The GOP does know how to win elections and 2004 showed that in spades. But could they have done it without all those Texans running the show? Carl Rove, Matt Dowd, chief operating officer, and Mark McKinnon, the principal media consultant, all got started in Texas and some, Dowd and McKinnon even worked for many years for Democrats. Here is a great Washington Post story and how they did it.

Happy New Year and may 2005 be a better year for Democrats.

“washingtonpost.com

On Nov. 2, GOP Got More Bang For Its Billion, Analysis Shows

By Thomas B. Edsall and James V. Grimaldi Washington Post Staff Writers Thursday, December 30, 2004; Page A01

In the most expensive presidential contest in the nation’s history, John F. Kerry and his Democratic supporters nearly matched President Bush and the Republicans, who outspent them by just $60 million, $1.14 billion to $1.08 billion.

But despite their fundraising success, Democrats simply did not spend their money as effectively as Bush. That is the conclusion of an extensive examination of campaign fundraising and spending data provided by the Federal Election Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and interviews with officials of the two campaigns and the independent groups allied with them.

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.

Those tactical successes were part of the overall advantage the Bush campaign maintained over Kerry in terms of planning, decision making and strategy. The Kerry campaign, in addition to being outspent at key times, was outorganized and outthought, as Democratic professionals grudgingly admit.

“They were smart. They came into our neighborhoods. They came into Democratic areas with very specific targeted messages to take Democratic voters away from us,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe said. “They were much more sophisticated in their message delivery.”

The ultimate test of the two campaigns is in the success of their efforts to increase turnout from 2000. Kerry and his allies increased the Democrat’s vote by about 6.8 million votes; Bush increased his by nearly 10.5 million. In the key battleground of Ohio, Bush countered Kerry’s gains in the metropolitan precincts by boosting his margin in exurban and rural counties from 57 to 60 percent, eking out a 118,457-vote victory.

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.

A large part of Bush’s advantage derived from being an incumbent who did not face a challenger from his party. He also benefited from the experience and continuity of a campaign hierarchy, based on a corporate model, that had essentially stayed intact since Bush’s 1998 reelection race for Texas governor. Take Office, Plan Campaign

When Bush moved into the Oval Office in 2001, planning for his presidential reelection campaign began almost immediately. Under the direction of Karl Rove, Bush’s top White House adviser who served as a kind of chairman of the board, White House political director Kenneth B. Mehlman, the chief executive officer, pollster Matthew Dowd, chief operating officer, and Mark McKinnon, the principal media consultant, the Bush political team developed a strategy for 2004, began investing in innovative techniques to target voters and prepared an early and cost-effective advertising plan. During this period, the Republican National Committee, where much of the planning was based, outspent its Democratic counterpart by $122 million.

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.

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. 527s’ Ineffective Messages

The 527 groups, named after a section of the tax code and allowed by law to accept unlimited contributions, provided invaluable help in registering and turning out voters. America Coming Together put about $135 million into what became the largest get-out-the-vote program in the nation’s history. But the 527s, fueled with money from billionaires such as George Soros, proved ineffective in helping Kerry deliver a consistent and timely message in his advertising.

Of all the money spent on television advertising for the Democratic nominee, Kerry’s campaign controlled 62 percent, according to spending totals analyzed by The Washington Post. The rest was spent on ads whose content or placement could not be coordinated with the campaign. The Bush campaign controlled 83 percent of the money spent on its behalf, giving it far more control over when and how it advertised.

At two junctures, when Kerry was either out of funds or under pressure to conserve resources for the close of the campaign, the absence of an overall strategy had damaging consequences: in March 2004, just when the Bush campaign began its first anti-Kerry offensive; and in August 2004, when the Swift Boat Veterans commercials raised questions about Kerry’s service in the Vietnam War.

The Democratic media 527s “didn’t do what we wanted done,” Kerry media adviser Tad Devine said. “We would have run ads about Kerry, we would have had answers to the attacks in kind, saying they were false, disproved by newspapers.”

