Bush's well-mapped road to victory: how Rove et al. pulled it off

National Review, Nov 29, 2004 by Richard Lowry

The Bush campaign's political director, Terry Nelson, says, "The untold story of the campaign is our targeting of prospective Republican voters and voters who would not typically fall into the Republican turnout universe," including registered independents or people in states without registration by party. These "disengaged potential Republicans," as Matthew Dowd calls them, were targeted with, among other things, more spending on radio and national cable than any other presidential campaign had ever done. "We acquired a raft of consumer information--do you own a gun? attend church regularly?--that a credit-card company might get," says Mehlman. This helped identify new potential Bush voters. "You might find that someone who subscribed to Christianity Today or lived in a high-income household in an area that typically votes Republican," says a Bush campaign official. They could be added to the target list. Also, the campaign matched up its volunteers with target voters, e.g., a gun-owning volunteer would be directed to other gun owners in his area.

"In Wisconsin, we had a lot of sportsmen phone banks, where sportsmen would call and explain to other sportsmen why they should be for us," says Terry Nelson. The campaign tried to match up "anyone with a common interest, common membership," explains Mehlman. "Someone concerned about education is going to be more likely to believe what she hears from a fellow member of the PTAthan a [Democratic] kid wearing a baseball hat who wants to show her a John Kerry video and who is getting paid by a temp agency." It was a way to deliver information in a personally compelling--and therefore more credible--way.

It was especially important to have social conservatives talk to social conservatives. The campaign famously thought there were 4 million missing evangelical voters in 2000. It sought to find them. The issues would be starker in 2004 than in the more consensus-driven election of 2000, which would help. But the campaign still had to find a transmission belt to conservative Evangelicals in the wake of the decline of the Christian Coalition. "We had hundreds of training sessions for pastors and activists," says Ken Mehlman. "People organized 'Citizenship Sundays.' Jim Dobson did great things. We reached out to individual members of megachurches who contacted their fellow attendees."

The campaign exploited new technology. You could go to the Bush website, type in your zip code, and get links to local talk radio, drafts of letters to the editor, and talking points of the day. The site had "virtual precincts." If you typed in your name and your address, you would get five people you could contact in your area and directions to their houses. You could get directions to the polls, and if you typed in ten other people, you could get directions to the polls for them, that you could forward on. "TV created an era of mass communications," says Mehlman. "The effect of the Internet is to return us to the days where local communities are important, or communities based on shared interests."