The Victory Lab (33 page)

THE ORIGINAL POLITICAL EXPERIMENTERS
looked on with approval from New Haven as their method snaked from academe through the corridors of power. Gerber and Green were already working on a second edition of
Get Out the Vote!
, which anthologized findings from dozens of electioneering field tests. Many of the studies had been conducted by former students who represented something of an experimental diaspora, with nonacademic collaborators who had emerged after the publication of Gerber and Green’s original
American Political Science Review
article. At first the pair had worked on a few small candidate campaigns, including one managed by a former student of Gerber’s. Groups promoting turnout among core Democratic constituencies, such as Youth Vote and ACORN, hired Gerber and Green to evaluate their programs. Then, Nickerson, who eventually managed the professors’ growing research “shop” at Yale, used municipal elections in Seattle and Boston to test the effectiveness of phone calls bearing a prerecorded message from a local registrar of voters. During a Virginia governor’s race, Gerber and two other researchers randomly gifted households in the state’s Washington suburbs with free subscriptions to either the
Washington Post
or the
Washington Times
, for a study titled “Does the Media Matter?”

The publication of
Get Out the Vote!
was part of a conscious effort by Gerber and Green to step out of the academy and ensure that lessons from these studies reached a nonscholarly audience. The authors believed they had made this populist mission apparent through the inclusion of an exclamation mark in the book’s title. (“This is an unusual thing,” Gerber says of the punctuation.) In their introduction, Gerber and Green bluntly declare themselves uninterested in “broad-gauge explanations for why so few Americans vote,” like an alienated citizenry and poor civic education. Instead they offer the volume as a “shoppers’ guide” for candidates and activists, filled with ratings (up to three stars) of different campaign methods based on the reliability of the academic findings. “Door-to-door canvassing by friends and neighbors is the gold-standard mobilization tactic,” they write in one standard passage.

The slim paperback became a vade mecum for organizers working in the ranks of groups who had responded to the era of partisan polarization by shifting their resources from persuasion to mobilization. “If they had published that in 1985 it would have been a blip. In 1985, it was all about TV and media buying,” says Kevin Arceneaux, who as a postdoctoral fellow helped run the Gerber-Green lab for two years beginning in 2003. “But there was an explosion of interest in these old methods—shoe-leather politics—and going back to that.”

Major Washington institutions began to take notice as well. Green had traveled to the capital during the Republican National Committee’s 72-Hour research phase, and Hal Malchow helped get him in front of any lefty crowd that would have him. “I did my rap for every Democratic institution under the sun,” says Green, naming the DNC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and a gathering of liberal interest groups hosted by EMILY’s List. At each stop, Green explained the experimental method and presented some findings from the research he had conducted with Gerber. Even though most assumed that the two Yale political scientists were liberal (and neither rejects the claim), both would always emphasize that they were eager to collaborate with anyone regardless of party or
ideology. “I think of myself as being on the science team,” says Green. “If Republicans want to do science, I’m happy to jump in. Democrats? Fine.”

But by then, Gerber and Green felt they had exhausted most of the questions about the relative effectiveness of individual contact methods.
They knew that personal contact was almost always better than mail, and mail usually better than phones. They knew that live calls were better than robocalls. They knew that volunteers were more effective, both at the door and on the phone, than paid workers. They knew that interactive conversations, where the canvasser asked regular questions of a voter, had more impact than a one-sided script. “There is something about canvassing that worked because it was on a personal level,” says Arceneaux. “We knew that. We just didn’t know why.”

Rogers and Grebner were coming from a different set of questions but arriving at a similar understanding of what drove political activity. No one decided to vote in a vacuum, and interpersonal interactions mattered. In fact, their psychologically minded tests and feints were moving toward something that felt very familiar to Gerber. Rogers’s project to promote voting as popular and Grebner’s threats to expose scofflaws had, if only briefly, reconstructed small corners of late-nineteenth-century America, where voting was a community activity. Since writing his dissertation about the introduction of the secret ballot, Gerber had spent much of his time trying to isolate the slightest ways to increase turnout in the system it had created. In Gerber’s eyes, the nineteenth century, where men packed onto courthouse steps to select their leaders with raised hands or words bellowed over the din, represented a kind of Edenic political space of widespread participation.

At one point, Green decided to see if they could bring Gerber’s prelapsarian America back to life.
Green drove up to Hooksett, New Hampshire, just before the town would host municipal elections, and spent twenty-six thousand dollars to erect a tent on a middle school lawn and hire a DJ to play music beneath it. On the Saturday before, they put a flyer in Manchester’s
Union Leader
advertising an “Election Day Poll Party,” an
alcohol-free, family-friendly version of the festivities that in the nineteenth century were
boozy men’s-only events. Along with a grad student and a colleague from Tufts, Green put up signs promoting the event, had the town administrator distribute flyers, and recorded phone calls to alert three thousand local households. A coin flip had determined that a demographically similar town, Hanover, would go DJ-free and be used as a control; afterward they could compare turnout and measure whether such festivals had any impact. (State officials advised that, as long as they did not directly reward people for voting, a festival was perfectly legal.) For four hours, families snacked on Yale-subsidized hamburgers and hot dogs as kids played catch under clear skies. Green spun cotton candy for attendees. “One of the things I really would not have anticipated was getting into the nuts and bolts of actual campaign work I don’t consider myself particularly good at,” he says.

