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

National Review, Nov 29, 2004 by Richard Lowry

Personal connection was important. The campaign's activities had overlapping purposes, all of which served to increase the sense of connection to the campaign. Sending out e-mails obviously communicated a message, but it also made people feel closer to the campaign because they were always hearing from it. Volunteers were important not just for their sheer work hours, but because they would come to care so much about the campaign for which they were working.

Mehlman explains that the model was the Bush caucus campaign in Iowa in 2000, where you could be a Bush team leader by bringing ten other people into the fold. The campaign learned, according to Mehlman, that "lots of volunteers will beat a paid army of people who don't have skin in the game." The same goes for donors--they will care more after they give you money: "If someone gives you five dollars, he has skin in the game. We massively, massively, massively, massively built the size of our donor list, more than a million people. You want to raise money, but you also want to give as many people a stake as you can."

Volunteers, by this way of thinking, weren't just workers, but potential Bush devotees and therefore doubly important. "I remember," Mehlman says, "someone from one of our offices rolling his eyes and saying, 'People keep coming here and asking for something to do'--as if it were a problem. I said, 'What, are you crazy?' If you showed up at our offices and asked to help, you were never turned away."

The campaign went out of its way to avoid pitfalls of a topheavy presidential-reelection organization. "After 2002, I sat down with every campaign in each state," says Mehlman, "and said, 'Tell us everything that you learned.' Usually what happens with a Washington-based campaign is that you think you know better. We wanted to avoid that. We wanted accountability--what did we do wrong and need to do better? And we wanted it to be driven by local knowledge, not from Washington."

THE GROUND GAME

The campaign had "metrics" for every week, goals by state, county, and precinct, for identifying voters and for registrations. The system was reminiscent of the COMPSTAT breakdown of crime statistics block by block that New York City used to fight crime--that's "exactly what it is like," says Mehlman. "I'd call up a field worker out somewhere and say, 'That was a great job you did with those 5,000 new people you ID'd last night.' That makes an impression. If the manager of this multimillion-dollar campaign tells a 24-year-old staffer he likes what he did, word gets around."

It allowed the campaign to identify problems. Terry Nelson says Bush headquarters could say things like, "Montgomery County in Pennsylvania is not producing? What do we need to do? Do we need another staff person? Do we need another phone bank?" Beginning in June there were weekly conference calls with the states, ensuring that they were doing things necessary to meet their get-out-the-vote goals in the fall.

But in the spring of 2004, it wasn't clear to outside observers that Bush would get a chance to exercise his campaign's machinery to any effect whatsoever. It seemed he might get blown out of the water by events. The campaign didn't panic. "There was always a sense of calm," says a Bush campaign official. "We knew the election wasn't in April, it was in November." The tone here, as in so much else, was set by Mehlman, who never betrayed discouragement or pointed fingers. (Says Gillespie, in a comment that would get near-universal assent from the Bush campaign: "Ken was never turf-conscious. It was never about him. I can't tell you what a top-quality guy he was--he was tireless, principled, selfless, a great manager.")