The Victory Lab (7 page)

A GAME OF MARGINS

H
arold Malchow’s first campaign activity was hanging a Nixon sign in the window of his Gulfport, Mississippi, school bus as it trundled to Christ Episcopal Day School in the fall of 1960, his show of support for the Republican competing with classmates’ Kennedy signs for the attention of passersby. Nine-year-old Hal had inherited Republicanism from his mother, a college professor who specialized in econometrics. She was so forceful in her views that it took forty years for Hal to learn that his father—a civil engineer who worked on roads and sewer systems along the Gulf Coast and avoided politics—voted for Lyndon Johnson. By eighth grade, Hal was busy going door-to-door for the Republican ticket and nailing Goldwater signs to telephone poles. On a long bus ride to Pennsylvania for the National Boy Scout Jamboree that year, while other boys lost themselves in comic books Hal read
U.S. News & World Report
for election coverage.

But coming of age in the 1960s radicalized Malchow, at least by Mississippi
standards. His ninth-grade class was among the first in the state to desegregate, and Malchow signed on with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, spun off in 1964 to protest the racism of the state’s Democratic leadership. At Millsaps College, a liberal-arts school in Jackson, Malchow wrote lefty editorials for the weekly student newspaper and helped to organize small antiwar rallies. “We thought maybe if we could do these things in Mississippi, people would notice,” he says. In 1972, Malchow was a Democratic poll watcher at the Madison County Courthouse, less concerned with bolstering George McGovern’s hopeless candidacy than looking out for the seven black candidates running for the local election commission. Pretty soon, thoughts Malchow had had of teaching political science faded, replaced by a new goal: running campaigns himself. “The real world was exciting,” he says.

At twenty-three, Malchow was invited by one of his former professors to participate in a newly formed seminar series called the Institute of Politics. The Ford Foundation had sponsored the project to train promising young Mississippians in how to “improve the quality of practical politics in Mississippi.” Malchow cringed a little when he saw this mandate—“Everyone looks at Mississippi and says ‘What a pathetic state.’ ” But he exulted when he saw the institute’s list of guest speakers. Each was identified as a political consultant, a term that didn’t exist when Malchow began reading about elections as a child, but in a decade had become a common descriptor for the men—and it would take a while for a woman to enter their ranks—who made their money trying to win them.

For several months, Malchow spent his weekends in a Millsaps classroom marveling at a procession of consultants who talked about their careers and the distinct roles they played in the modern electioneering enterprise.
Bob Squier had happily abandoned public television when Lyndon Johnson invited him to the White House and asked him to serve as his television adviser; Squier’s camera work quickly defined the aesthetics of the thirty-second advertisement, which became the common currency of late-twentieth-century politics.
Peter Hart launched his polling firm in
1971, one of the first generation of opinion researchers to put social science survey-taking to work for campaigns. Memphis advertising executive Deloss Walker had begun advising southern Democrats on their media strategy and eventually played the new role of the general consultant, hired by candidates to manage the increasingly varied retinue of specialists that campaigns kept on contract.

Yet even as these new sages talked about tracking and shaping public opinion in a mass-media age, the speaker who most captured Malchow’s attention was the one who practiced the oldest art. Matt Reese’s specialty had been long described as “organization.” It manifested itself in “voter contact,” the category of campaign activity that, unlike broadcast and newspaper ads, was defined by its ability to hit a single individual with precision. Reese was a gigantic West Virginian whose voice boomed through the Jackson classroom, his hands gesturing wildly as he spoke. This choreography seemed appropriate, because Reese practiced politics at its most tactile—democracy as it looked from the mailbox, the doorstep, or the distant end of a telephone line. “He had all these schemes,” Malchow recalls, marveling at the terms Reese had invented: Go Days, Blitz Days, Block Captain Kits. Reese’s practically minded lexicon represented an earthbound counterpart to the narrative of politics in a mass-media era, the lofty contest of ideas and broadcast messages dueling to win over the American people. Instead, Reese’s priorities revolved around whose opinions had already been won—counting their votes, sifting between supporters and opponents to turn out the right ones, leave the others behind, and isolate the select few whose minds were still up for grabs.

Reese had been John F. Kennedy’s
only full-time employee in West Virginia before the Massachusetts senator showed up to contest the state’s primary in 1960. Kennedy’s team of high-powered volunteer advisers arrived clutching what they called “the O’Brien Manual.” The bound sixty-four-page book had been compiled by Kennedy retainer Lawrence O’Brien, whose successes in Boston politics had informed a best-practices volume for campaigns. Reese’s job was to translate the O’Brien Manual
from Charlestown to Charleston, taking lessons first divined in neighborhoods packed tight with three-decker houses and interpreting them for far-flung hollers where letters traveled by rural delivery and telephone calls over party lines.
Reese worked to get the Democratic party apparatus on Kennedy’s side, assembling chairmen in thirty-nine of the state’s fifty-five counties, and under each of them a volunteer hierarchy. Kennedy’s win in that primary is often remembered as a triumph for American pluralism—a Catholic showing he could carry a heavily Protestant state. More quietly, it also validated a new technical approach to the nuts and bolts of politics.

