He's dressed like a loser, too.
Posted on 11/21/2004 6:22:22 AM PST by John Jorsett
One of the worst days of Steve Bouchard's 36 years on the planet began, as it would end, in a bleak, second-floor banquet room on Main Street in Columbus. Someone must have thought the exposed brick walls and copper piping would give the room a contemporary feel, but the effect was undone by a sad little mirror ball overhanging a miniature dance floor. ''This is what I'm talking about,'' Bouchard said, sipping from a takeout coffee cup and gesturing at the lights. ''Doesn't this just bring you back to your Studio 54 days?'' It was Election Day in Ohio, and a jumbo flat-screen TV had already been wheeled into place for the Democrats who would gather here, some 15 hours later, to watch the presidential returns come in.
There was always something torturous about Election Day, Bouchard said. After all the months of working more or less around the clock, suddenly it was a struggle to stay busy. Bouchard was the Ohio state director for America Coming Together, the most important and perhaps most controversial group to emerge from the new galaxy of independently financed organizations commonly known as 527's. As such, he presided over the most critical state operation in the largest get-out-the-vote effort ever undertaken to win a single presidential campaign. But once the voting commenced, his work was pretty much finished. ''By the time the clock hits 4 o'clock, what can I do?'' he asked. ''I know guys who will go get a big Delmonico steak on Election Day. I know a guy who actually goes into his office with a movie and a bottle of wine and closes down. Once the plan's been written and you have your field and regional people out there working, you're pretty much done. All I can do is go around and see how things are going.''
But still, he had risen in the dark -- who could sleep? -- and made his way downtown. Around the perimeter of the room, giddy volunteers lined up in pairs behind signs that read Team 1, Team 2 and so on, all the way up to Team 20. Each duo was handed a folder that contained MapQuest directions and a detailed map of a neighborhood with the team's specific street route outlined in Magic Marker, along with an armful of door-hangers reminding people to vote. The same scene was playing itself out in 64 other staging areas around the state. This was the first of three waves of canvassers who would hit the streets before the polls closed at 7:30 p.m.; all told, ACT and its sister organizations in a giant umbrella coalition of liberal groups known as America Votes would put hundreds of paid canvassers and some 20,000 volunteers on Ohio's streets before the day was out.
A year ago it had seemed to Bouchard that it would be impossible to get ordinary people to volunteer for a 527. (The name comes from the provision of the tax code that makes such groups legal.) After all, ACT represented a phenomenon that had never been seen in presidential politics: a campaign without a candidate. Much of its staggering $130 million haul came from wealthy liberals like George Soros and interest groups like the Service Employees International Union, which was ACT's single largest contributor of money and manpower. (The union kicked in more than $26million.) But legal restrictions in the 2002 campaign-finance law created a wall between ACT and both the Democratic Party and the Kerry campaign itself, so that ACT officials were barely allowed to speak to their longtime friends at the campaign. ACT existed separately as an enormous door-to-door campaign without anything like the star quality of an actual, breathing politician.
But ACT had nonetheless evolved into something glamorous, a kind of sleek new political vehicle for the Volvo-driving set. Perhaps because they supported other liberal groups aligned with ACT, like Emily's List or the Sierra Club, or perhaps because ACT had a certain outsider cachet, thousands of volunteers from New York, New England and California chose to work for the organization in Ohio instead of the Kerry campaign; among them, I met a book editor from Manhattan and a massage therapist from Santa Barbara. A few nights earlier, in Cleveland, Bouchard and I visited a basement-level phone bank where the ACT volunteers included the actors Matt Dillon and Timothy Hutton and the actress Eliza Dushku. (''Eliza who?'' I asked. ''Don't know,'' Bouchard shrugged, prompting the actress herself, apparently blessed with good hearing, to turn around and appraise us coldly.) Now, on election morning, he surveyed the ballroom. ''I don't care where these people are from,'' he said, ''as long as they're motivated.''
