analysis credited specifically to the coalition exercises they had run to motivate social conservatives. “That was like, ‘Oh my God!’ ” says Hazelwood. “That was pretty shocking to me, that we could increase turnout that much.”

In Hazelwood’s mind, 2 percentage points had been something of a benchmark for turnout improvements. Any intervention that exceeded that was promising and worthy of future attention; one that fell short probably was not worth the trouble. The numbers from Frederick suggested Hazelwood had been dramatically underestimating the influence a rigorous campaign could have. When RNC pollsters called social conservatives in the two counties, those in Frederick were 16 percent more likely to say they had been contacted about Earley’s campaign, which suggested that not only had the additional resources and manpower expanded the party’s reach but also that the quality of volunteer interaction had been high enough to make an impression.

By the end of 2001, Hazelwood had overseen fifty experiments and had developed a formidable body of knowledge about what worked in voter contact. In South Carolina, calls from volunteers had turned out voters at a rate five points higher than paid call centers. Sending new Republican registrants in suburban Philadelphia a piece of literature with local polling place information increased their turnout by six points. Dispatching “ground troops” to flush voters to the polls on the Monday and Tuesday of the election improved Republican turnout by an average of three points. Assigning a full-time precinct worker, as the party did in both Pennsylvania and Virginia, added three. At one time, such margins might have been
shrugged off as negligible. “One good thing about the closeness of the last presidential election is that it erases the need to convince people how important two percent can be,” Hazelwood, recently promoted to RNC political director, told the party’s winter meeting in Austin the next January.

Hazelwood devoted a considerable share of her PowerPoint presentation at that gathering to explaining the Frederick County coalition test, as an example of what Republicans could do when they flooded an area already home to a developed network of coalition allies. “We aren’t here to tell you about your state, but rather to give you an idea of what can be accomplished within a target group if you really make a commitment to do it,” she said to the gathering of party officials at an Austin hotel ballroom.

Another set of experiments offered lessons that might prove more portable to other parts of the country where Republicans lacked an existing infrastructure. In two precincts in different states, a new-style targeting of phone and mail messages had increased Republican vote share by almost exactly the same amount: a 3.6-point gain by Earley in the Virginia governor’s race, and 3.4 points for congressional candidate Joe Wilson in South Carolina. In these cases, the targeting was based on the standard individual-level data available on the party’s national voter file, which mostly designated voters by straightforward demographic categories. Richer data, Hazelwood explained to her crowd, would only make the targeting sharper. “Knowing where a voter lives, how old they are, what gender they are, and all those things are very important. But nothing is as important as understanding what they really care about,” she said. “To accomplish this, we need better information on more voters. This can be done, but it will take a team effort and a lot of people willing to give some time.”

Hazelwood concluded her presentation by encouraging state and county party officials to schedule a daylong turnout seminar in which the RNC staff would train local activists to better use volunteer door-knocking, paid phone banks, and coalition lists to identify individual voters for the
2002 midterm elections. Already Hazelwood had hosted four regional meetings that included party leaders from forty-seven states. “The other three states have been kicked out of the party,” she joked.

Dowd was sitting on a panel to discuss the findings. Though he kept it to himself at the time, he had recently learned of a method that promised to render entirely moot the arduous and costly process that Hazelwood had just outlined. This new tool would offer a powerful boost to whichever party first mastered it: a way to divine what issues every single voter in America cared about without having to track them down and ask them individually.

A FEW MONTHS EARLIER
, Matthew Dowd had wandered the long, colonnaded porch of the Grand Hotel on Michigan’s Mackinac Island, aware that the political terrain he had so delicately mapped with 2004 in mind was already shifting beneath his feet. It was one week after Al Qaeda’s assault on New York and Washington. Immediately after the attacks, staffers at RNC headquarters had been instructed not to place any phone calls or send e-mails outside the building, for fear they would be seen as playing politics at a time of national tragedy. Pundits speculated that partisanship could be indefinitely pushed aside in favor of a greater sense of national purpose. But the point of the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference was partisanship, and the island’s autumnal camouflage offered a low-profile refuge for swing state operatives whose competitiveness had not been dulled by the terrorist attacks.

