The Victory Lab (50 page)

Most of this activity took place quietly and deliberately, receiving little attention outside a small circle of liberal foundations and activist groups that shared its objectives. The one time that the group did earn
wide notice had come in the spring of 2008, when North Carolina election officials condemned its robocalls targeting black voters with a request to return a forthcoming voter registration packet. The calls had arrived after the deadline for the primary, and many (particularly Obama supporters) accused the group of trying to mislead voters who were already registered into thinking they were not, as part of a scheme to depress the black vote on behalf of Hillary Clinton, to whom Gardner and Malchow both had ties. For bloggers who covered the controversy, Gardner’s statement that “
these calls were our sincere attempt to encourage voter registration for those not registered for the general election this fall” was treated as a bit of obfuscation. In fact, the whole process grew out of experimental research that showed that, for nonvoters with available phone numbers, an advance alert by robocall increased response rates to a mailed registration form. (The fact that some registered voters were targets marked a modest, if predictable, failure of the data Malchow had run through his statistical models.) Hackles were raised largely because of the tradition of race-based voter suppression, but for a more banal reason, as well. Women’s Voices’ approach to the largely unscientized process of registering voters was so unusually methodical (
The Economist
called it “Rube Goldberg–ish”) that the group regularly garnered suspicion from opponents and local authorities who suspected that its only purpose could be fraud or manipulation.

In November 2011, as Malchow sat in his home in Virginia monitoring his latest round of experiments, those registrations were no longer a sideshow to the project of picking a president. With a year to go until his reelection, Obama’s popularity had fallen so precipitously, especially among swing voters, that questions about persuasion no longer seemed as urgent. Turnout would, as ever, remain crucial, but economic disillusionment from some core constituencies made it imprudent to rely on mobilization efforts alone. Indeed, the first maps to line the wall in Obama’s new Chicago headquarters reflected how much Democratic plans for holding on to the White House depended on changing the composition of the electorate. Demographic shifts, particularly Latino-population spikes away from
the Mexican border, made it conceivable that nontraditional Democratic states like North Carolina and Arizona would be friendlier turf than old battlegrounds like Ohio. Nevada and New Mexico could be moved from battlegrounds to safely Democratic states, giving Obama the ability to devote his time and resources elsewhere. But Democrats and their allies would have to successfully register those potential new voters, certainly hundreds of thousands of them, if not millions. They would also have to do it early enough in the process not only to meet legal deadlines, but so that they could be identified, canvassed, and modeled in such a way that Obama’s campaign was able to meaningfully communicate with them throughout the election year.

Malchow tracked the experiments’ progress on what were known as PLANET Code reports. They were named for a service that the U.S. Postal Service had introduced years earlier permitting a mailer to place a unique bar code on a piece of mail and record when it entered the postal system. The PLANET codes allowed a person to return a registration form directly to election officials on his or her own terms without denying the original sender the ability to track the response in real time. The codes were a small innovation, unknown to most political consultants and practically useless to all but a sliver of those who work with direct mail. But as with so many other developments Malchow had latched onto during his career, their introduction had taken a discrete campaign activity with latent impact and made it instantly measurable. It was thanks to the codes that Women’s Voices and Malchow were able to run the experiments and modeling programs that, in just four years, had cut in half the cost of registering a new voter.

Now Malchow was hunting through the code reports to see whether any of his tests could help bring that cost down even further. He had auditioned one letter that tried to replicate the social pressure Grebner had aimed at nonvoters for use as psychological leverage on nonregistrants, and it seemed to be working, with a response rate about 25 percent above Women’s Voices’ standard mailer. But an effort to do the same with Gerber’s
privacy message—by including a reminder that an individual’s registration could not legally be used for commercial purposes—looked like a flop, drawing barely half the standard response. Maybe, he assumed, some of those unwilling to register were so detached from political institutions that nothing could win their trust, or perhaps just raising the issue of privacy reinforced their paranoia.

