In GOP Win, a Lesson in Money, Muscle, Planning
washingtonpost.com
By Jim VandeHei and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 10, 2002; Page A01
Ten days before the congressional elections,
Republican Rep. C. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia
needed help, and fast. His polls showed him
seven points down in his long-shot bid to
oust Sen. Max Cleland -- a veteran who
returned from Vietnam with one arm and
no legs -- in a red-white-and-blue election
year colored by fears of terrorism and
Saddam Hussein.
So Chambliss did what virtually every
hard-pressed GOP candidate in the country
was doing: He implored President Bush
to jet to his state and fire up potential
voters. "There's only one guy who can juice"
such voters, Chambliss strategist Gene Ulm
told the White House. Could
the president please visit the vital
suburbs of either Atlanta or Savannah?
To the campaign's amazement, Bush agreed to
rallies in both places. Three days after his Nov. 2 appearances, Chambliss upset Cleland,
helping Republicans retake control of the Senate.
It was by no means the first time the White House aggressively inserted itself in the 2002
congressional races, nor would it be the last.
Starting early last year and culminating on
Election Day, Bush and his political team
used well-timed, well-placed and sometime
heavy-handed strikes to restore Republicans
to power on Capitol Hill.
The Bush White House certainly wasn't the
only big factor in last week's surprising and dramatic elections. Local issues, Democratic
mistakes, attack ads, pro-Republican
efforts by lobbies such as the drug industry,
Texas Rep. Tom DeLay's political machine and the
intangibles of luck and fate all played
key roles, too.
"We had the message and mechanics and moment," said Mitch Bainwol, the top political strategist for
Senate Republicans. Indeed, Republicans stunned most political handicappers by regaining the Senate,
expanding their House majority and holding
their loss of governorships -- thought
to be an especially vulnerable GOP
spot -- to a mere handful.
Crucial to it all was Bush and, in
the words of Ulm, his "precision weapons."
Raising Money, Voters
Starting more than a year ago, the administration's
obsession with discipline and detail was shaping
the 2002 election. Under the
leadership of White House senior adviser
Karl Rove and political director
Ken Mehlman, Republicans financed the
most expensive and sophisticated
get-out-the-vote and polling operations
ever undertaken by the Grand Old Party.
Rove, DeLay and others concluded that
Republicans had lost the turnout battle
in recent elections by focusing too much on paid
advertising and too little on the ground war
that Democratic allies such as the AFL-CIO do
so well: getting potential voters to the polls.
Beginning in early 2001, the party registered
thousands of new Republican voters, particularly in fast-growing states. It invested heavily in
a program, dubbed the "72-hour project," that would later help spur record turnout in key regions.
The Republican National Committee
spent millions of dollars honing a system
to identify voters, down to specific households,
and contact them repeatedly with phone calls,
mail and visits from party activists.
With so many campaign ads confusing so many voters,
most political strategists saw old-fashioned,
door-to-door politics -- augmented by
new-age resources such as the
Palm Pilot -- as a critical element.
DeLay's top political hands, including little-known but influential figures such as Dan Flynn and Timothy Berry, started meeting with RNC Deputy Chairman Jack Oliver last summer to discuss their own get-out-the-vote project, designed to complement the national party's effort
in especially tight races.
DeLay drew 200-mile-diameter circles around
each competitive House district and called
on non-threatened GOP legislators who fell
inside them to bring volunteers to the area.
The party offered to pay for transportation,
while lawmakers and business
groups covered hotels and meals.
Around this time, Republicans aggressively
raised money specifically to scare off
potential Democratic challengers. The strategy
included early negative ads -- such as the
attacks on House candidate Dario Herrera
D) of Nevada, whose campaign eventually faltered.
More than a year before the elections, in Alabama, where Republicans feared that popular
Rep. Bud Cramer (D) might challenge Sen. Jeff
Sessions (R), Bush held a fundraiser for Sessions.
The Republican's campaign bank account soared,
and Cramer stayed out of the race. In
Missouri, Republicans worried about a
potentially tough challenge to Rep. Sam Graves (R).
Vice President Cheney went in early to raise
money for Graves, and an administration official
concluded, "We took a potentially competitive race off the table."
"We tried to be very strategic, very methodical,
very focused," Mehlman said. Bush, Cheney
and Rove handpicked Chambliss for the Senate
race in Georgia, Norm Coleman in Minnesota,
and John Thune in South Dakota. (Coleman and
Chambliss won, Thune narrowly lost.) In
House races, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.)
and National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Thomas M. Davis III (Va.) did
the same, pushing weaker prospective
candidates aside in key districts.
Anatomy of an Agenda
It takes more than money and manpower to win
elections. So by late summer, with campaigns
in full swing, congressional Republicans
held private talks with White House officials
to plot a winning legislative and policy agenda.
Polls showed that the wave of corporate
scandals was not eroding support for
GOP candidates, but broader economic concerns might.
Once Bush had called for the creation of
a Homeland Security Department and talk of war
with Iraq intensified, Republicans saw an
opening. GOP congressional leaders decided
to delay action on controversial domestic
items until the elections were over, according to
people familiar with the discussions. That would allow national security matters -- the Republicans'
best issue -- to carry the day.
In Georgia, Chambliss's ads attacked
Cleland for opposing Bush's version of
Homeland Security Department legislation,
even though the
issue centered on a somewhat arcane
dispute over civil service rules. Democrats'
interest in protecting government union rights,
Chambliss and other Republicans claimed, meant
they weren't serious about national security.
GOP congressional leaders postponed votes on
spending bills for labor and education programs,
which would have put several fiscally
conservative Republicans in the uncomfortable
position of voting against school construction
and other projects that appeal to swing voters.
