Jul. 12, 2004
The New (Old) Politics
By J. Barlow Herget
RALEIGH - President George Bush, at last count, has raised over $212 million for his re-election campaign, not including the $1 million he picked up here last week. He already has spent much of his millions on television commercials, and he is quietly spending millions more on some old fashioned politics -- grassroots, get-out-the-vote organizing.
State Republican Party officials don’t want to give away any secrets and decline to reveal their plans. But press reports and Republican candidates are talking about a grass roots plan that’s unprecedented in scope.
A little history. The GOP did not have the turnout it expected in the 1998 mid-term election and national party officials vowed to do better next time. They experimented with some pilot programs called the 72-hour Project in the 2002 mid-term election. Wake County reportedly was a model and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Dole carried the county by 20,000 votes over her Democratic opponent Erskine Bowles.
A report in “The New York Times Magazine” by Matt Bai described how the Bush campaign is preparing for this year’s presidential election. Rather than the familiar boiler room bedlam of most grassroots campaigns, Ken Mehlman, 37 and a Harvard educated lawyer, runs the operation from an office complex in Arlington, Va. It’s orderly, computer connected and efficient, and it started in February, not August.
It also commands a huge database of Republican voters; its e-mail subscribers alone number over 6 million. Using a system similar to multi-level marketing, not unlike Amway, the campaign has identified volunteers down to the precinct level. Regional and state captains are given goals on the number of volunteers they must recruit and the number of new Republican voters to register. In Ohio, for example, the state chairman was given the goal of recruiting 51,000 volunteers and 91,000 new voters.
What separates Mehlman’s plan from traditional “coordinated campaign” is that his group expects and gets weekly reports from every level of volunteer. One Ohio county chairman, for instance, was to recruit 643 volunteers by a certain deadline, and Mehlman wants names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mails for his database. And on Election Day, they all will contacted to vote and to get their list of Republican neighbors to vote.
In North Carolina, both party chairmen emphasize the importance of the grassroots campaign. Democratic Chair Scott Falmlen predicts, “The Democratic Party will probably have its most sophisticated turnout operation ever. There is no question that turnout organizations are important.”
His Republican counterpart, Ferrell Blount, told a Nash County audience, “We have to have neighbors calling neighbors, neighbors walking neighbors. It has to be a sweat and shoelaces, grassroots campaign. If we don’t do it, we are going to lose.”
Bruce Pederson, Democratic chair of the 11th Congressional District that includes 15 western counties, is a model for Falmlen’s coordinated campaign. Unlike the top-down Republican campaign, Pederson, a retired Asheville principal and coach, depends more on his own organization than any national presidential campaign.
Mehlman’s operation, however, mirrors Pederson’s effort. He has volunteers in all of Buncombe County’s 71 precincts except two. He has regular volunteer luncheons that draw 75-80 people. His district meetings draw 40-45 party leaders. He has voter lists, now available from local election boards. He has walk lists with addresses of Democrats for neighborhood canvassing and he has precinct maps.
“We can flag where every Democratic voter lives,” he says. “We will target precincts that are high Democratic registrations, but poor performing. We will telephone bank and on Election Day, we will get lists from each precinct to see who has voted at 10 a.m. and again at 2 p.m.”
Pederson says his system works and he points to the April Democratic Presidential Caucus results as proof.
“The 11th District was responsible for 25 percent of the total vote [in the statewide caucus],” he says. “I think that the grass roots campaign is going to be outstanding. I’m hearing about people who are changing their registration in every county we’ve had. More people are attending precinct meetings and the monthly Democratic meetings like Democratic Men or Democratic Women than ever before.”
The national, state and local campaigns are continuing to spend money on traditional media to spread their respective messages. One radio executive in Raleigh says that his stations already have sold out most of their time for political ads. And this is before President Bush and Sen. John Kerry decided to start spending serious money in political advertising.
But it’s the grassroots campaigning that may be the most effective message. The contrast between a media campaign and street-level campaigning is compared by one analyst to his movie-going experience. You can see all the ads and promotions on television and in the magazines for a new film, but if it stinks, you’ll hear about it.
Likewise, if your neighbor and your coworkers and your girlfriend tell you that there’s a new movie you ought to see, you’re going to buy a ticket.
Politics often works the same way. And that’s not a bad thing.
Barlow Herget is a former Raleigh city councilman and writes the Follow the Money column for the N.C. Center for Voter Education.
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