So it wasn't just the churches that were telling folks to vote rethuglican; it was also the workplace, or "pro-business" employers. After reading the story below (and screaming a few times!), I googled "Prosperity [Propaganda] Project" and was rewarded with a whole slew of state chapters, including one in my own state,TN.
The article below says they targeted 18 states (gee that number sounds eerily familiar). Unfortunately, the participating businesses are a bit shy about revealing themselves. (!)
GOP Surfed for Voters at Work
Greg Gordon, Star Tribune Washington Bureau
November 6, 2004 BIZWAR1106
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Business groups picked Ohio two years ago as the first place to fully deploy a new tactic for turning out Republican votes in the 2004 election.
Managers at more than 50,000 companies in Ohio urged employees to vote, while trying to coax them in e-mails to look at customized internal Web sites rating politicians' votes on business issues, a project leader said. One rating gave Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry a zero last year on votes affecting manufacturers.
Now the business strategists are trumpeting their efforts in Ohio and several other battleground states as a prime example of how Republicans topped Democrats in turning out voters, clinching President Bush's reelection. Greg Casey, a former U.S. Senate sergeant-at-arms who headed what he calls business' "below-the-radar" national effort, said it resulted in 30 million electronic contacts with workers, about 700,000 the day before the election. He said 812,000 workers downloaded voter registration forms from the Web sites.
Casey believes that the "Prosperity Project" had a big impact in Ohio, citing research suggesting that for every 10 employees who scanned company Web sites, one was motivated to vote. He said Ohio companies made 1.3 million employee contacts, more than nine times Bush's 136,483-vote victory margin in the state.
Former Michigan governor John Engler, the new president of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), said businesses' effort to turn out voters "has to be viewed as a resounding success."
Lawrence Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political scientist, agreed that "the days when the Democratic Party had a natural advantage in turnout are over," noting that Republican-leaning churches have also fine-tuned their voter mobilization tactics.
But Jacobs is skeptical of company managers' assurances that their effort is politically neutral and doesn't urge workers to vote for certain candidates.
"Employers know that they're into a dangerous territory" as they circulate political material in the workplace, he said.
"This is not nonpartisan, even-handed campaign material. It's material that's subtly, but clearly promoting one candidate at the expense of another. That's the line that's being crossed. It raises a lot of issues about the rights of employees not to be intimidated regarding elections. ... There's no democracy in a workplace."
Through the e-mails and Web sites, he said, it could appear that "your boss is giving you very clear signals about how he wants you to behave as a citizen. ... You're seeing a blurring of a line between the hierarchy of a workplace and the equal playing field of citizenship."
Casey and other Prosperity Project officials, however, say they are "respectful" to employees and merely offer them access to information affecting their companies' prospects in a tough global economy.
"At the end of the day," said Eric Burkland, president of the Ohio Manufacturers Association, if employees and companies "aren't working together, all those jobs are going to China."
The customized Web sites include ratings of legislators' stands on issues such as trade, legal reform and proposed regulatory changes aimed at helping U.S. firms compete globally.
In Minnesota this year, Casey said, 327,800 employees opened Prosperity Web sites that display key business issues and business groups' ratings of votes by congressional members. Among Minnesota's delegation, Republicans rated sharply higher. GOP Sen. Norm Coleman got two 91 percent ratings, while Democratic Sen. Mark Dayton was rated from 8 percent to 45 percent. (Neither senator was up for election this year.) In the House, where every seat was up for election, Minnesota's four GOP members rated between 75 and 100 percent, while conservative-leaning Democratic Rep. Collin Peterson (52 percent to 70 percent) was the only one of four House Democrats to exceed 38 percent.
..... http://www.startribune.com/stories/587/5071629.html
Here's another story that suggests 'Prosperity Project' was needed in order to counteract the AFL-CIO's GOTV efforts:
Prosperity Project Turns On Political Power in Nationwide GOTV Campaign
http://www.nam.org/s_nam/doc1.asp?CID=39&DID=232063