Democrats believed they had a chance in the campaign's closing weeks to turn the debate back to the economy
in a way advantageous to their candidates. But the
absence of a clear Democratic alternative, and Bush's emphasis on tax cuts and economic stimulus efforts,
prevented Democratic nominees from gaining traction
on the economy, despite public sentiment that the
country was heading in the wrong direction.
An RNC poll taken during the campaign's final
weekend showed Republicans actually winning
the economic argument by
a narrow margin.
At the same time, Republicans pulled a page from former president Bill Clinton's playbook, co-opting
issues such as Social Security and
Medicare that typically favor Democrats. Using
the bully pulpit of the presidency, they offered
their own solutions that left many voters
unsure which party would best serve their interests.
"When I was on the street, the talk among union
members was, 'Where was everyone else?' "
said Steve Rosenthal, political director of the
13 million-member AFL-CIO. "There was a big partner
missing at the table, and that was the Democratic Party. Democrats can't ride in with vans and sound trucks on Election Day without having an agenda."
To make matters worse, major drug companies
were airing positive ads for Republicans,
defending them on what Democrats thought was
their ace in the hole: prescription drug coverage for seniors.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers
of America and the deceptively named United Seniors Association -- largely funded by the big
drug companies -- spent more than $12 million
on television and radio ads such as one that lauded GOP nominee Jim Talent, who won the hotly
contested Missouri Senate race,
for backing a market-based
prescription drug program.
The Bush Advantage
As the campaign's final weeks approached,
Bush enjoyed the highest overall approval
ratings of any modern president heading into his first
midterm. More important to GOP thinking was
his standing with Republican-leaning voters.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, Bush's approval rating
among self-identified Republicans has
hovered just above 90 percent, giving him
extraordinary draw on the party's base.
"We'd earlier thought there was a necessity
in these high-profile Senate races for him
to go in, most of them twice," first to raise
funds and then to boost turnout, a senior White House official said. In Missouri, for example, Bush held fundraisers in St. Louis and Kansas City for
Talent, followed by get-out-the-vote visits
to the St. Louis area and Springfield.
There were often strings attached to Bush's
help, however. Rove micromanaged some races
down to details as fine as how long candidates
could talk before the president took the stage.
A New Jersey Republican official involved
in the losing Senate campaign of Doug Forrester
described the Rove-Mehlman operation as "ruthless" in demanding results. Mehlman called the
candidates on their cell phones with good
news, such as a planned presidential visit,
and he called campaign managers with bad news.
When Forrester wanted Bush to headline a
fundraiser, Mehlman demanded that his campaign
sell $1 million in tickets. The White House
later insisted on more polling data
to prove that New Jersey was worth the effort.
"We're going to be making decisions about
where the president is going the last 10 days,
and those decisions are going to be guided at least
in part by how the campaigns used a presidential visit earlier in the cycle," Mehlman said, according
to the GOP official. The White House
had tentatively scheduled a presidential visit
for Forrester in the campaign's last five days.
But with Forrester's numbers sinking, his staff
learned the bad news eight days before the election,
in a weekly conference call with Alicia Davis,
a Mehlman deputy. "There was deathly
silence," said a participant.
72 Hours and Counting
Several key races were decided in the final 72 hours.
DeLay had rented 73 buses and 245 vans to move 8,000 volunteers to targeted districts. As recently as
six weeks before the election, DeLay was hitting up businesses for an extra $600,000 in soft money
to make sure candidates had enough for the final push, according to people familiar with the drive.
Hundreds of those volunteers went to Colorado's
7th District for a race so close a winner
has yet to be declared. For the entire state, "we
had a couple thousand people on the ground
the last couple of days," Oliver said.
While voters often say they loathe negative ads, they frequently elect candidates who use
them -- and Republicans generally had more
money for such efforts than did Democrats.
The National Republican Campaign Committee
also spent an extraordinary $5 million on
polling, much of it in the campaign's
final eight weeks. NRCC Chairman Davis said the total was five times the amount spent on polling in
the 1998 midterm elections.
By Election Day, GOP polls showed that in 21 key House districts, a plurality of voters had
an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic
nominee. This was the handiwork of beefed-up
GOP opposition research and a concerted
strategy to put Democrats on the defensive early,
forcing them to spend their limited resources,
Republican operatives said.
Even when Democratic candidates outraised
their Republican opponents, the national
GOP operation would flood the districts with money.
Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa), whom Democrats expected to knock off, won in part because the NRCC poured $2 million into his district.
Rove and Mehlman made some last-minute adjustments
to Bush's schedule based on their sense of
movement in competitive House races.
The president went to Springfield, Ill.,
in the campaign's late stages to help
Rep. John M. Shimkus (R), who was in one
of four races nationwide pitting GOP and Democratic incumbents. "The polling showed Shimkus close,"
the official said.
Bush also made a late visit to West Virginia
when public polls showed Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R) narrowly ahead of Democrat Jim Humphreys.
Bush's trip had two purposes in a state he
surprisingly won in 2000. "She was ahead,
but she was not ahead by the margin
she needed," a White House official said.
"It would have been a big blow to us to lose her,
and it also would have had ramifications for us" in
2004.
Whenever possible, Rove and Mehlman tried to put
Bush in places where he could influence both
a competitive Senate race and a House
race or two. His two Nov. 2 stops in Georgia
not only helped Chambliss upset Cleland but
also contributed to GOP victories in two new
House districts drawn specifically to favor Democrats.
And his visits doubtlessly played a role in
Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes's surprising
loss.
"In our universe,'' a senior White House
adviser said, "we're going to first try
to affect the Senate, second try to affect
the House and then, if we have an opportunity,
to affect governorships. In the closing stages,
we tried to have twofers."
<b.
Staff writers Mike Allen and David S. Broder
contributed to this report.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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