Alex Gage arrived on the island with his mind fully on 2004. That summer, Gage, a longtime Republican pollster based near Detroit, had attended one of Hazelwood’s many presentations of the 72-Hour Task Force’s work. Two of the eight items on her “Prescription for Victory” checklist particularly drew his attention. One was the need for “sharper targeting”
of messages by phone and mail; the other was “voter identification,” where Hazelwood said Republicans demanded more efficient methods. Gage decided to treat these “almost like a Harvard Business School problem,” as he put it. When he traveled a few months later to northern Michigan, he was eager to tell Dowd that he might have figured out a way to meet both challenges at once.

“YOU MEAN YOU DON’T DO THIS IN POLITICS?”

I
n a consulting industry filled with hucksters, Alexander Gage was an awkward salesman. He fidgeted constantly and his sentences shared a tendency to trail off before reaching their destinations. But his discomfiting manner belied a career building political relationships. He spent much of his childhood near Washington, the son of a lobbyist representing E. & J. Gallo Wineries, but by Gage’s teenage years his father had moved the family to Detroit to oversee the vintner’s regional interests. At Christmas, Gage was given the job of driving cases of wine to the houses of Michigan legislators as holiday gifts. He went to a small college in northern Michigan in search of a hockey career; when the time came to give up on that, Gage transferred to the University of Michigan and studied politics. Desperate for work after graduation, he took a job cleaning rooms at the University Motel in Ann Arbor. One day, he read a newspaper reference to a poll conducted by a Detroit firm named Market Opinion Research. Gage looked up the company in the Yellow Pages, sent his résumé, and after
months of his follow-up calls was hired as a part-time intern in the summer of 1974.

To the political world, Market Opinion Research was known as the home of Bob Teeter, a young Republican operative who had little training in statistics but had stumbled into polling when it was still, in his words, “
a kind of black art.”
Teeter was barely out of college when in 1964 he traveled to San Francisco with his father, a small-town Michigan mayor serving as a delegate for favorite-son presidential contender George Romney, and marveled at the spectacle of a national party convention. That year, while working as a teaching assistant and football coach at Adrian College, Teeter spent his summer vacation as an advance man on Romney’s reelection campaign. From there he was hired to manage a southern Michigan congressional campaign, and toyed with rudimentary precinct analysis so he could target prerecorded supportive phone calls from Romney to unaligned voters. In 1967, a twenty-seven-year-old Teeter joined Market Opinion Research and set out to recruit a roster of political clients; by 1970, his analysis had helped to elect a series of midwestern governors.

Polling was the fastest-growing consulting specialty of its day. The academic survey-taking on which the American National Election Studies had been based was slow, and typically occurred after the fact. To the extent that campaigns used polls through the 1960s it was for what pollsters called “benchmarking”: to take stock, usually at the beginning of an election season, of where voters stood—what issues they cared about, their attitudes toward the economy, what they thought of politicians in the news. By the end of the decade, polling grew more nimble, allowing candidates to use short-term, small-scale surveys to inform tactical decisions as a campaign proceeded.

By 1971, Teeter was so celebrated for his ability to translate survey data into practical strategic advice that Richard Nixon pushed aside his pollster and
hired the young Michigander for his reelection campaign, which went on to
spend more than $1 million on surveys. Teeter decided he had to get serious about statistical research, and to do that he hired
Fred Steeper, then a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student at the University of Michigan who had worked at its Institute for Social Research during the 1968 election study. Steeper’s academic credentials impressed Teeter, who wanted to style Market Opinion Research as more analytically rigorous than its peers. Each poll the firm would return to a candidate would include a complete report, sometimes as long as one hundred pages, even when a candidate or campaign officials made clear they had neither the time nor interest in more than a five-page summary. Market Opinion Research’s name occasionally appeared on articles in political science journals challenging academics’ voting models with data from private surveys. Although Teeter and Steeper shared authorship of the journal articles, there was no question how the firm divided its labor. Steeper wrote the scholarly material while Teeter brought in the clients and translated the survey results into strategic advice, which usually required repositioning conservative candidates so they could appeal to centrist ticket-splitters. One client, Illinois governor James Thompson, called Teeter the “
Midwestern barometer.”