Field organizers are the invisible heroes of any political campaign, the grunts who rarely get credit, and they fall into two categories: the first includes the bookish spreadsheet fiends who love nothing more than to transform urban tracts into streams of relevant voting data; the second comprises the kind of oddball extroverts whose idea of a good time is to entertain a total stranger at the doorstep of his own home. Bouchard fell into the latter category. He was likely, at any moment, to break into a blues standard or into a well-practiced imitation of Tom Brokaw. In his pocket, he carried for good luck a New England Patriots pendant that was given to him by the team's owner, Robert Kraft, during a chance encounter. He had walked up to the man in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in New York City and started chatting him up, as if Kraft were just another voter waiting to be registered.
Bouchard had molded an impressive, almost military operation. He took over Ohio from a previous director last April, after running field operations for Bob Graham and then Wesley Clark in each man's failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. Bouchard inherited a sprawling network of some 25 field offices and a payroll of 800 canvassers. Before he arrived, ACT was quickly exhausting its budget for Ohio, and, worse, Bouchard observed, it wasn't converting enough voters to justify the expense. The reason, he figured, was practical: since ACT, as a 527, was legally barred from advocating for a specific candidate, it was impossible for ACT canvassers to make a compelling case for Kerry. They were allowed to tell a voter that, say, a lot of jobs had disappeared from Ohio in the last four years, but they weren't able to explain what Kerry intended to do about it.
Bouchard closed almost a third of the offices and pared down his canvassing staff by two-thirds. His team then focused its efforts on signing up new voters in heavily Democratic areas where a lot of new and transient voters had yet to register. Using Palm Pilots equipped with 30-second video ads to show to prospective voters, the canvassers set about identifying voters across the state: where they lived, how they planned to vote, what issues they cared about. Even building an up-to-date list of previously registered voters was a monstrous assignment in Ohio, because voters in the state don't register with a party affiliation; the only thing canvassers knew about their political orientations before knocking on their doors was whether they had voted in either party's primary in the last six years. Every night, without fail, the canvassers plugged their Palm Pilots, full of new data about the homes they had visited, into ACT's Web-based voter list.
By Election Day, ACT claimed to have registered 85,000 new voters in Ohio, while the rest of the America Votes coalition -- groups as large as the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and MoveOn.org and as small as Music for America -- had registered another 215,000. If you were an Ohioan registered by ACT or one of its partners, Bouchard told me, you were contacted as many as a dozen times after you registered, by phone or by mail or by a live canvasser at your front door. ACT claimed to have knocked on 3.7 million doors and held more than 1.1 million doorstep conversations in the state; in contrast, the Kerry-Edwards campaign, which had its own significant turnout effort under way, had arrived in Ohio months after ACT and reported having knocked on about 595,000 doors. ''There's no way a party or a campaign could put on the ground the resources that we have,'' Bouchard told me. ''The sheer numbers of doors we knock on and phone calls we make are just astounding.''
Earlier in the year, I had spent weeks on the other side of the lines in Ohio, writing an article for the magazine about the Republican plan to vastly increase turnout using an all-volunteer network, modeled on a multilevel marketing scheme like Amway, that would focus on the new and growing exurban counties around Ohio's major cities. Democrats, traditionally the masters of field organizing, had dismissed the Republican effort as an exercise in self-delusion, insisting that volunteers could never build a turnout model to compete with professional organizers. In ACT and its partners, Democrats told me, they were building the most efficient turnout machine in political history. I returned to Ohio in the final days of the campaign to see the power of this grass-roots behemoth in action. I did -- and I came to understand its limitations as well.
But all of that was still hours away as canvassers clutched their marching orders and streamed out of the little ballroom on Main Street. Soon Bouchard and I were the only ones left. ''I'm thinking I've got to go,'' he said finally. ''Except what have I got to do? I'm going back to the office to see what's going on, I guess.'' We walked down to the street. The polls were open and the sun had risen, although Bouchard, blinking at the sky, could see the stirrings of storm clouds. This worried him; rain is always assumed to deter urban voters. He had been watching weather forecasts for weeks, and the latest report all but assured him of showers. Bouchard changed his mind about the office. ''I'm going to vote,'' he said.
After breakfast, I called Steve Rosenthal on his cellphone. Rosenthal, ACT's chief executive officer and Bou-chard's boss, had been lent a private jet for the closing days of the campaign by one of the group's wealthy donors. He touched down the night before in Cincinnati, and now he was driving his rental car from Dayton to Columbus. ''I'm just blown away by what I see everywhere I go,'' he told me. ''It's raining, but our people aren't deterred. They're voting. They're organizing. They're canvassing. It's amazing. I really think we could win by a substantial margin.''