The best performer, to Malchow’s surprise, wasn’t one of the packages that played devious mind games with its recipient but the type of straightforward, even earnest, entreaty that had fallen out of favor in the Analyst Institute world. This winning package was targeted at African-Americans on their eighteenth birthdays, framing their first election—and their chance to be part of it—as a monumental occasion. Women’s Voices already had a robust “birthday” program, which mailed forms to teenagers as they turned eighteen, and it was one of the most effective mechanisms the group had. But emphasizing the historic moment of Obama’s presidency brought in even more voters.

There was an unusual sweetness to that finding, especially since Malchow was at a complete loss to explain it. He was comfortable with the honest cynicism about human decision making that informed much of the behavioralist revolution in voter contact, but he couldn’t understand why this appeal to civic duty would be succeeding where so many others had failed. Malchow grasped briefly at a few possible causes, but gave up on each quickly. He fell uncharacteristically silent, alone for a minute with the pleasing thought that there might still be a place in political life for innocent uplift.

I
t’s my good luck to have learned how to cover campaigns in Philadelphia. Politics in an old, big city has remained a wondrously physical affair. The campaign operatives I talked to tended to brag not about the size of their television ad buys but about how many election day workers they would have on the street and how many vans they had rented to drive voters to the polls. I savored election days not as a twelve-hour lull between the frantic close of a campaign and its result, but as the occasion where electioneering machinations were forced out in the open. I spent those days taking long walks on city streets. For one primary, starting just across the city line in Delaware County when polls opened and winding my way by dusk nearly to the Montgomery County border near Oak Lane, I traveled around twenty-four miles, nearly a proper political marathon—stopping along the way to check in on polling places and union staging areas, and to talk to party committeemen and ward leaders.

Philadelphia offered a real education in political tactics at their most
tactile, at what I only years later appreciated had been a transformative moment in the way campaigns counted, targeted, and mobilized votes. Those experiences instilled in me a sense that campaigns were more than a procession of speeches, ads, debates, and press conferences, in a way rarely reflected in political journalism. So I owe a lot to my friends and sources in the Philadelphia political world, particularly Nathaniel Parks and Harry Cook, who gave me my earliest lessons in the rudiments of field and voter contact, even though I wouldn’t have had the language to describe what I was learning that way. Others have been generous with their time and wisdom then and since, including Tom Lindenfeld, Mike Roman, Neil Oxman, J. J. Balaban, Doc Sweitzer, Sam Katz, Jim Baumbach, Maurice Floyd, Michael Bronstein, Mark Nevins, Ken Smukler, Maureen Garrity, Al Spivey, Elliott Curson, Eleanor Dezzi, Rebecca Kirszner Katz, Brian Stevenson, Mark Alderman, Micah Mahjoubian, Stephanie Singer, Tracy Hardy, Appollos Baker, John Hawkins, Chris Mottola, Commissioner Josh Shapiro, and Congressman Bob Brady.

The
Boston Globe
allowed me to cover the best presidential campaign I have any right to have lived through, let alone track across thirty-eight states and six countries. I am grateful to Peter Canellos for making me a newspaperman, and to Marty Baron for taking a chance on someone who had never before written a daily story. Great colleagues in both Washington and Boston made it an exceptional place to practice journalism: Matt Viser, Bryan Bender, Farah Stockman, Susan Milligan, Scott Helman, Michael Kranish, Michael Levenson, Marcella Bombardieri, Jim Smith, Foon Rhee, Gareth Cook, and Steve Heuser. Thanks to Christopher Rowland for letting me remain part of the family, and to Stephanie Vallejo for all her help and good humor along the way. I am also in hock to the transatlantic gang at
Monocle
for harboring this refugee from the American newspaper crisis, and their understanding when I felt moved on short notice to write this book: Tyler Brûlé, Andrew Tuck, Aisha Speirs, and Steve Bloomfield.

