COLUMBUS, Ohio—With only nine days until this election is over (or so everyone hopes), we’ve reached the stage of the campaign when the political press evaluates each side’s ground game. The media’s track record on this is not encouraging. Almost exactly nine months ago, reporters were wandering around Iowa judging the merits of everyone’s “organization, organization, organization.” The verdict: Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt were the men to beat. We were dazzled by Gephardt’s union support and by Dean’s “Perfect Storm” of door-knocking, orange-hatted, out-of-state volunteers. They both got creamed.
In hindsight, Dean’s Perfect Storm has been judged a debacle on two levels: It annoyed Iowans, who don’t like outsiders, and it tied up Dean’s staff with organizational headaches—where should we house the Stormers? How can we keep them busy?—when the staff’s time would have been better spent figuring out how to get Iowans to the caucuses. But at the time, it got great press.
So, perhaps it’s a bad omen for Kerry’s ground game in Ohio when I discover that Christy Setzer, the woman who handled press for the Perfect Storm, has been assigned to deal with national reporters who parachute into Columbus to watch America Coming Together, the New New Thing of the general election, in action. That’s not meant as a slap at Setzer—she’s a terrific person who’s good at her job (see the aforementioned glowing press)—but the parallels are irresistible. Like the Storm was for the caucuses, the George Soros-funded ACT is the Big Question Mark of the general election: How many of the new voters it registered in the past year are authentic? How many of them will show up to vote? Can this unconventional strategy win Kerry the presidency?
ACT’s army of red-coated canvassers are Kerry’s Afghan warlords: He’s outsourced his base campaign, his voter-registration drives, and a healthy chunk of his get-out-the-vote operation to them. Much of the rest of the operation will be handled by the groups (including ACT) that make up America Votes, another 527 that coordinates the voter-contact and voter-turnout operations of a host of interest groups, from the AFL-CIO to Planned Parenthood, to ensure that everyone’s on the same page. In a sense, America Votes does for the liberal ground game what Grover Norquist’s weekly meeting does for conservative talking points.
When I ask Setzer to compare ACT to Dean’s Storm, she says it differs in important ways. For one, the canvassers are paid workers and not volunteers, and the organization tries to hire locals instead of out-of-towners. More important, perhaps, the canvassers are supposed to identify voters and get them to the polls, not tell voters their personal stories of how far they’ve traveled and why they’re committed to Howard Dean (or John Kerry). But the real key is that they don’t work for just one weekend.
The secret to turnout is frequent face-to-face contact with voters. That’s a lesson Steve Rosenthal, the national head of America Coming Together, learned during his years as the political director of the AFL-CIO. Many people attribute Al Gore’s victory in the popular vote in 2000—and his wins in every close state except Florida—to Rosenthal’s turnout operation for the unions in 2000. Donna Brazile has called Rosenthal “the last great hope of the Democratic Party” and has compared him to Michael Whouley and Karl Rove. ACT is a national version of what Rosenthal did for Philadelphia Mayor John Street in 2003. In that race, 38,000, or 44 percent, of the 86,000 new voters Rosenthal registered came to the polls, he told National Journal earlier this year, compared to 28 or 29 percent of what the magazine called “voters from the same neighborhoods and similar socio-economic backgrounds who had registered on their own.”
In Ohio, ACT sends out between 200 and 250 paid canvassers each day. They get paid between $8 and $10 an hour. Setzer reels off impressive numbers: We’ve knocked on 3.7 million doors in Ohio, had more than 1 million conversations. On Election Day, ACT will send out 12,000 volunteers, each paid a stipend of $75 for travel and expenses, to make sure voters get to the polls. ACT and the partner organizations that make up America Votes have registered about 300,000 new voters in Ohio, and they’ll consider it a success to turn out just half of them. Those voters alone, though, wouldn’t swing the election. Four years ago, Bush’s margin of victory was nearly 180,000 votes. In all, Ohio has between 700,000 and 800,000 new voters for this election, though Setzer points out that some of that could just be churn from voters who moved.