Harold Ickes, who ran the Media Fund, a 527 organization that raised about $59 million in support of Kerry, said the federal election law prohibiting communication with the Kerry campaign created insurmountable obstacles in crafting effective, accurate responses to anti-Kerry ads. Ickes said he regretted not responding to the Swift Boat Veterans’ attacks, but at the time he thought they seemed “a matter so personal to Senator Kerry, so much within his knowledge. Who knew what the facts were?” Early Research Is Like Yeast

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.

Democrats had access to similar data files. But the Bush campaign and the RNC were able to make far better use of the data because they had the time and money to conduct repeated field tests in the 2002 and 2003 elections, to finance advanced research on meshing databases with polling information, and to clean up and revise databases that almost invariably contained errors and omissions.

“Very few people understand how much work it takes to get this technology to actually produce political results. We are one election cycle behind them in this area,” said a Democrat who helped coordinate voter contact in the 2004 campaign.

The Bush campaign’s early fundraising success made much of this possible. By March 2004, Bush had $110 million in the bank and virtually no debt. During this period, Kerry was forced to spend all his time and money in the Democratic primaries, a fight that cost him $36 million and that left him $5 million in debt.

“Nobody was giving a thought at all to the general election,” said Kerry pollster Mark S. Mellman. Until that March, “it was: How do we survive this week?” Bush Ads Undermine Kerry

Two days after Super Tuesday, the Bush campaign, anticipating Kerry would have no money to respond, began a $40 million, six-week televised assault designed to crush the Democratic nominee before he could get off the ground. “We had a financial advantage over them for four to six weeks. That’s why we did what we did,” Dowd said.

With a $177 million ad budget, the Bush campaign and its allies ran more than 101,000 anti-Kerry “attack” or negative ads, more than the combined total of “positive” and “contrast” ads, according to the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project, based on data from Nielsen Monitor-Plus ratings of media buying effectiveness.

Less than 5 percent of Kerry’s ads were “attack” or negative, according to the Wisconsin advertising project, and the remaining 95 percent were positive or contrast ads.

During March and April, before the candidate had replenished his war chest to finance TV ads, Kerry strategists were convinced that Kerry needed a barrage of positive biographical ads describing him in a sympathetic light to counter the negative picture drawn by the Bush ads. But when the Democratic 527s began their ad campaign, they aired negative ads reflecting their intensely anti-Bush donor base.

By the time Kerry had raised enough money to begin his positive ad campaign two months later, the Bush “attack” ads had helped convert the ratio of Kerry’s positive to negative ratings in battleground states. Kerry’s positive ratings fell from 40 percent to 35 percent, and his negative ratings rose from 24 percent to 36 percent at the start of May, according to the National Annenberg Election Surveys.

The negative Bush barrage was followed in August by the Swift Boat Veterans ads, the first one airing on just four cable channels at a cost of $546,000. The Swift Boat Veterans eventually would raise and spend $28 million, but the first ad was exceptionally cost-effective: most voters learned about it through free coverage in mainstream media and talk radio.

An additional Republican television commercial that significantly affected the race, according to surveys, was a positive spot financed by a second GOP 527 group, Progress for America. It invested $17 million in “Ashley’s Story,” which featured Ashley Faulkner, 11, whose mother had been killed in the attack on the World Trade Center, describing her meeting with Bush. GOP Dollar Power

Overall, Kerry, the DNC and the Democratic 527s spent $344 million on ads, while Bush and the GOP counterparts spent about $289 million, much of which was disbursed in the final three months. Arguably, Republicans got more bang for their bucks.

The Bush campaign’s early strategy decisions shaped GOP spending. Under the guidance of Rove, Dowd and Mehlman, the Bush campaign had financed early research into ways to communicate to center-right voters through nontraditional media.

The Bush campaign concluded that many of their voters did not trust the networks and the establishment press, and therefore did not trust messages transmitted through them.

