Matt Bai’s big scoop — almost
In his NYT Magazine article on the Democrats’ Ohio Grass Roots efforts by America Coming Together, Matt Bai would have had the scoop of the 2004 election season if John Kerry had taken the state. Excerpt:
ACT had nonetheless evolved into something glamorous, a kind of sleek new political vehicle for the Volvo-driving set. Perhaps because they supported other liberal groups aligned with ACT, like Emily’s List or the Sierra Club, or perhaps because ACT had a certain outsider cachet, thousands of volunteers from New York, New England and California chose to work for the organization in Ohio instead of the Kerry campaign; among them, I met a book editor from Manhattan and a massage therapist from Santa Barbara. A few nights earlier, in Cleveland, Bouchard and I visited a basement-level phone bank where the ACT volunteers included the actors Matt Dillon and Timothy Hutton and the actress Eliza Dushku. (”Eliza who?” I asked. ”Don’t know,” Bouchard shrugged, prompting the actress herself, apparently blessed with good hearing, to turn around and appraise us coldly.) Now, on election morning, he surveyed the ballroom. ”I don’t care where these people are from,” he said, ”as long as they’re motivated.”
Field organizers are the invisible heroes of any political campaign, the grunts who rarely get credit, and they fall into two categories: the first includes the bookish spreadsheet fiends who love nothing more than to transform urban tracts into streams of relevant voting data; the second comprises the kind of oddball extroverts whose idea of a good time is to entertain a total stranger at the doorstep of his own home. Bouchard fell into the latter category. He was likely, at any moment, to break into a blues standard or into a well-practiced imitation of Tom Brokaw. In his pocket, he carried for good luck a New England Patriots pendant that was given to him by the team’s owner, Robert Kraft, during a chance encounter. He had walked up to the man in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in New York City and started chatting him up, as if Kraft were just another voter waiting to be registered.
Bouchard had molded an impressive, almost military operation. He took over Ohio from a previous director last April, after running field operations for Bob Graham and then Wesley Clark in each man’s failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. Bouchard inherited a sprawling network of some 25 field offices and a payroll of 800 canvassers. Before he arrived, ACT was quickly exhausting its budget for Ohio, and, worse, Bouchard observed, it wasn’t converting enough voters to justify the expense. The reason, he figured, was practical: since ACT, as a 527, was legally barred from advocating for a specific candidate, it was impossible for ACT canvassers to make a compelling case for Kerry. They were allowed to tell a voter that, say, a lot of jobs had disappeared from Ohio in the last four years, but they weren’t able to explain what Kerry intended to do about it.
Bouchard closed almost a third of the offices and pared down his canvassing staff by two-thirds. His team then focused its efforts on signing up new voters in heavily Democratic areas where a lot of new and transient voters had yet to register. Using Palm Pilots equipped with 30-second video ads to show to prospective voters, the canvassers set about identifying voters across the state: where they lived, how they planned to vote, what issues they cared about. Even building an up-to-date list of previously registered voters was a monstrous assignment in Ohio, because voters in the state don’t register with a party affiliation; the only thing canvassers knew about their political orientations before knocking on their doors was whether they had voted in either party’s primary in the last six years. Every night, without fail, the canvassers plugged their Palm Pilots, full of new data about the homes they had visited, into ACT’s Web-based voter list.
By Election Day, ACT claimed to have registered 85,000 new voters in Ohio, while the rest of the America Votes coalition — groups as large as the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and MoveOn.org and as small as Music for America — had registered another 215,000. If you were an Ohioan registered by ACT or one of its partners, Bouchard told me, you were contacted as many as a dozen times after you registered, by phone or by mail or by a live canvasser at your front door. ACT claimed to have knocked on 3.7 million doors and held more than 1.1 million doorstep conversations in the state; in contrast, the Kerry-Edwards campaign, which had its own significant turnout effort under way, had arrived in Ohio months after ACT and reported having knocked on about 595,000 doors. ”There’s no way a party or a campaign could put on the ground the resources that we have,” Bouchard told me. ”The sheer numbers of doors we knock on and phone calls we make are just astounding.”
Earlier in the year, I had spent weeks on the other side of the lines in Ohio, writing an article for the magazine about the Republican plan to vastly increase turnout using an all-volunteer network, modeled on a multilevel marketing scheme like Amway, that would focus on the new and growing exurban counties around Ohio’s major cities. Democrats, traditionally the masters of field organizing, had dismissed the Republican effort as an exercise in self-delusion, insisting that volunteers could never build a turnout model to compete with professional organizers. In ACT and its partners, Democrats told me, they were building the most efficient turnout machine in political history. I returned to Ohio in the final days of the campaign to see the power of this grass-roots behemoth in action. I did — and I came to understand its limitations as well…
From the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and especially after the disputed election of 2000, Democrats operated on the premise that they were superior in numbers, if only because their supporters lived in such concentrated urban communities. If they could mobilize every Democratic vote in America’s industrial centers — and in its populist heartland as well — then they would win on math alone. Not anymore. Republicans now have their own concentrated vote, and it will probably continue to swell. Turnout operations like ACT can be remarkably successful at corralling the votes that exist, but turnout alone is no longer enough to win a national election for Democrats. The next Democrat who wins will be the one who changes enough minds.
”I can’t think of a thing in Ohio that we could have done more to boost our vote,” Steve Rosenthal told me three days after the election, as the trauma of the defeat began to subside.
With an additional 120,000 Democratic votes in Ohio, Mr. Bai would have had perhaps the story of the 2004 election. The problem was not an ineffective plan by the 527′s and their associates, however. The ACT turnout machine was very effective. Democrat turnout in 2004 was up 7% over 2000. The problem, as Michael Barone has noted, was that GOP turnout was up 19% in the election. Suppressing, disillusioning, or changing the minds of those exurban voters would appear to be one key to a future Democratic national victory.