Party Politics
by Ryan Lizza
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 12.31.03
As Noam Scheiber explained in his recent profile of Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's campaign manger, the great power of the Internet from a presidential campaign's perspective is that it can help dramatically reduce "the cost per body," or the amount a candidate must spend to bring one voter to the polls. Last night the Dean campaign showed how the Internet can also bring down "the cost per dollar," or the amount it takes to raise a buck. Most campaigns have a high-profile national fundraiser with a rolodex full of rich donors who targets $2,000 check-writers. To be sure, Dean has one of these, too--Steve Grossman, one of the Democratic Party's star fundraisers. But the Dean campaign has also ingeniously recruited hundreds of volunteer fundraisers with Palm Pilots full of small-time donors. While every campaign has a website that allows supporters to donate online, a feature that costs the campaigns almost nothing, Dean has gone one step further by actually training people across the country to go out and recruit donors who never would have given money on their own. Last night was the culmination of a months-long effort to organize these hundreds of amateur fundraisers to simultaneously hold fundraising events--called house parties--across the country. Through the power of the Internet, even the lowliest Dean volunteer has been transformed into a mini-Steve Grossman.
For all the talk of how Dean runs a decentralized campaign, it turns out that the Internet is also a powerful tool for centralization. House parties have been a fixture of politics for decades, but with the Internet the campaign has the ability to shape the content and character of hundreds of small gatherings. On the Web, budding Dean fundraisers can find a "party management event center" that allows them to send out e-mails, track RSVPs, and monitor a party's progress. Using online tools provided by the campaign, each host can create his own page on Dean's website to advertise his party. Once a page is created, the host receives a special house party kit in the mail. Inside is an instruction manual, campaign buttons, literature about Dean, contribution forms, and a handy pre-addressed mailer in which to send along the campaign checks once the event is over.
In a way that the other campaigns don't even attempt, the Dean campaign asks each host to become an evangelist for the cause. The Amway-like techniques for packing one's house party ensure that a host doesn't overlook a single person she might know. "Why not invite your friend from college who lives near by? Or the cousin you haven't seen in a couple of years?" one manual suggests. "What about your massage therapist, grocer, dry cleaner, or plumber you may not see regularly at work? Remember to ask each person who accepts your invitation to bring along a friend." You never know when you're going to run into a potential Dean donor, so "carry invitations with you wherever you go."
The most important and detailed instructions in the house party kit have to do with raising money, or what the campaign calls "doing 'the ask.'" "Don't be shy about asking for money. Don't apologize and don't be embarrassed," the manual advises. Just like the professionals at the national level, the first step in fundraising at the local level is to identify "your low hanging fruit"--your closest friends and relatives and hardcore Dean supporters, who you know you can hit up for some money. Even though a host is supposed to extend an invitation to everyone she knows, at some point she has to get rid of the freeloaders who will only show up for the booze and "Pin the Deficit on the Republicans" (a party game hosts can download from the Dean website). As the house party kit instructs, "[W]eed out some people who only come for the party aspect."
The key to doing the ask is to "be VERY persistent." Dean campaign headquarters recommends asking each guest at least three times during the evening, once when they arrive, and once before and after the evening's main attraction, a conference call with Howard Dean and Al and Tipper Gore. Burlington even wisely suggests a little pre-conference call lubrication to loosen guests up before the second and third ask. "Refresh drinks 10 minutes before the conference call starts," a fundraising manual says. "As soon as the call is over, do the 'ASK.' Timing is everything."
