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The line began to form early for George Bush's noontime "conversation on education" at the Valley Forge Convention Center. By the time the doors opened, people were standing quietly in a single file that snaked up the stairs, out the main entrance and a hundred yards across the parking lot. Even when the line started moving, it moved slowly, as volunteers near the door carefully checked tickets and photo IDs against a master list, and uniformed Secret Service agents funneled everyone through airport-style magnetometers.
Here was a rich Pennsylvania seam for Cheryl Boyce to work, harvesting addresses, phone numbers and e-mails, recruiting volunteers for a special "72 Hours" get-out-the-vote drive through Election Day, a new plan to use urgent, last-minute phone calls and volunteer drivers to get every last Bush supporter out to the polls. A 44-year-old mom, housewife and aspiring author (she's working on a "romance mystery" called "Soul Assassins"), Boyce is the archetype of the new Republican organizer: a Roman Catholic who sees abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research as dire threats to her way of life. Wearing a crucifix and carrying a clipboard, she politely patrolled the line last Wednesday, persuading Maryann Oelkers of Wayne and Christine Seiler of Gladwyne to be drivers on Nov. 2. "The passion is out there," said Boyce. "And there is passion on both sides, which is why I need to be here today."
This is the ground war of Campaign 2004, and aptly symbolic of our times: security lines as organizing tools (John Kerry's campaign trolls its own events just as assiduously). The contest that most Americans see is on the air, conducted on TV and on the Internet in ads, speeches and the debates, the first of which is this week at the University of Miami. But there is a less visible, just as crucial, battle underway now, too--a meticulously targeted, parking-lot-to-parking-lot struggle to find and motivate a relative handful of voters in Pennsylvania and a dozen other battleground states. The war uses high tech for a prosaically low-tech goal: person-to-person contact. With mainframes and Palm Pilots, data mining and Webcasting, the campaigns aim to generate word-of-mouth buzz as well as lists of voter names. Republicans call it "multilevel marketing"; Democrats, "F2F"--for face to face.
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Hand-to-hand combat is hardly a new idea in politics, of course--King David probably was pretty good at F2F--but there is a special sense of urgency about it this year. Riven by culture and partisan allegiance, the electorate is hardened into two blocs, which makes wooing "persuadables" one by one that much more difficult but that much more important. Republicans and Democrats alike remain driven by, and obsessed with, the 2000 election. Karl Rove, Bush's mastermind, was caught napping by a terrific last-minute Democratic get-out-the-vote drive, which turned a blowout into the squeaker of all time. Democrats can't forget that they lost the race in the Supreme Court, and have brought back the man who ran the ground game in 2000--the mysterious, near-legendary Michael Whouley--to do it again, only better. And both sides are deploying technology that now makes the granular, individualized targeting of voters possible.
It turns out that television alone can't reach some voters, at least to the extent that Bush and Kerry need to reach them. At best the tube can be an annoyance, at worst it can feed a sense of distance and suspicion, especially in a swing state inundated by ads. "People here don't pay much attention to what they see on television," said Bob Feickert, a Democratic organizer in Hudson, Wis., a fast-growing Minneapolis exurb. "They want to hear somebody from around here say, 'I support my candidate, and this is why'." Lori Bernard, a Republican counterpart, agreed. "Someone sitting next to you in church, someone you go hunting with, that's who you know best," she said. "That's who you trust."
In Washington, the top generals in the armies of the ground war have fancy theories for this simple truth. At Democratic headquarters, Karen Hicks--a veteran of Howard Dean's groundbreaking, Internet-based campaign--cites the books of Robert Putnam ("Bowling Alone") and Malcolm Gladwell ("The Tipping Point") in arguing that local "connectors" with their own "social capital" are the best and most convincing emissaries. Ken Mehlman, the button-down lawyer and Rove acolyte who runs Bush-Cheney '04, is a proponent of "viral marketing," in which word of mouth, talk radio and chatter on Web-based communities supplement the air war. "This is how everything in this country today is being communicated," Mehlman told NEWSWEEK. "It is how sophisticated companies market products." These days, the next best thing to the back fence is the talk show: enter your ZIP code on the BC04 site, and you are prompted to call your local station. "A big part of the reason why we build this," said Mehlman, "is so that people will hear the same message from their neighbors that they are hearing from our TV ads."
As always, the medium is the message, and the opposing armies send revealing messages about the parties and candidates who deployed them. The GOP effort is built on the model of a corporate sales office, with precise performance targets set from above, a system of rewards for stellar volunteer work (better seats at Bush events, for example) and regular verbal reports filed to headquarters by field lieutenants. Rove, in the role of CEO, sits atop the sales pyramid in his second-floor office at the White House, plugging his laptop into an Apple monitor when he isn't on the road. Mehlman, a Harvard Law alum who favors white shirts and clipped sentences, is in the role of COO, and presides over a vast and somewhat clinical warren of offices in suburban Arlington, Va.