In the crowd was a large man who wore a bemused smile. He was not there for a hot dog or to buy a ticket in the raffle. He was not there to vote, either; in fact, he did not even live in Hooksett. He had already worked for a generation at the highest levels of American politics. Now he was about to take command of a $40 million campaign budget, and he thought the guy spinning cotton candy might be able to help him spend it better.

SHOWDOWN AT THE OASIS

I
t was a two-hour round-trip from Dave Carney’s New Hampshire home to the Hooksett election day festival but Carney had ample incentive to make the drive. He was about to become Don Green and Alan Gerber’s most beneficent patron. The previous summer, Carney had bought a copy of
Get Out the Vote!
after seeing it promoted in a Brookings Institution catalog as a “practical guide for anyone trying to mobilize voters.” The description applied to Carney, a Republican consultant who each year handled only a few campaigns, approaching each with an intensity that often frightened his colleagues as much as his opponents. From his desk in Hancock, he would sit watching an apple orchard bear its fruit while he listened in on conference calls and drafted strategy e-mails for Americans for Job Security. The corporate-funded group offered an independent boost to Republican candidates, usually by running ads that savaged their opponents, and to Carney it represented the kind of low-profile, high-paying mercenary work that sustained his business even as it failed to inspire him. For months,
Get Out
the Vote!
had sat untouched, under drifts of polling binders, taking its place on an oddball desktop reading list that included—in roughly ascending order of centrality to Carney’s worldview—statistics texts, popular business books, Adam Smith’s
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
, and Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
. Then, in November 2004, Carney prepared for a trip to Texas to meet advisers to Governor Rick Perry, his main political client and the one whose campaigns most inspired Carney, so the two could begin formal preparations for Perry’s bid for a second full term. Carney tossed the book into his briefcase as in-flight reading material.

In 2002, when he was directing Perry’s first gubernatorial campaign, Carney had helped to design a massive turnout operation, spending $4 million to pull voters to the polls, much of it concentrated during Texas’s two-week early-vote period. Carney’s forces, tapped from temp agencies statewide, indiscriminately knocked on doors in one thousand “fortress precincts,” as party operatives referred to the areas where they typically garnered more than 60 percent of the vote. At the same time, Texas Republicans hired Brent Seaborn, a junior staffer at Alex Gage’s firm, to draft a primitive microtargeting plan that would help locate conservative-minded independents who resembled potential Perry voters and could be persuaded on specific issues like taxes, education, or tort reform. (Texas voters do not register by party, but those who regularly choose to participate in a party’s primary are usually treated by strategists as though they were formally attached to it.)

Perry won the race by 18 points. Carney was pleased with the result, yet eager to find out who should deserve the credit. Had his unprecedented investment in a get-out-the-vote operation mobilized voters who would have otherwise stayed home? Did Seaborn’s data find Perry voters that the campaign would have otherwise ignored? Or had Perry just been a great candidate running in a conservative state as the heir to a popular governor now serving as a wartime president? After election day, Carney had asked Mike Baselice, Perry’s pollster, to commission a survey in search of answers, but he was unsatisfied with what the numbers told him.

Carney designed his own bootleg experiment for Perry. He took four demographically similar markets that could be isolated in a “bell-jar kind of a way,” as one Perry adviser described it, and assigned a treatment to each. In one city, Carney had the campaign buy newspaper ads; another got a blast of robocalls; the third received radio ads and a dusting of mail; the fourth just mail. It was out of an election cycle, so the messages referred to general issues in front of the state legislature rather than campaign themes. He had Baselice poll in each market before and after to measure Perry’s support among voters and their awareness of each issue. Carney attributed the differences in how public opinion moved in each market to the delivery mechanism: the radio and mail combination seemed to change minds slightly, while newspaper ads didn’t at all. “It wasn’t done in the truly academic sense, so you couldn’t say it doesn’t work,” Carney says of the after-action tests. “We just couldn’t show much tangible improvement.”

Somewhere between Manchester and Austin, it all started to make sense for Carney. As soon as he arrived in Austin, Carney went onto the Yale website and searched for e-mail addresses for Alan Gerber and Don Green. In their book, the political scientists lament that most of their field experiments up till that time had been of the same sort: working with nonpartisan groups on their efforts to turn out voters. The few times that Gerber and Green had been invited into candidate campaigns had been on small-scale local races. The next campaign on Carney’s docket was a wholly different affair. Perry had spent $25 million in 2002, and Carney anticipated a much tougher reelection in 2006, when voters were likely to have tired of Republicans and be eager for alternatives. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a popular Republican whom Carney had helped win her first election to the U.S. Senate, was considering a primary challenge, and a formidable Democratic threat likely followed in the fall. Carney had begun planning for a budget of $40 million, the bulk of which—as was typical in statewide races, especially with a geographically far-flung electorate like Texas’s—would naturally go to television and radio. “Would you be interested in being in a real campaign?” Carney wrote to Gerber and Green.