This book started as an article for
The New York Times Magazine
about the use of behaviorally minded field experiments in politics. I lived with
the piece for nearly a year, and on several occasions I worried that I had lost the access and cooperation of subjects I would need to breach the secretive world where the most compelling and influential research was taking place. At one point, fearing that I wouldn’t be able to deliver the narrative I had promised, I wrote my editor, Chris Suellentrop, to suggest we just abandon the assignment. “It’s too good of a story to give up without a little fight,” he wrote back. Chris was right, and I owe him for his commitment to telling that story—along with Gerry Mazorzati for commissioning it, Hugo Lindgren for publishing it, Lia Miller for fact-checking it, and James Ryerson for carrying it across the finish line. Thanks, as well, to David Haskell and David Wallace-Wells at
New York
for further indulging my interest in the science of politics. Since then, I have joined
Slate
to cover that terrain on an ongoing basis, and have been part of the best political team on the Web, including David Plotz, Michael Newman, Will Dobson, John Dickerson, Dave Weigel, and John Swansburg, who edits better than anybody who can edit faster, and edits faster than anybody who can edit better.

The greatest debt is owed to those whose names fill this text. My subjects and sources are often those who, in an industry propelled by self-promotion, choose to remain in the background. But this book is possible only because they shared my commitment to having the story of the largely underappreciated revolution in American politics be told with the scope and detail the subject demands. Over the course of the year I reported and wrote this book, I conducted hundreds of interviews, and the identities of those who shared their time and candor with me will be apparent to readers. (Nearly all of my interview subjects spoke, to some extent or another, on the record.) I am most appreciative of their patience. I began this project with little grasp of even the most basic technical aspects of randomized experimentation or statistical modeling, and when I think back to some of my earliest interviews I am embarrassed by some of the questions I asked and can only imagine how weary they made my interlocutors. There are a few whose contributions—unearthing documents, tracking down other sources, making introductions—are out of proportion
to whatever place (if any) they have in the narrative: Debra DeShong Reed, Anu Rangappa, Amy Chapman, Brent Colburn, Mark McKinnon, Adrian Gray, and Regina Schwartz.

A salute is due to traveling companions from an epic 2008 campaign and electioneering adventures since: Bret Hovell, Adam Aigner-Treworgy, Bethany Thomas Jordan, Mosheh Oinounou, Kelly O’Donnell, Michael Cooper, Elisabeth Bumiller, Lisa Lerer, Maeve Reston, Katie Connolly, Seema Mehta, Athena Jones, Jonathan Alter, Hans Nichols. Former colleagues RoseMarie Terenzio and Lisa Dallos remain good friends who have offered a useful boost as I’ve tried to find my footing writing books. I can thank a warm circle of erstwhile Washingtonians for welcoming me to Washington: Mike Madden, Mindy Saraco, Mark Paustenbach, Dan Reilly, Meg Reilly, Scott Mulhauser, Cecily Craighill, Betsy Barnett, Ben Wallace-Wells, Juliet Eilperin, Jill Zuckman, Carrie Budoff Brown, Jose Antonio Vargas, Christina Bellantoni, Brian Weiss and Aimee Agresti, Michael Schaffer, Keltie Hawkins, and Eleanor and Eva Schaffer. Good friends still make Philadelphia feel in many ways like home: Jason Fagone, Rich Rys, Andy Putz, Michael Karloutsos, Phil Press, Russ Tisinger, Jeff Steinberg, Bridget Morris, Alessandra Bullen, Elliot Bullen.

Some of my best friends happen to be talented writers and editors who offered their time to read and work over my text at various stages: Lisa Wangsness, Benjamin Wallace, Jack Bohrer, Geoff Gagnon, April White. They made essential contributions, as did others. I never had the good sense to study with Rick Valelly when I attended Swarthmore, but I’m glad to have gotten to know him since; he offered sage scholarly counsel on this project, partially by belatedly assigning me the political science syllabus I dodged as an undergraduate. I receive continued inspiration from Jonathan Martin; he is probably the best political reporter of my generation, and I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to watch him up close as he practices his craft. And above all there is my longtime friend and professional coconspirator, James Burnett, who makes just about all my work better.