Over the next two decades, as television ads came to dominate campaign communication, Reese refined the far less glamorous art of turning out voters.
He effectively rewrote the O’Brien Manual in a succession of field plans, organizational charts, and checklists. Reese compared the way he found voters to his method for picking fruit: “
You go where the cherries is.” In the early days of a campaign, Reese wouldn’t spend much time worrying about the known strongholds for one side or the other—the precincts where his candidate, or others like him, had run well before or had an established partisan or demographic edge. Instead Reese’s attention would go to the areas that were likely to deliver more muddled results on election day.

There he would start looking for cherries. He would ask around for a phone bank, or in the worst cases build one anew; it could sometimes take months to get a room properly wired with phone lines. (The phone banks had to be local because interstate calls were at this time still prohibitively expensive.) Reese would hope to find an available voting roll maintained by a local board of elections or party boss, but usually there wasn’t one. So he would hand a phone book to his volunteers or paid callers with instructions to start dialing names one by one, to ask if the respondents were registered and which candidate they supported. For Reese, only two types of voters mattered. “
I wish God gave green noses to undecided voters, because between now and election eve, I’d work only the green noses. I wish God gave purple ears to nonvoters for my candidate on election eve, because on election day I’d work only the purple voters,” Reese often
explained. “The ones we go after are nonvoters who are for us and the undecided voters.”

As head of the Democratic National Committee’s voter-registration division during Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign, Reese added as many as four million likely new Democrats to the rolls. (“
If the 1964 election had not been a landslide, everyone in the country would have heard of him,” wrote David Lee Rosenbloom in his book
The Election Men
.) Reese moved in and out of governing,
landing jobs as an administrative assistant on Capitol Hill and a Small Business Administration functionary, but he always drifted back to the cherry orchard. In 1966, he opened Matt Reese Associates. It was one of the country’s first full-time political consultancies, and so far ahead of the curve that it would be years before the term itself existed. Reese and wealthy, self-funding candidates were drawn to one another. He offered them “organization on demand,” an instant standin for the party structures—with their permanent hierarchies of county chairs, ward bosses, precinct committeemen, and block captains—that had been undercut by twentieth-century reforms and the rise of independent media. “
Consultants have become possible because of the decline of the political parties,” Reese later explained to an interviewer, “and the consultant has made the parties even more irrelevant.”

REESE MAY HAVE PROFESSIONALIZED
the practice of getting the vote out, but he did not invent it. In January 1840, after returning from the state convention of the Illinois Whig Party, state representative Abraham Lincoln wrote to the party’s county committeemen, urging them to aid “the overthrow of the corrupt powers that now control our beloved country.” To bring Whig voters to the polls that November on behalf of the party’s presidential nominee, William Henry Harrison, Lincoln instructed each committee to divide its county into districts and appoint a subcommittee for each. “Make a perfect list of all the voters in their respective districts,
and to ascertain with certainty for whom they will vote. If they meet with men who are doubtful as to the man they will support, such voters should be designated in separate lines, with the name of the man they will probably support. It will be the duty of said subcommittee to keep a constant watch on the doubtful voters, and from time to time have them talked to by those in whom they have the most confidence, and also to place in their hands such documents as will enlighten and influence them.”

That Lincoln quote eventually found its way into countless sets of canvassing instructions and photocopied party-organizing manuals, affixing a noble patrimony on some of the most arduous work in politics. But the eternal applicability of the future president’s instructions was also a reminder of how little had changed in the ways campaigns rustled up votes in the century since Lincoln’s death. In 1924, a national party convention was first broadcast live by radio. In the 1940s, a president retained a pollster to have his own personal accounts of public opinion. In the 1950s, candidates hired Madison Avenue agencies to draft their TV ads. But when it came to finding voters and bringing them to the polls, it was still 1840.

In 1964, as Reese was modernizing the DNC’s election operations, a twenty-nine-year-old aspiring marketing professor named Vince Barabba took some time off from graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles, to work as a regional field director on Nelson Rockefeller’s campaign against Barry Goldwater in the California primary. Charged with organizing volunteers and setting up campaign events from Burbank to Pasadena, Barabba thought there had to be a better way to predict which voters would be favorable to his candidate without knocking on each of their doors. There was already a little information about each voter publicly available from the local board of elections—usually name, age, how long they had been registered, and the elections in which they had participated—and election officials released results down to the precinct, often equivalent to a single set of voting machines or boxes of ballots. But electoral boundaries had to be redrawn every ten years and when voters moved they took their vote histories with them.

In most parts of the country, established political machines kept track of maps and election returns, or more likely relied on old hands to recall which terrain was enemy turf and which was favorable to their cause. But California had weak parties and little institutional knowledge. Past votes there offered little guidance to present conditions, since the population changed so quickly with new arrivals whose partisan loyalties were fluid. “Things were changing so quickly out there, and there never was an entrenched political organization,” says Barabba. “It had a more open approach to politics.”