ACT represented Rosenthal's vision more than anyone else's. Ellen Malcolm, the influential president of Emily's List, had done the most to raise the money, but it was Rosenthal, the former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and a labor department official in the Clinton administration, who was known inside the party as a brilliant, almost legendary field strategist. Perpetually rumpled and self-effacing, more studious than brazen, Rosenthal wasn't the kind of guy given to bold pronouncements. But everything in his experience told him the election was well within reach for Kerry. He had taken to repeating a football analogy that came from Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, who had dispatched thousands of the union's members and employees to work on ACT's behalf: ACT, Stern said, had assembled the best field-goal unit ever. All the candidate had to do was get them into range, and they would do the rest.
''For the life of me, I can't see how we could lose Ohio,'' Rosenthal had told me over lunch in Washington the previous week. ''The only way they win Ohio is to steal it like they did Florida four years ago.''
Rosenthal, wearing jeans and sneakers, arrived at ACT's Ohio headquarters to hugs and handshakes from old friends and volunteers. He and I jumped into a Ford Explorer driven by Tom Lindenfeld, one of Rosenthal's oldest friends, who was helping to direct ACT's Ohio campaign. As we drove, Rosenthal explained to me what he had learned about elections as a union organizer. He had increased turnout among union members at a time when the union rolls themselves were shrinking, and he had done it by focusing on new registrants. Union members could be persuaded to vote, Rosenthal found, when an informed canvasser came to their doors and talked to them about the issues. More cerebral than your average political operative, Rosenthal had taken an interest in the work of a couple of Yale professors, Alan Gerber and Donald Green, who reported in controlled studies that door-to-door visits were far and away the most effective way to get people to vote.
The Democratic Party had a different approach, as I learned just the day before. I had driven over to the Kerry campaign's Ohio headquarters; it was only a five-minute drive from ACT's office, and yet so complete was the separation between the campaign and the 527's that no one in the ACT office seemed to know where it was. (The campaign's Ohio spokeswoman, Jennifer Palmieri, told me that the only time Kerry operatives had stumbled across ACT's work in the state was when they went to rent vans for Election Day and found that ACT had beaten them to it.) Talking to Palmieri, one of the party's most senior press aides, it was clear that the party and its candidate did not share Rosenthal's vision.
Given the finite resources of any campaign, she said, ''field people generally feel that registering new voters isn't a good use of time. It takes a lot of energy and time to register new voters, and you know they don't come out to vote.'' Instead, she told me, the Democrats' campaign in Ohio had adopted the old-fashioned strategy of counting ''hard yeses.'' They found stalwart Democratic voters -- the base -- and pounded them with mail, phone calls and visits to make sure they went to the polls.
ACT, on the other hand, reflected Rosenthal's dream: he could take what he had started in the labor movement, this push for new voters, and expand it into a national turnout program that was entirely separate from the party -- and over which the party had no control. He had run a field test in Philadelphia during the 2003 mayoral election, and the data were impressive. ACT had registered and then canvassed 87,000 new black voters in the city, and an estimated 38,000 of them -- or 44 percent -- voted on Election Day. By comparison, among new voters who had registered through other means, like the state's motor-voter program, turnout was at 30 percent. ''You really can expand the electorate, and that's what I think we have to do,'' Rosenthal told me as Lindenfeld pulled into the parking garage of the Holiday Inn near the Ohio State campus. ''You talk to people who don't vote, and what we've found is that nobody asked them to. Well, no one will have that excuse in this election.''
In a ballroom inside the otherwise empty hotel, about 200 canvassers and van drivers -- the day's second wave -- were assembled for last-minute training. The drivers, who would get $100 for the day's work, were deputized to oversee their teams; each one was given a Nextel pager to communicate with headquarters. It was the driver's job to make sure that the canvassing teams hit every door on their route, affixing a giant Post-it note reminding residents to vote. (The Post-it notes, it turned out, could be used only in the afternoon, because they wouldn't stick to doors covered with morning dew.) Hundreds of yellow ponchos were piled up to protect workers from the rain.