decided to show up at one of Dean's house parties last night not far from my home in Washington. Logging onto the Dean website I found that I had my choice of some dozen parties in my area that were open to the public. (Some of the parties were private.) One of them was hosted by a woman named Melissa Berger, who was turning her birthday party into a Dean fundraiser. Her father is a retired CIA employee, and she promised there would be lots of State Department folks and retired foreign service officers there. Andy Stern, the president of the SEIU, had also RSVP'd. Berger says she had never met the guy but that he'd donated a hundred dollars to Dean through her party page and promised to show up. I also considered checking out Christopher Gerlach's party in Glover Park. Gerlach has been hosting house parties for Dean long enough that he can remember "the good old days when your conference call was with the governor [alone] and you could ask him whatever questions you like." Barbara Helpern, an earnest woman in her early fifties who was hosting about 25 people from her "temple, school, and parenting" offered to let me attend her party. She was mostly eschewing all the formal fundraising and party rules Burlington wrote up and just wanted to use the night as an opportunity to have a political discussion with her friends and family. "I want my kids to vote but they don't see any point in it," she says. A guy named Rudi offered to have me over to his place where he was hosting "a small but sincere group of four."
But in the end I was convinced by Katie Parker to hang out with her husband and about 25 or 30 of their friends as well as a few people who just showed up out of the blue. "Ours is going to be the best," Katie assured me. "We're going to have hot chocolate spiked with cinnamon schnapps. ... We're not a bunch of middle-aged boring Democratic people who sit around and talk politics." At least at my house party the Dean campaign's heavy-handed instructions were mostly ignored. Katie did pop in the Dean DVD that came in her host kit, but it went mostly unwatched as people spent much of the pre-conference call conversation discussing the idiocy of Dean's long string of dubious comments over the last two months about everything from the Confederate flag to sticking up for Osama's civil liberties.
I never heard Katie do the ask--and certainly not the recommended three times--and she didn't liquor up her guests before Dean's conference-call pitch. Guests clearly hadn't read the pamphlet that the Dean campaign has put out teaching house party attendees how to talk to reporters ("A good litmus test about whether information or anecdotes are appropriate to share with the press is to ask yourself whether you'd be comfortable saying it in front of the governor"). If people brought checks she discreetly deposited them in an envelope and sometimes marked up a little fundraising thermometer that hung on the wall. At the end of the conference call, when the operator opened the line up for all 1,400 parties to yell in unison "Happy Dean Year," most people rolled their eyes. Hanging up the phone, Katie joked, "Nerds!" If the only thing you know about Dean's supporters is the almost cult-like musings of his fiercest Internet evangelists, spending an evening with Deaniacs who haven't quite drunk the Kool-Aid yet helps shatter some stereotypes. (Check out this blog for a more detailed summary of Katie's house party for Dean.)
or all the genius of the house parties, which the campaign says raised $500,000 from 22,000 people, they also provide evidence that the Dean campaign isn't really moving beyond its base. The campaign met its goal of attracting 450,000 online supporters by the end of September. Months ago, the campaign also set a goal of having one million online supporters by tonight. They're almost 450,000 people short of that goal. In September, the campaign also organized an evening of nationwide house parties, and Deaniacs responded by hosting 1,400 of them. The goal for last night was an ambitious 3,000 parties. "[I]t seems we will undoubtedly break our own record," one party-planning document on the Dean website explains. But Dean's supporters didn't even come close to the larger goal. Once again, there were 1,400 parties.
That far exceeds what any of the other campaigns are doing, but it does little to convince people that the Dean campaign is really moving beyond its now familiar base of college kids, urban young professionals, and latte-swilling social liberals. In small ways, even the slick house party kits confirm these stereotypes. They are tailored for people who live downtown in apartments and condos ("Is your buzzer clearly marked?"), people who immediately understand a reference to Craigslist.org, which the campaign suggests using.
"Post your flyer on the message boards of places you visit regularly--the library, co-op, grocery store or coffee house, for example," one manual instructs. Needless to say, not everyone regularly visits the co-op or the coffee house. In contrast, a fundraising appeal sent out in the president's name the day after Dean's house parties says, "To win, we need people talking with their relatives and friends at work, at the coffee shop or over the back yard fence about the tremendous issues at stake." Whether fair or not, if the election next year is defined as a contest between people who go to the coffee house versus those who go to the coffee shop, those who buzz their guests up versus those who talk to their neighbors over the fence, Dean is going to lose.
Ryan Lizza is an associate editor at TNR.
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