Mehlman said that talk radio and cable television “are more credible” to potential Bush voters. Ultimately the Bush campaign invested an unprecedented $20 million in narrowly targeted advertising on cable and in radio, with a heavy emphasis on religious, talk and country and western stations, and such specialty outlets as golf and health club channels.

“They did a lot of stuff really well. They were ahead of us,” said one of the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote managers who did not want to be identified. “They had a strategy set by the beginning that they were going to live and die by. And we didn’t.”

In an election with a 2.6 percent margin of victory, the Bush campaign was run to ensure that every dollar went to fulfill core strategies, that resources were allocated to capitalize on Bush’s strengths and on Kerry’s vulnerabilities, and that the money necessary to finance research, technological advance, television and the ground war was available when needed.

At the July Democratic National Convention in Boston, McAuliffe commented on the disciplined Republican team: “We are up against the dirtiest, meanest, toughest group of people we have ever faced. They have money, they have power, and they ain’t going to give it up easily.”

Hope you all have a happy holiday and safe and sober new years. Politics will resume in 2005

The DLC has a great article on the election. Here it is.

“Democrats can’t win on voter mobilization alone. Demographic and political trends point in the wrong direction. Persuasion is the key.

By Mark Gersh

There are two fundamental ways for Democrats to look at the 2004 presidential election.

The one bright sign for Kerry was among 18-to-29-year-old voters, whom he carried by 9 points. Gore carried them by only 2. But even there, Kerry did not come close to Clinton’s 1996 margin of 19 points.

The first is to focus on the fact that if about 60,000 George W. Bush voters in Ohio had instead voted for John Kerry, the Democrat would be planning his administration today.

The second way to look at the results of Nov. 2 is more sobering, and probably more instructive in terms of how Democrats can come back in 2008. The questions are: What are the overall demographic and political trends, not just since 2000 but since the last time a Democrat won the White House, in 1996? And what are the trends in the battleground states that ultimately determined this election?

The big national number that everyone should understand is that Al Gore’s margin of 540,000 popular votes in 2000 (which was undoubtedly reduced somewhat by Ralph Nader, who won 2.8 million votes) turned into a margin of 3.5 million popular votes for President Bush this year. (President Clinton won by more than 8 million votes in 1996.)

But it is not just the size of Bush’s margin that matters. It is important to look at where Bush made his gains between 2000 and 2004. In the July 2004 Blueprint, I examined several national voter categories in which Gore lost substantial ground compared with Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign. In most cases, that erosion has accelerated.

Clinton won women by 16 percentage points in 1996; Gore won them by 11 in 2000; Kerry won them by only 3 points in 2004. Clinton won high school graduates by 16 points; Gore lost them by 1; Kerry lost them by 5. Clinton won Catholics by 7; Gore won them by 3; and Kerry — the first Catholic presidential nominee since 1960 — lost them by 5.

Given current demographics, two especially important trends show that things are not getting better for Democratic presidential candidates: Clinton won seniors by 4 points, and Gore held that margin. But Kerry lost them by 8, even as seniors increased from 22 percent of the electorate to 24 percent. And among Hispanics, whom Democratic strategists have pursued obsessively during the past four years, there has been an even more precipitous decline. Clinton’s 51-point margin in 1996 shrank to somewhere between a 27-point margin and a 33-point margin for Gore in 2000 (there are conflicting estimates, and then to an 11-point margin for Kerry in 2004.

The one bright sign for Kerry was among 18-to-29-year-old voters, whom he carried by 9 points. Gore carried them by only 2. But even there, Kerry did not come close to Clinton’s 1996 margin of 19 points.

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which most Democrats thought would marginally benefit Kerry. Close to 120 million Americans voted on Nov. 2. That represents the highest turnout of eligible voters since 1992, and the second highest since 1960.

In this high-turnout election, Bush didn’t just hang on to his 2000 vote; he boosted his margins in 41 of the 50 states, including blue-state bastions like New York, California, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Michigan.

