The Victory Lab (22 page)

Dowd and Mehlman finally won him over. Someone would now have to contend with consultants certain to feel threatened by Gage’s technique, especially the phone vendors who each year performed millions of dollars’ worth of ID calls that would now be considered superfluous. Coddy Johnson, a Mehlman deputy who had become the campaign’s field director, traveled the country to meet with senior state party officials to tell them that their targeting methods, which usually focused on their strongest precincts, were no longer going to be supported by the RNC. “We’re not mailing them, we’re not going to call ’em, and we’re not buying radio in their neighborhoods,” Johnson would explain. “Here’s how we’re going to do it.” He brought with him PowerPoint slides of the Pennsylvania microtargeting project, and would flip to a Stay-at-Home Independents segment: families in suburban areas that might not be loyal Republicans or even regular voters but that the algorithms showed would be ripe targets for Bush. “That’s who we are targeting,” said Johnson. “We’re not going after the fifty-year-old man who’s voted in every primary and caucus in the last twenty years.”

Dowd, the former Democrat, didn’t care that his decisions would antagonize local Republican officials and the party’s consulting class. “Everybody knew I was going to be bailing quickly, and that I wasn’t going to be part of any new regime,” says Dowd. “After election day I wasn’t hanging around to do a bunch more campaigns.” That message would become clear to anyone who walked by Dowd’s office at Bush’s suburban Virginia headquarters and saw the handwritten sign he affixed to it. “GTT,” it read, the same abbreviation for “Gone to Texas” that Tennesseeans—including
many who ended up dying at the Alamo—had scrawled on their homes before fleeing the state to escape their debts after the Panic of 1819. When Dowd envisioned the conflict he was triggering with his new political methods, another nineteenth-century analogy came to mind. “It’s a business,” he says. “You show up with an automobile that runs on gasoline and the horse-and-buggy people go crazy.”

IT WAS CLEAR
to anyone closely watching ground-level politics in a battleground state that the Republicans were doing something different in 2004. By the last weekend of the campaign, there were six thousand field-workers walking streets with clipboards (or in some cases primitive handheld digital devices) or manning phone banks. Many of them were in places that had never before seen Republicans hunt for votes, let alone in such a disciplined fashion. When Ryan Johnson, a Bush field organizer responsible for five suburban counties ringing Minneapolis, led canvassers into blue-collar, union-heavy neighborhoods of South St. Paul, he had to reassure them they hadn’t made a wrong turn. “It was like, ‘Why are we going there?’ ” he recalls. The same question was asked on one of Bush’s visits to the state, when he stopped in Duluth, a Democratic stronghold that rarely made Republican target maps let alone earned a few hours of the president’s time. Now, Bush’s strategists could count the number of voters they were trying to reach in Duluth, even if they were a minority, in the hopes of tipping the whole state—“real people who support you behind enemy lines,” as Nelson put it.

In Washington, deputy party chairwoman Maria Cino had converted the fourth floor of RNC headquarters into a command center for 72-Hour operations, filling conference rooms with staffers responsible for booking flights, hotels, and rental cars for ground troops nationwide. Cino had, in effect, created a travel agency, with five people handling arrangements for Ohio alone. When Democrats talked about enlisting volunteers for
field, it often involved union members and college kids. The RNC found its volunteer ranks thick with congressional staffers and lobbyists. “This is not a volunteer effort where you can have everybody staying in people’s homes,” she says.

They arrived at their destinations to find clear instructions waiting for them. Bush’s state directors were judged by the weekly spreadsheets they sent back to headquarters listing the number of phone calls and house visits their volunteers had made, and perhaps more important, how many new ones they had recruited. During the summer, headquarters demanded that each state administer a “Test Drive for W.” operation, devoting a day to a full-scale deployment of turnout resources, giving Hazelwood’s team a new array of data on which to judge their state-level personnel. Afterward, she spent weeks leaning on state party officials to enlist county leaders, with local field organizers walking the new recruits through PowerPoint presentations titled “You will be the Margin of Victory,” which outlined the 72-Hour Task Force’s new set of highly regimented best practices. Those identified as turnout targets would typically get three rounds of contact by phone or door knock, the first two in September and October to encourage them to vote early or by mail. Field organizers were able to show the results of experiments demonstrating that, in states permitting it, getting voters to cast a ballot early was more efficient and cost-effective at delivering votes. “They ate it up, and it made them true believers,” says KC Jones, the campaign’s deputy executive director in Minnesota. “They worked harder. A lot of volunteers, if they feel they’re just leaving voice mail after voice mail, they wonder: Am I making any sort of effect on this? Now they knew they were.”

But even as those experimental findings were projected onto the crudely spackled walls of field offices across the country, the microtargeting information was closely held. The term itself was rarely spoken beyond the upper echelons of the campaign, or even outside the team assembled to match the new data with the traditional voter contact program of mail and phones. The Michigan gang relocated to Washington to run the numbers
operation, with Seaborn and Meyers building the data models. From his new home in South Carolina, Wszolek wrote the pithy segment names and descriptions that Gage felt helped him explain the data to political operatives in a way they could visualize it.

These issue profiles were conceived to make it easy for operatives to intuitively match messages to specific groups of voters. Minnesotans who received federal farm subsidies were almost certain to get a piece of mail arguing that Bush’s free-trade position would not damage the state’s sugar beet economy as badly as many farmers believed. Moderate Republicans in the Philadelphia suburbs learned about Bush’s support for the Clean Skies Initiative, which the campaign presented as a policy of pragmatic environmentalism. “The universes shrank but they did many more pieces,” says Kevin Shuvalov, who worked on Bush’s mail team. “Once you took all these little clusters and put them together you were basically having an ongoing conversation with the entire universe you have in a state.”

