Taking the Campaign to the People, One Doorstep at a Time
By John F. Harris and Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 18, 2004; Page A01
First in a series of occasional articles
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Here in Ohio, gatekeeper to the presidency, 2004 has become the Year of the Human Face.
Nothing against television. The operatives trying to win this state already are hitting viewers with a merciless bombardment of political spots. Nothing against telephone polls. More Ohio dinners than ever will fall victim this year to randomly sampled interruptions.
But the decades-long trend toward distance and impersonality in national politics has run up against a countervailing trend. This year's calculation, backed by huge investments of money and time by both sides, is that a close election ultimately will be decided by individual encounters -- at work, at neighborhood parties and, above all, on the doorstep.
In Ohio and a small core of other states on which this year's contest will hinge, grass-roots voter registration, persuasion and turnout operations are underway on an unprecedented scale: never so early, never so large, never so central to strategies for victory in a presidential race that likely will be settled, once again, at the wispy margins.
Ohio is vibrating with the oldest kind of politics, being waged in a new and exotic landscape. The overhaul of campaign finance laws two years ago crimped the traditional way Democrats funded and waged campaigns much more than it did the GOP. Here in Ohio, President Bush's fully staffed and methodical campaign would be trampling Sen. John F. Kerry's (D-Mass.) barely existent state operation on the ground and air alike were it not for this year's most novel political fact: the emergence of well-funded and aggressive independent groups on the left. The largest of these, America Coming Together, has 18 offices in Ohio, and its staff of 450 has already knocked on 235,000 doors.
So the face of this election, cheerful and clean-shaven, is Cosby Lindquist, age 25. He was out walking the dreary streets -- a television in the front yard here, a couple of soiled mattresses rotting by the curb over there -- of Precinct 24 on Columbus's north side the other night, earning $8 an hour to look for people who share his low opinion of the president.
Lindquist, an aspiring photographer, is a regular canvasser for America Coming Together (ACT). His brand of politics is hard work. At many houses, people poked their heads out groggily, like hibernating bears, and mumbled sullenly that they were not interested in registering to vote or answering his questions about "what two national issues matter most to you."
But every several houses there was a payoff. In the back yard where Lance Montgomery, 21, was hanging out with friends, mention of the election brought a shower of anti-Bush profanities, as well as some teasing when Montgomery told Lindquist that he did want to register to vote.
"Cool!" Lindquist announced, and began filling out the paperwork for Montgomery, with a promise that ACT would send the registration form directly to the Ohio secretary of state. Then he typed Montgomery's data, including his response that "jobs" and "gas prices" are his main issues, into the Blackberry digital assistant he was carrying. The information will be used to ensure that the young man is contacted several more times, with issue brochures and reminders to get to the polls.
Lindquist has no monopoly on ebullience, or on devotion to the resurgence of grass-roots politics. He is matched on both counts by another young face in the battle for Ohio, 30-year-old Michael Hartley. He is the Bush-Cheney campaign's field director for central Ohio, a job that brought him one recent evening to Union County, 40 miles northwest of Columbus. Hartley and his bosses do not worry about winning Union County, Ohio's most Republican county. Perhaps the only way Bush could lose it is by personally urging people to vote against him. But the experience of a virtual tie vote four years ago in Florida -- and similar breathtakingly close votes in New Mexico and Iowa -- has given Bush's strategists a keen appreciation for stray votes that once would have been dismissed as not worth the bother. That is why Hartley came to Marysville, the Union County seat, to urge the local Bush-Cheney steering committee to get busy organizing house parties for Bush on April 29.
There will be thousands of Bush house parties across the nation that day, and Hartley told the group he had been authorized to share a special announcement. Every house party that gets at least five people will be given the access code for a conference call in which they can hear "an actual live conversation with Vice President Cheney." Bush's Union County volunteers were impressed, nodding their heads in surprise and approval.
The parties, Hartley said, can be boisterous affairs, with cakes, flags and bunting. Or they can be small and simple. Some people are planning quiet prayer services. The important thing is the individual contact -- people "being touched," as Hartley puts it. "I know as Republicans we love our president, and this is an opportunity to show him," Hartley said, as the meeting broke up.
With his emphasis on the "touch," Hartley is reflecting a brand of politics that is preached from the top, by Bush-Cheney campaign manager Ken Mehlman. Last September, Mehlman began the Ohio reelection effort with a visit to the state and laid out his vision for the most extensive network of precinct captains and volunteers Ohio has ever seen. JoAnn Davidson, a former speaker of the Ohio House who is the regional chairman of Bush's campaign in Ohio River Valley states, said the goal by Election Day is 50,000 Bush-Cheney volunteers -- one for every 50 Ohio voters -- as well as a precinct captain in each of Ohio's 12,000 precincts. One strategist with the Ohio campaign describes an organization that is "almost military" in its structure and aims. The analogy is not chosen lightly. At the Ohio headquarters here, staff members motivate themselves with quotations from Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu's "Art of War," a favored text of many conservatives.