Rosenthal and I watched from the side as his creation came to life. ''Once you do this, there's no going back,'' he said. ''One of the by-products of this election is this whole new generation of organizers who know how to cut turf, develop lists, use them to target voters. They know how to do these things now. This is how politics changes.''
We all moved on to Champps for lunch, where Rosenthal got a call from his office on his cellphone and began taking down the numbers from the first wave of exit polling. Kerry was up by 4 points in Ohio and Florida. He led by 12 in Pennsylvania. ''These look great,'' Rosenthal told Lindenfeld and Bouchard. ''I'll take these.'' The three men wondered why it was that they hadn't seen much evidence of the vaunted Republican turnout effort. The ''vote challengers'' that Republicans had successfully appealed to the courts to allow into the polls had never shown up. Field offices weren't detecting any sign of Bush canvassers on the streets or at the polls. It was as if all this talk about the Republicans' volunteer-driven machine had been some kind of a strategic feint rather than an actual plan.
On the way back to headquarters, where he would say his goodbyes before returning to Washington, Rosenthal saw two ACT workers standing in the rain, shielding their Post-it notes under their ponchos. He rolled down the window. ''Hey guys, great job!'' he said. ''Keep up the good work!'' The volunteers waved. ''Have you seen any Republicans?'' Rosenthal asked. ''No? They gave up, I guess. They're all back in Crawford, at the celebration.''
Lindenfeld and Bouchard were back on the road, checking out target precincts to make sure they were being canvassed. We rolled slowly through poor, all-black neighborhoods in Lindenfeld's rented Ford Explorer, eyeing front porches for Post-it notes and ACT flyers.
This is how white Democrats have always won elections in close states like Ohio -- by cajoling every last black urban voter to go to the polls. In Ohio, Republicans have been able to count on winning somewhere around 75 of the state's 88 counties in any statewide election. The traditional Democratic formula for victory centered on a handful of counties with a heavy concentration of minority voters: win the critical stronghold of Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, by a margin of more than 150,000 votes; stay close in Franklin County, which contains Columbus and its suburbs; and hold the Republicans to a margin of victory of fewer than 60,000 votes in Hamilton County, the area that encompasses Cincinnati. (As it turned out, Democrats in 2004 would easily meet these criteria, and then some. Kerry won Cuyahoga by more than 217,000 votes, narrowly won Franklin, and in Hamilton lost to Bush by fewer than 25,000 votes.)
Our S.U.V. passed by polling places where people waited in line around the block, umbrellas perched over their heads. ''Look at that,'' Lindenfeld motioned to me. ''Out the door and around the block. It's a beautiful thing.'' The rule of politics had always been the same: the more people who turned out, the better it was for Democrats.
Bouchard and Lindenfeld had been working side by side for weeks, and by now, whenever they shared the same space, a kind of dramatic tension surrounded them. They were like mismatched conspirators in a common struggle. Bouchard, the natural performer with a comedic gift, tended to lighten the atmosphere of every room he entered. Lindenfeld, who grew up in New Jersey and was schooled in urban politics, came off like a human machine gun, given to bravado; Rosenthal had described him to me as ''the best street fighter in the business.'' Lindenfeld kept the earpiece for his cellphone planted in his ear at all times, with an activation trigger on his belt, so that he was constantly barking into the phone without any apparent provocation. You might be talking to him, face to face, when suddenly he would shout, ''How you feelin'?!'' and it would take a moment to realize that he had moved on to someone else.
''Are these the numbers you have?'' Lindenfeld asked, passing his BlackBerry over to Bouchard. The newest exit-poll data was leaking out.
''Yes,'' Bouchard said, then paused. ''Wait. Tommy, where's Ohio? Ohio isn't even in here. There's no Ohio. Why do you do this to me?'' He stared at Lindenfeld. ''Why do you hate freedom?''
The newest numbers, in fact, showed the race in Ohio tightening to within 2 points. Bouchard still believed Ohio was Kerry's, but he was less relaxed than he had been an hour before, when he had stopped to buy cigars for later, just in case. And with the lines at urban polling places came a new problem: in a few hours, the polls would close, and thousands of voters, most of them presumably Democrats, would be standing out in the rain until late at night, waiting to vote. They couldn't be allowed to just give up and go home. Bouchard ordered his staff at headquarters to send out volunteers with ponchos and meals for the voters waiting their turn. ''I want to make sure we keep the people in line warm, happy, fed and dry,'' he said.