There were so many specialized pieces that Ted Jarrett, who coordinated the mail operation at Bush’s headquarters, stopped looking at the individual orders he sent to vendors. One day, Jarrett got a call from one of the firms producing a mail piece. Did they really want to print only three hundred copies? It was comically microscopic: city council candidates rarely put in mail orders that small. “If there’s one thing I think people don’t get about the Bush election in ’04, it’s this idea that it was a base election and all they were concerned about was the base,” says Meyers. “That was in a sense true but they treated the base as anyone who agreed with them strongly on an issue.”

Dowd had already made a priority of knowing how to rile up a voter who stood with Bush on only a single issue. As he watched 72-Hour Task Force refine the party’s procedures and protocols for reaching their supporters, Dowd had worried that Republicans wouldn’t know what to say to them once they had. So he asked Fred Steeper for what the survey taker called a “mobilization poll,” focused only on one piece of the electorate.
What issues or themes could Bush use to push loyal Republicans to the ballot box on his behalf?

A decade earlier, the RNC had ordered up from Steeper another poll of Republicans, this one to explain why they seemed to have deserted George H. W. Bush in his loss to Bill Clinton. Traditionally, polls asked people to process politics analytically, but from what Steeper had witnessed on campaigns it seemed that the issues that really drove elections were the ones that pushed voters emotionally. Steeper decided he would just ask them directly “how pissed off they were,” as he put it—a hunt for what he thought of as their “anger points.” Instead of prompting people to place abortion’s importance as an issue on a five- or seven-point scale, or asking whether Bush’s position had changed their likelihood of voting for him, Steeper’s survey asked “how angry” they were made by the number of abortions that took place annually in the United States.

Steeper’s polls convinced him that one popular take on the elder Bush’s electoral failure—that Republicans had been fractured over social issues—didn’t ring true. After the election, few respondents recalled having been energized by Pat Buchanan’s convention speech declaring a “culture war.” Yet all of Steeper’s questions about unemployment and the economy elicited a strong reaction. Anger points did not need to be only a retrospective tool, he realized; they should help media consultants isolate issues and craft messages around them while a race was still to be won or lost. “The practitioners are always looking for hot buttons!” Steeper says.

When Dowd ordered up the mobilization poll, Steeper thought it was time to hunt for hot buttons. He gathered a sample of people who had identified themselves as Republicans in other surveys done for Bush by Jan van Lohuizen, and felt around for their anger points. Did estate taxes make them angry? What about activist judges, late-term abortions, or trial lawyer fees? Steeper’s polls showed that while September 11 had had a temporary effect on Bush’s broad popularity—
the president’s national approval jumped to 86 percent immediately after the attacks—it had an
enduring influence on Bush’s base. They were emotionally invested in the “war on terror” that Bush had declared: angry about efforts to repeal the PATRIOT Act, pleased about Saddam Hussein’s removal. As he drafted questionnaires for the benchmarking surveys on which his microtargeting segments would be built, Gage decided to add a battery of questions, inspired by his old mentor Steeper, that would probe for “anger points.” In one of the campaign’s endless sequence of conference calls, another Bush adviser asked why the poll didn’t investigate voters’ emotional responses to the administration’s successes. Gage called these “pleasure points,” a term that reliably made him snicker even as he was pressured to include such questions in his polls. “How pleased and happy are you that Bush has reformed the education system?” he says, derisively. “It was easier to write anger points.”

When funneled into Gage’s microtargeting algorithms, anger and pleasure points helped to turn message development on its head, with acceptable language trickling up from voter contact needs instead of sent down from media consultants trying to translate advertising themes for smaller audiences. The pleasure points questions yielded one unlikely pocket of targets for Bush—his No Child Left Behind school reforms had left a mark on Hispanic women in New Mexico—and helped identify issues for others, such as the environmentally minded Pennsylvania moderates. Weak anger points scores also helped exclude voters from contact on sensitive issues. “We realized some people were pro-life but that talking about it put their religion or their morals on their sleeve and were uncomfortable,” says Todd Olsen, who inherited Rove’s Austin-based firm and worked on the campaign’s direct-mail team. Most important, the new measure of intensity allowed those writing direct-mail pieces to calibrate the emotional potency of their language and imagery. “It helped with the body language of message, the nuance,” says Chris Mottola, a media consultant on Bush’s ad team. “It helped you know how far you can go in terms of rhetoric.”

The last weekend of the campaign, a four-page brochure started arriving in mailboxes across the country. By most aesthetic and moral standards
of the time, this mailer went too far.
The front flap featured a collage of September 12, 2001, front pages of the
Des Moines Register
and
Orlando Sentinel
, newspapers intentionally chosen to represent battleground states, with an image of the World Trade Center in the midst of the previous day’s plane attacks. “How can John Kerry lead America in a time of war?” it asked. On the back, in hazy chiaroscuro, was Osama bin Laden, making eye contact with every reader. The head shot may have been the single most familiar facial image in news coverage from 2001 through 2004, but it had never entered the official visual language of the campaign. An informal prohibition on explicit depiction of the September 11 events had been accepted by both sides, and studiously enforced by elite opinion.
When Bush had run an ad in March showing the World Trade Center wreckage and a firefighter carrying a body from the site, victims’ families hosted press conferences to protest. A draft of the proposed mail piece sat around untouched for months amid a heated debate over its propriety. Many of Bush’s advisers argued that such a graphic appeal could force swing voters to recoil from Bush, goaded by a media eager to claim that the White House was preying on a climate of fear it had helped to nurture.