Seven months after Mehlman's challenge, his Ohio team has reaped impressive results. The Bush-Cheney Ohio campaign says it so far has captains in more than 5,000 precincts, has recruited 22,393 volunteers toward its goal of 52,000, and in tandem with the state GOP has registered 30,000 new voters, with a goal of 91,000.
ACT, meanwhile, reports it has so far registered about 45,000 new voters.
The emphasis on volunteers, house parties, voter registration -- the politics of the human face -- would seem at first glance to be a return to old-fashioned ways, when political machines delivered victory by visiting homes precinct by precinct. But what is happening in Ohio is less a return to past ways than the latest advance in how media and technology are transforming politics.
The effort to find voters, track their preferences and communicate regularly with them -- the essence of the new grass-roots politics -- is vastly facilitated by recent gains in data mining and the mainstreaming of the Internet in virtually all segments of the population. More to the point, the proliferation of media -- more television networks, Web sites, and other sources of news, argument and rumor than ever before -- has made a return to grass-roots politics essential.
People are so saturated in media that the days of simply putting ads on the air to affect the national conversation are obsolete, said Bush strategist Matthew Dowd. The paid message must be supplemented by human contact. The election is "not about lying on the couch, watching the show," he said. "We're trying to build the conversation at multiple levels."
The challenge that Dowd describes -- how to win an election in a new environment, with an electorate more polarized than it has been in decades -- is the subject of this series. Over the next seven months, The Washington Post will be returning regularly to Ohio to explore the workings of the election in this critical battleground state. What are the new strategies for reaching voters and turning them out? How are public perceptions of Bush and Kerry evolving over time? What are the issues and personalities influencing which way a swing state swings?
A State Up for Grabs
It is neither coincidence nor mystery that the Bush and Kerry campaigns are focused so intently on Ohio, which Bush won by a margin of 3.6 percent in 2000. Among the large states, Ohio is the one that recent polling and history alike suggest is most up for grabs for either campaign. Any strategy for winning 270 electoral votes -- the number needed to win the presidency -- that includes a realistic plan for winning Ohio is plausible on its face. Any strategy that does not include Ohio almost by definition requires a measure of fancy footwork.
If Kerry were to win every state Al Gore won in 2000, he would still need to take at least one more state from Bush's column to win the presidency. If the answer is not Ohio, other possibilities are Florida, Missouri or West Virginia. But all those Bush states since 2000 and its bitter aftermath have trended even more Republican in polls and voting patterns. Ohio, by contrast, has become more fluid.
The most obvious reason is jobs. Bush beat Gore by 165,019 votes in 2000. Since Bush took office, Ohio's economy has shed about 236,400 jobs -- 160,000 of them in manufacturing -- as the state's unemployment rate has climbed from 3.9 to 5.7 percent.
The less obvious reason lies beneath the surface of what at first blush looks like a reasonably comfortable Bush victory in 2000. A closer look at election returns shows that four years ago -- before Sept. 11, before the Iraq war, before the votes over taxes and homeland security that have given Washington debate a bitter flavor -- Ohioans were already much more sharply divided on partisan grounds than the state's steady, middle-of-the-road reputation would suggest.
In the urban areas where Democrats typically do well, Gore did more than well. He beat Bush by wide margins, winning more votes even than Bill Clinton did when carrying the state twice. This was especially true in the heavily unionized manufacturing areas of northern Ohio. Bush took the state only by winning even more votes in the outer suburbs, small towns and downstate rural districts that are typically Republican strongholds. Ohio's most-populous county, Cuyahoga, reflects the trend. In 1988, the president's father, George H.W. Bush, won a respectable 40 percent of the vote in this Democratic stronghold, which includes Cleveland. In 2000, George W. Bush carried 33 percent of the vote in Cuyahoga. In Ohio's six largest urban counties, he won 43 percent of the vote -- among the lowest percentages ever by a winning candidate. In Ohio's 82 other counties, Bush won by nearly 55 percent. Polling suggested that mistrust of Gore on cultural issues and disaffection with incumbent Clinton helped drive the large GOP vote in the smaller counties. In any event, this spread of nearly a dozen percentage points between voter preferences in the six largest counties and the rest of the state was the largest in Ohio history.
A month before the election, Gore -- then about 10 percentage points behind in the polls -- pulled out of Ohio to spend time and ad resources in other states, most of all Florida. On Election Day, Ohio Republicans were startled by a significantly closer result than they expected.
The implications of this data for 2004 could be large. Polling and on-the-ground reporting make clear that voters in Democratic-leaning urban areas who came out strongly for Gore in 2000 are at least as motivated -- more in opposition to Bush than ardor for Kerry -- to vote Democratic again. To win, Bush must do just as well among rural and suburban Republicans and conservative independents as he did last time. That means any fall-off for the president on such issues as job loss, rising deficits or anxieties about Iraq must be offset by newly recruited Bush voters.