Presidential elections are decided in the Electoral College, not by the popular vote, so the best way to get a sense of the post-2004 challenge for Democrats is to consider the shifting dynamics of key battleground states. In the May 2004 Blueprint, I analyzed three: Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. In this year’s election, Kerry narrowly won Pennsylvania, narrowly lost Ohio, and lost Florida decisively. But what’s remarkable is that Kerry hit his targets in all three, turning out the votes his campaign thought he would need to win. It wasn’t enough in two states, and was barely enough in the third.

Keystone cliffhanger. Al Gore won Pennsylvania in 2000 primarily because he generated an enormous turnout in the Philadelphia area and in Pittsburgh. Since both cities have been losing population, I wondered in my previous analysis if it would be difficult for Kerry to match that performance. In the end, he exceeded it. Kerry garnered 214,000 more votes in urban and suburban counties than Gore did in 2000. But Bush turned in an even stronger performance in exurban and rural communities, improving on his 2000 showing in those areas by 225,000 votes.

Kerry maintained about the same margin as Gore in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County (95,000 votes, but boosted the already massive Democratic margin in Philadelphia from 348,000 to 398,000 votes. Even so, the Democratic statewide margin was cut nearly in half, from 207,000 votes to 128,000.

Republican gains actually occurred in two key areas. First, Democrats lost significant ground in northeast Pennsylvania, often the “swing” area of the state. Turnout in the key counties of Lackawanna and Luzerne was very high; yet Kerry’s margin of victory was approximately 8,000 votes lower than Gore’s in Lackawanna, and 6,000 lower in Luzerne.

But more crucially, reflecting a national pattern, rural and exurban counties in the state saw large increases in turnout and significant increases in the Republican percentage of that inflated vote. In just three exurban counties in south-central Pennsylvania — Lancaster, York, and Westmoreland — Bush improved his margin by 38,000 votes, basically offsetting the Democratic improvement in Philadelphia. Overall, in rural and exurban Pennsylvania, Bush picked up 106,000 net votes, compared with his 2000 performance. He won 90 percent of the state’s counties. And there were danger signs even in the Democratic core areas. For example, the affluent “Main Line” suburb of Bucks County swung from Gore in 2000 to Bush in 2004.

Moving from geography to demographics, the number that leaps off the page in Pennsylvania — a state with a relatively old population — is Kerry’s performance among seniors. In 2000, Gore did much better among Pennsylvania seniors, winning them by 17 percentage points, than he did among seniors nationally, whom he won by 4 points. Kerry lost them by 4 — which was better than his national performance, but still a 21-point swing in the wrong direction.

In future elections, it is clear that Democrats will not be able to keep winning the state by piling up big margins in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and losing everywhere else. They must find a way to do better in northeast Pennsylvania, and to cut into the growing GOP margins in rural and exurban parts of the state.

Buckeye bust. The Kerry campaign’s goals in Ohio were to turn out a large vote in the state’s urban and suburban core areas, including some that have tilted Republican in the past, and to boost both turnout and the Democratic percentage in the northern Ohio communities hit hardest by job losses during the Bush administration. Kerry met both those goals impressively, after campaigning there relentlessly down the stretch, but still lost the state by about 119,000 votes. Al Gore, who did not seriously contest Ohio in 2000, lost the state by a margin of 164,000 votes.

Consider the two big urban counties that Democrats have frequently lost in the past, Hamilton and Franklin. Al Gore lost Hamilton County (which includes Cincinnati) by 43,000 votes; Kerry cut Bush’s margin of victory to 25,000 votes there. Gore won Franklin County (which includes Columbus) by 4,000 votes; Kerry won it by 41,000 votes. In the state’s big Democratic wheelhouse, Cuyahoga County (which includes Cleveland, Gore won by 168,000 votes; Kerry boosted that margin to 218,000 votes. Those are big numbers.

In the blue-collar counties that have suffered the greatest job losses, the picture was much the same. In Lucas County (Toledo, Stark County (Canton, Summit County (Akron, Mahoning County (Youngstown) and Lorain County, Kerry gained a net 32,000 votes over Gore’s performance.