My trip to watch two ACT canvassers in action wasn’t very impressive, but that’s because it was a Potemkin canvass, organized for the benefit of an MSNBC reporter and his camera. Malik Hubbard, 26, and Julian Johannesen, 32, walked up and down a few blocks in a largely African-American neighborhood in Columbus on a Saturday afternoon. As ACT’s field directors for Franklin County, which includes Columbus, Hubbard and Johannesen don’t usually canvass themselves. Each man carried a Palm Tungsten T2, which contained the addresses of the voters they were supposed to contact. It’s Saturday afternoon on the day of the Ohio State homecoming game, so it’s not optimal door-knocking time, but they do their best to put on a good show. When a voter answers the door, the canvasser gives him or her a flyer that has the address of the local polling place stamped on it. He explains that the polls will be open from 6:30 a.m. until 7:30 p.m., advises the voter to bring some form of identification to the polls in case their registration is challenged, and asks if there are any questions. On two separate occasions, a voter worries about a false rumor that the neighborhood’s voting machines have been replaced with punch-card ballots. After talking to each voter, Hubbard and Johannesen input the data into their Tungsten T2s.
Over the next nine days, canvassers will follow up with voters, continuing the personal contacts. For what it’s worth, the Bush-Cheney campaign in the state is following a similar strategy, though it doesn’t partly rely on an outside organization to carry it out. “I’m not saying we’re gonna outperform the other side, because they have the potential to be spectacular,” says Dave Beckwith, a Bush-Cheney spokesman in Ohio. “I’d just rather be where we are, with a real solid model.” The model is the Republican “72 Hour Program,” Karl Rove’s get-out-the-vote operation from 2002, which helped the Republicans gain House and Senate seats in the midterm elections. Like ACT, the 72 Hour Program relies on frequent face-to-face contact with voters, what Bush’s Ohio campaign manager Bob Paduchik calls “the volunteer-to-voter interface.”
“By and large, it is an effort to move closer to the Democrat knock-and-drag vote drive,” Beckwith says. Republicans have traditionally relied on things like direct mail to get out the vote, but this time, “We are going to the personal contact system.” The Bush-Cheney campaign has printed up small pamphlets that contain a list of each committed Bush voter in a neighborhood, along with voters’ phone numbers and a map of the area. On Election Day, a volunteer takes the book and checks off each voter after they go to the polls.
Beckwith admits that the Democrats have registered more new voters than the Republicans, but he says that their work was done by “mercenaries”—and they have “people signed up by crack addicts”—while his side employs volunteers, or “liberty-loving free men.” Beckwith then drifts into a reverie about the Battle of San Jacinto and explains how Sam Houston knew that “conscripts” and the forces of “despotism” couldn’t defeat free men. The enemy was saying, “Me no Alamo,” Beckwith says with a laugh. (At another moment in the interview, Beckwith observes of the Kerry-Edwards campaign offices, “I think they’re on Gay Street, which is interesting, because we’re on Rich Street.”)
At the Bush-Cheney headquarters, I mention to Paduchik, Bush’s Ohio campaign manager, how the media overestimated the effectiveness of Dean’s Perfect Storm. Paduchik says the evidence of Bush’s organization in Ohio is the size of his crowds, because the campaign distributes its tickets through its volunteers. When you see 22,000 people in Troy, Ohio, or 50,000 people in Westchester, Ohio, you know you’re looking at “a real organization,” he says. “It’s not because we had tickets you could download from the Internet. It’s not because we had put them on car windows, or had people pick them up at a 7-Eleven, like the other side does.”
On the way out, I’m reminded that all this work on both sides isn’t necessarily a sign of confidence. As we walk to the door, Beckwith points to an empty portion of the Bush-Cheney offices. That’s where the staff for Sen. George Voinovich works, he says. “These cocksuckers are up 30 points and they’re never in here.”
