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

National Review, Nov 29, 2004 by Richard Lowry

The Republican convention was, by contrast, a runaway success. Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Laura Bush all had favorable/unfavorable ratings better than anyone at the Democratic convention. And the campaign kept it interesting. "We had a matrix with a theme for every night," says Mehlman. "We told speakers, 'This is what you should focus on, and here are three or four things you might want to say.' But we didn't do what the Democrats did, which was basically to have 27 speeches all written by the same people. That's always boring."

Most important, Bush launched a policy offensive at the convention. He had waited a long time, but for a reason. "In 2000 we had done it in the spring," says Gillespie, "and by October we had run out of gas. We didn't want to repeat that. It was a sense of a new beginning, a new agenda for a new term. Without acknowledging anything was wrong in the first term, it said the second term will be a little different."

THE CLOSER

The campaign went into the stretch run with a very strong candidate. "The most important thing was George W. Bush," says Mehlman. "He was a good campaigner. He's a charismatic guy. He's compelling. He's good on the stump. And people loved him. All we did was take that incredible support and build channels for it."

The first debate was a major stumbling block. "We all knew it was problematic for us and it was a gain for Kerry and we had to regain our footing," says Gillespie. By the end of the debate period Bush had regained his lead. The last event that could have changed the dynamic of the race was the explosive New York Times story. Kerry seized on it, and Bush aides think the story hurt their candidate. But it represented an opportunity cost to Kerry too. Mehlman says, "That he would want to spend the week before the election talking about how much munitions there were in Iraq, I never understood. I was saying, 'Are you kidding me?'"

"It ended up exactly the way we thought," says Mehlman, "a close election that we won on the ground." The Bush team had confidence in the ground game it had honed for years. "[The campaign workers] had executed every day, had executed every week, and had been held accountable," says Terry Nelson. "I had very few doubts." New registrants, who were supposed to carry Kerry over the top, broke only 53-46 for the senator. The GOP goal was for 14 million "attempts"--attempted contact with voters--in the battleground states in the last four days. The number may have hit 18 million. "If you look at it county by county," says Nelson, "we outperformed our 2000 vote in a huge number of counties."

Bush officials hope they have created a new model for Republican politics. Nelson argues that Republicans have traditionally won when they have had a better message and a better candidate, while Democrats have often won on the basis of better tactics and turnout. "Republicans in two different elections now [2002 and 2004] have had a better tactical effort than the Democrats," he says.