A
very interesting election post-mortem can be found in a current Washington Post analysis.
It's difficult to know whether the article's overall thrust -- that the Bush campaign "outorganized and outthought" the Kerry campaign, as well as outspent at key times -- can be derived from the election results.
In a sense, that seems self-evident from the tactics Bush employed. On the other hand, Kerry very nearly beat an incumbent wartime president, so writing an article that implies Bush beat the pants off Kerry seems to me to be engaging in a little Monday-morning quarterbacking. Would the same claims be made if Bush had lost Ohio by 100,000 votes?
Still, there are important points the article contains, and they're things we can learn from and make use of in the future.
For one thing, it would appear that the Bush team knows Bush is a very polarizing figure (in other words, the fact that he's a divider, not a uniter is not a secret) so they concentrated on shoring up Bush's support, rather than trying to win over undecideds and soft Democrats.
In 2001, Dowd said that "we made some of the basic strategic assumptions about what we thought the election would look like."
One fundamental calculation was that 93 percent of the voting-age public was already committed or predisposed toward the Democratic or Republican candidate, leaving 7 percent undecided.
Another calculation was that throughout the Bush presidency, "most voters looked at Bush in very black-and-white terms. They either loved and respected him, or they didn't like him," Dowd said. Those voters were unlikely to change their views before Election Day 2004.
That prompted Republicans to jettison their practice of investing 75 to 90 percent of campaign money on undecided voters. Instead, half the money went into motivating and mobilizing people already inclined to vote for Bush, but who were either unregistered or who often failed to vote -- "soft" Republicans.
"We systematically allocated all the main resources of the campaign to the twin goals of motivation and persuasion. The media, the voter targeting, the mail -- all were based off that strategic decision," Dowd said.
For another, it would appear that Bush had a definite overall strategy that took maximum advantage of Kerry weak points, especially those times when Kerry was low on cash -- just after the primaries, and in the month of August.
One thing that isn't terribly clear, at least from my initial reading, is why Kerry was supposedly hamstrung by a legally-mandated inability to coordinate with outside groups, but Bush didn't face the same obstacle. Is there the implication that Bush ignored the law, or that some other system was employed?
In a $2.2 billion election, two relatively small expenditures by Bush and his allies stand out for their impact: the $546,000 ad buy by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the Bush campaign's $3.25 million contract with the firm TargetPoint Consulting. The first portrayed Kerry in unrelentingly negative terms, permanently damaging him, while the second produced dramatic innovations in direct mail and voter technology, enabling Bush to identify and target potential voters with pinpoint precision.
. . .
A supposed strategic advantage for the Democrats -- massive support from well-endowed independent groups -- turned out to have an inherent flaw: The groups' legally required independence left them with a message out of harmony with the Kerry campaign.
. . .
Republican officials said they put $50 million into "ground war" drives to register and turn out millions of new voters in 2001 and 2002, and an additional $125 million after that.
Meanwhile, Kerry, faced with a difficult primary campaign and infighting and turnover among his consultants, did not begin seriously to address the general election until after his Super Tuesday primary election victory in March, eight months before the November vote. By that time, the campaign was hamstrung by legal restrictions on any cooperation between the campaign and the independent 527 organizations running ads and mobilizing voters on Kerry's behalf.
I was especially interested in the techniques employed for targetting voters, though. There seems to be absolutely no reason why Democrats couldn't do the same thing even better in the future.
The 2002 elections, along with the Kentucky and Mississippi gubernatorial contests the following year, became testing grounds for the Republican effort to mobilize supporters. Designed to get base voters to the polls, it became known as the "72 Hour Project," whose cost Republican officials refused to disclose but is estimated by sources to have been in the $200 million range.
Under Dowd's direction, the RNC began investing in extensive voter research. One of the most striking findings, according to Republican consultants, was the ineffectiveness of traditional phone banks and direct mail that targeted voters in overwhelmingly Republican precincts. The problem: Only 15 percent of all GOP voters lived in precincts that voted Republican by 65 percent or more. Worse, an even smaller percentage of "soft" Republicans, the 2004 target constituency, lived in such precincts.
The RNC decided to cast a wider net for voters. But to work, Dowd's motivation and mobilization strategy needed expensive, high-tech micro targeting to cherry-pick prospective Republicans who lived in majority Democratic neighborhoods.
Republican firms, including TargetPoint Consultants and National Media Inc., delved into commercial databases that pinpointed consumer buying patterns and television-watching habits to unearth such information as Coors beer and bourbon drinkers skewing Republican, brandy and cognac drinkers tilting Democratic; college football TV viewers were more Republican than those who watch professional football; viewers of Fox News were overwhelmingly committed to vote for Bush; homes with telephone caller ID tended to be Republican; people interested in gambling, fashion and theater tended to be Democratic.
Surveys of people on these consumer data lists were then used to determine "anger points" (late-term abortion, trial lawyer fees, estate taxes) that coincided with the Bush agenda for as many as 32 categories of voters, each identifiable by income, magazine subscriptions, favorite television shows and other "flags." Merging this data, in turn, enabled those running direct mail, precinct walking and phone bank programs to target each voter with a tailored message.
"You used to get a tape-recorded voice of Ronald Reagan telling you how important it was to vote. That was our get-out-the-vote effort," said Alex Gage, of TargetPoint. Now, he said, calls can be targeted to specific constituencies so that, for example, a "right to life voter" could get a call warning that "if you don't come out and vote, the number of abortions next year is going to go up. "
Dowd estimated that, in part through the work of TargetPoint and other research, the Bush campaign and the RNC were able to "quadruple the number" of Republican voters who could be targeted through direct mail, phone banks and knocking on doors.
Anyway, read the whole thing. It has good info, and I think we would do well to conduct a thorough analysis of what Bush's team did right and emulate/improve on it, as well as work on improving our own techniques and coordination. For example, I see no reason why, using the sort of micro-targetted, high-tech information Bush's team had, we couldn't both target our own groups, undecideds AND those leaning Republicans.