If you looked only at these urban and suburban gains, you’d be justified in assuming that Kerry would win Ohio and the presidency. But Bush, who won the exurban and rural Ohio counties by 422,000 votes in 2000, boosted his margin there to 515,000 votes in 2004. Those gains offset most of Kerry’s gains, and proved decisive for the GOP.

Demographically, a few numbers stand out in Ohio. Self-identified Republicans represented 40 percent of the state’s electorate, a 5-point margin over Democrats. Bush won Ohio Catholics by 11 points, compared with 5 points nationally. And the gender gap in Ohio nearly disappeared. One especially odd number is that Bush won 16 percent of African-Americans in the state (compared with 11 percent nationally, and there’s a significant amount of indirect evidence that he did a lot better than that among rural black voters — perhaps a reflection of the impact of cultural issues.

Sunshine sea change. While the results in Pennsylvania and Ohio reflected relatively marginal changes from four years ago, the state that redefined the idea of an electoral draw in 2000 — Florida — showed a big and unmistakable shift in the GOP’s direction in 2004.

As in other states, the Kerry campaign hit some of its markers in the Sunshine State. Kerry slightly improved on Gore’s already solid performance among Florida Hispanics (probably because Bush could not match his astronomical, Elian Gonzalez-related margins among Cuban-Americans in 2000). And turnout in key Democratic parts of the state — such as Palm Beach and Broward Counties — matched, or nearly matched, the historic turnout in 2000.

But the pattern of increased turnout, and increased Republican percentages, in rural and exurban communities that was evident in Pennsylvania and Ohio was even more intense in Florida, producing most of Bush’s 5-point statewide margin. In just five mainly exurban counties (Brevard, Polk, Hillsborough, Lake, and Pasco, Bush picked up a net 99,000 votes over his 2000 performance. The blowout was a combination of higher turnout, especially among Republicans. Despite his success in urban areas, Kerry’s support dropped to 39 percent of the vote in Florida’s exurban communities, compared with Gore’s 43 percent; and Kerry lost nearly 5 percentage points from Gore’s performance in rural Florida. (Kerry won 37.9 percent of the rural vote, as opposed to the 42.7 percent that Gore won.) No turnout operation could possibly overcome these margins of defeat, especially given the fast-growing nature of the state’s exurbs.

In the end, Democratic turnout grew by a total of 471,000 votes. But Republican turnout increased by 873,000 votes, fueled by an enormous 456,000-vote increase in rural and exurban counties.

Stopping the erosion. The bottom line in these three battleground states, and nationally, is pretty clear: Democrats are unlikely to win presidential elections based on sheer turnout efforts, or by boosting their already extraordinary margins in Democratic base areas. Republicans have now caught up in the get-out-the-vote game, and they are unlikely to allow Democrats the kind of advantage they had in the past.

Moreover, the results of the 2004 election confirm the advantage the GOP has gained in highly polarized elections. Democrats no longer enjoy superior partisan identification numbers in the general electorate. More importantly, 34 percent of voters in 2004 identified themselves as conservatives, 21 percent as liberals, and 45 percent as moderates. Even though Kerry won moderates by 11 percentage points, it wasn’t enough to overcome the fact that conservatives outnumber liberals 3-to-2. He probably needed to boost his margin among moderates by at least another 5 points, in addition to picking off a slightly higher percentage of conservatives.

In the future, Democrats are going to have to rely on persuasion, as well as mobilization, and cut into those growing GOP margins among rural and exurban voters. It should be obvious by now that conceding “red America” is suicidal for Democrats, if they ever hope to win back control of Congress or a majority of the statehouses. But making inroads in red areas — in states Bush carried in both 2000 and 2004, in battleground states, and even in increasingly vulnerable blue states — is becoming equally essential in presidential contests.

The DLC’s “heartland strategy” for expanding the electoral battlefield, and its agenda for closing “trust gaps” related to security, culture, and reform of government, are good places for Democrats to start in stopping the erosion of their vote”.

Mark Gersh is Washington director of the National Committee for an Effective Congress.