Public polls have the race in Ohio dead even. "We really have our work cut out for us on the Republican side," said Ohio Gov. Bob Taft, chairman of the Bush campaign here. While Ohio voters "respect this president's strength," he said in an interview at the executive mansion here, this election "is going to be different and harder than before." For all the ideological heat of this year's national debate, Taft cites coolly pragmatic reasons why he believes Bush's reelection is important to Ohio. The president has been "very responsive" to Ohio in granting waivers for changes the state wanted to make in its Medicaid program, and in directing federal environmental clean-up dollars. Taft predicted Ohio voters will be making a similarly practical judgment on one basic issue: "The president has to focus on his plan for the economy."
Taft's counterpart with Kerry, longtime Democratic operative Jim Ruvolo, offered an appraisal that was not far different. In his party, Ruvolo said, "I've never seen Democrats more energized to beat someone -- ever. I think it's his arrogance. I think it's running as a 'compassionate conservative' but then turning dead-right after the election."
But Ruvolo is under no illusion that such intense partisan feelings are matched in the broader electorate. To the contrary, Ohio is a swing state with a distinctly conservative tilt. Democrats, who reigned here in the 1970s and 1980s, have been routed for every statewide office since 1992, leaving the party organization in disarray. The GOP state legislature recently passed a ban on gay marriage, as well as a law allowing people to carry concealed weapons. Kerry's best hope, Ruvolo said, hinges on keeping the conversation on the economy and job loss under Bush. "My state votes first and foremost on pocketbook issues," he said, echoing Taft. "People only vote on cultural issues if they are doing well."
This bottom-line mentality has made Ohio a reliable barometer of the nation. Ohio is one of just four states to have voted for the winner in every presidential election from 1964 on. (Only one other state, Missouri, has a longer winning streak, to 1960.) Since 1860, Ohio has backed the winner 32 out of 36 times.
The New Money Game
Among the most familiar traits in politics is the tendency of partisans to believe their side has the better ideas and candidates but the other side has the better tactics. As a result, elections are often a form of competitive imitation. The GOP's close call in 2000, in which superior Democratic turnout helped Gore close strong in many states, inspired the Republican National Committee in 2002 to launch the "72-hour project," an extensive get-out-the-vote campaign culminating in the final three days before the election. The GOP's success with their new ground game in 2002, in which Republicans defied history by winning seats for the incumbent president's party in the midterm elections, in turn inspired Democrats to make major efforts to improve their ground game. It also forged a conviction that, unlike in 2000, they will fight in Ohio until the end.
Yet there is a signal difference between now and 2002: the overhaul of campaign finance laws. The Democratic National Committee is no longer able to raise unlimited "soft money" contributions it historically has relied on more heavily than the GOP. Filling this void have been independent groups such as America Coming Together, which are still allowed to raise big lump sums from wealthy supporters, so long as the money is not spent in coordination with or expressly on behalf of candidates. The Republican National Committee has challenged the legality of these outside groups with the Federal Elections Commission, in a case that is pending.
For now, however, the existence of America Coming Together and other groups, such as the liberal MoveOn.org, has leveled what would be an overwhelming Bush-Cheney advantage in advertising and grass-roots outreach alike. And it has turned Ohio into a battle between the president's conventionally organized reelection campaign and an innovative brand of politics whose effectiveness and staying power has yet to be tested.
America Coming Together and an affiliated group, the Media Fund, said they have raised about $40 million and have pledges for more, largely from labor unions and from the liberal financier George Soros, in a bid to offset the GOP's historical financial advantage. The Media Fund runs the ad war, while ACT handles the ground campaign.
For now, that campaign has two prongs. Particularly in urban neighborhoods, such as where Lindquist was canvassing, it is focused on voter registration. The other prong is voter persuasion -- aimed principally at conservative working-class neighborhoods of northeast Ohio that have been buffeted by the decline of Big Steel.
That long-term decline has accelerated in the Bush years. One of every four Ohio steel jobs that existed in 2000 is gone. Among ACT's team of paid canvassers, not surprisingly, are former steelworkers. Driving to a canvassing session on a snowy afternoon this month in Canton, David Leasure passed the hulking and decrepit Republic Steel plant in nearby Massillon. On what Leasure calls "the day of infamy" -- the day in 2001 when the plant closed after 83 years -- he lost the job he held for 25 years as a Republic truck driver.
Now, it is with special zeal that Leasure knocked on doors in a neighborhood of trim, little houses, many bedecked with U.S. flags, in his own bid to tilt the presidential election. In addition to collecting voter data, Leasure's Blackberry plays its digital presentation. It is a commercial attacking Bush for eliminating tariffs on steel imports.
The presentation found a receptive audience when Leasure knocked on David Sager's door. Sager voted Republican last time, and said he is leaning toward doing it again. But he was happy to sign Leasure's petition calling on Bush to restore the tariffs.
Sager has not heard the last of ACT. The key to the election is not simply finding sympathetic voters. It is visiting and calling again and again. Leasure means it at the end of his door-knocking, as he quietly promises, "We'll be back."
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