The Kerry-Edwards campaign is organized differently--less hierarchical, perhaps, but no less determined. Complementing its own army of precinct captains and volunteers targeting high-value voters is an agglomeration of Democratic fiefdoms: party organizations, "527" independent-spending groups such as America Coming Together, grass-roots crusades such as ACORN, big-city machines and, of course, labor unions, which for years have formed the backbone of the street-level effort. An umbrella group called America Votes is supposed to coordinate things--its members have a weekly conference call--and local chiefs try to prevent duplication. "We cut turf," said Ana Cruz, America Votes' Florida director. Field workers tend to be judged less on the basis of the number of "sales" they log than the numbers of hours they work: more shop floor than telemarketing office.
To gather these reins, the Dems recently brought back Michael Whouley. A bald, intense native of Dorchester by way of Boston College--imagine Matt Damon's Jason Bourne with no hair and a Boston accent as thick as chowder--Whouley avoids the press, eschews titles and plush offices, and exchanges a blood oath of mutual loyalty with his field hands. But he is as much Brooks Brothers as he is "Mystic River," a partner in Boston's premier political-consulting firm. And he has often worked for Kerry--who didn't run in 2000 in part because Whouley had a previous commitment to Al Gore. When he arrived at DNC headquarters the other week, staffers assumed Whouley would take the corner office. Wrong. He set up a desk in the office of the fellow in charge of get-out-the-vote.
Mehlman and Whouley know precisely what the game is: targeting, or the allocation of limited resources to maximize their vote. At first, that means geography: states on the Electoral College map. Rove and Mehlman seem to be following the adage of the late Lee Atwater, who once explained that the aim of a presidential campaign was to "pick a state and break their heart." After arguing over the matter internally, BC04 settled on Pennsylvania over Michigan as the hoped-for heartbreaker. Bush has visited the state 40 times, more than any other, and several more are expected--including four to the Valley Forge area.
In Pennsylvania, as in every other state, BC04 set county-by-county (and in some cases precinct-by-precinct) targets; then it hired Guy Ciarrocchi to meet them. A match for Whouley, at least in intensity, the 39-year-old Ciarrocchi had been president of the College Republicans (a leading training ground for GOP operatives) but had spent the previous decade working for the archdiocese of Philadelphia. So if the target is Pennsylvania, the target within it is the state's culturally conservative Catholic vote. A protege of Sen. Rick Santorum, Ciarrocchi (who carries two cell phones, "one for incoming and one for outgoing") persuaded Rove and Mehlman to raise the sales quotas for southwestern and northeastern Pennsylvania, where Catholics may be open to cultural appeals in aging industrial towns--and where he fears that Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell, a shrewd campaigner, will mount a counter-attack on economic themes.
The ground-war armies are also operating in less obvious places. One is overseas, where an estimated 4 million to 7 million Americans, civilian and military, live and work. The Pentagon this year has mailed 340,000 absentee ballots, though the method and timing of counting those that are returned varies from state to state and even county to county. (If it's close again, look for disputes over such ballots--Florida was full of them--to be repeated.) The Democratic overseas effort, run by Kerry's sister Diana, is thought to be the better of the two; the GOP's has long been more of a social club. College campuses are a serious new target of opportunity, since a recent court ruling says that college kids now can register and vote in the state where they attend school. At Villanova University, two miles from the Valley Forge Conference Center, 19-year-old Kristene Henkelman has persuaded hundreds of students to register locally--unless, as she said, "they are from swing states."
The bottom-line goals everywhere are the same: to register voters (deadlines are approaching in most states); to give them absentee ballots where possible (a growing number of states have loosened restrictions on their use); to encourage them to vote early if they can (some states, including Florida, allow them to fill out regular ballots at polling places weeks in advance of Nov. 2); to prepare lists for get-out-the-vote drives on Election Day. And geography is just the beginning of list-building. Campaigns are hungry to know the specific interests of voters--data that find their way from Palm Pilots and check-marked call sheets to mainframe computers in Washington.
Demography is destiny. In Wisconsin, Republicans are scoping out the gun-loving members of Turkeys Unlimited--not to mention Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever. For Democrats in Florida, that means Eleanor Rempell of Delray, Fla. The Hurricane State is crawling with paid, imported organizers who trudge the streets with voter lists and Palms in hand. They are no match for Rempell, an 82-year-old retired administrator for the City University of New York. She patrols the hallways of assisted-living facilities with a determination born of experience: she was one of the thousands of elderly Jews who mistakenly marked butterfly ballots in 2000 for Pat Buchanan. The editor of the Delray Citizens for Social Responsibility newsletter, she is a Gladwellian "connector" who knows not to hector her fellow seniors. "I don't hammer them, I just speak kindly and gently. I think I get the point across." Does she? The ground war--and the election--turn on the answer.
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