Lindenfeld, on his phone, was working out a deal. ''We can feed some people,'' he told Bouchard. If ACT, which was almost out of money, would write a check for $3,000 to McDonald's for vanloads of hot meals, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. would reimburse them. Bouchard looked incredulous. ''What?'' he shouted. ''I'm not going to write a $3,000 check to 'feed some people.' What, is there some kind of new McSurf-and-Turf I don't know about?''
''But we're not paying for it,'' Lindenfeld snapped back. They needed the food. Bouchard O.K.'d the deal.
What gnawed at Bouchard was that nowhere we went in Franklin County, a vigorously contested swing county, did we see any hint of a strong Republican presence -- no signs, no door-knockers, no Bush supporters handing out leaflets at the polls. This seemed only to increase Lindenfeld's confidence. He didn't believe in the Republican turnout plan. ''What they talked about is a dream,'' he told me at one point. ''We've got the reality. They're wishing they had what we've got.'' For Bouchard, however, the silence was unsettling. How could there be such a thing as a stealth get-out-the-vote drive?
Bouchard decided that he wanted to drive to an outlying Republican area to see if turnout there was keeping pace with the city. Maybe the Bush campaign was waging a more visible effort in nonurban precincts. Obliging him, Lindenfeld punched a few keys on his in-dash navigation system and set a course for Delaware County, a fast-growing exurban tract north of Columbus where Republicans dominate.
Traffic thickened as we found our way onto Route 23, lined with brand-new strip plazas and office parks. The sky dimmed to a shade of charcoal. Storm clouds massed and then erupted, dumping sheets of cold rain onto the Explorer's windshield. The mood in the car seemed to darken as well. ''This is not good,'' Lindenfeld said, turning up the wipers. Kerry's early lead in the exit polls should have been widening as daytime turned to night; according to the time-honored rules of politics, Republicans vote in the morning, while Democrats vote late. Instead, the polls suggested that whatever lead Kerry still had was fading, and the long delays at urban polling places, with the rain now bearing down, seemed to present a distinct disadvantage. Lindenfeld and Bouchard worked their cellphones simultaneously.
''Listen,'' Lindenfeld barked, by way of starting a conversation, ''the latest poll numbers we heard showed Ohio dead even. So you need to get back on the cellphone and work the Nextel pagers and make sure no one comes back early and punks out on their routes.''
Lindenfeld dialed a new number and talked as he changed lanes: ''Listen, it's now dead even where we were up before, so we need to make sure we get these people out there, O.K.? We're in an all-out, squeeze-it-out, make-sure-we-get-every-vote-out-there type deal.''
Bouchard was talking to someone in Cleveland. ''Hey, how's the weather?'' he said. ''What do you hear?''
As night fell, we reached the city of Delaware and found a polling place at a recreation center. The only people in the parking lot were a drenched couple holding Kerry-Edwards signs. Inside, the polling place was empty. ''Look at this,'' Lindenfeld said to me triumphantly. ''Does this look like a busy polling place? Look around. There's no one here.'' He repeated this several times, making the point that turnout in the outlying areas was tailing off, while voters were lined up around the block back in Columbus. ''Do you see any Republicans?'' he asked me, motioning around the parking lot.
In fact, a quick investigation of the voter rolls, taped to the wall outside the voting area, indicated that the polling place was dead for a less encouraging reason: most of the voters in the two precincts assigned to the recreation center had already voted. The officials in charge told me that 1,175 of the 1,730 registered voters on the rolls had cast their ballots. In other words, turnout in those precincts was up to an impressive 68 percent, and there were still two hours left before the polls closed. (When it was over, Delaware County as a whole would post an astounding turnout rate of 78 percent, with two out of three votes going to Bush.)
I was beginning to understand that the rules of the game were changing, confounding even the experts who seemed to have this business of voter turnout all figured out. For decades, Democratic operatives had been virtually unchallenged by Republicans when it came to mobilizing voters, and during that time, they had come to rely on a certain set of underlying assumptions, all of them based on experience in urban areas. One was that the volume of activity at a polling place was a reliable measure of turnout; long lines meant higher turnout, and no lines meant disaster. Another was that the strength of a get-out-the-vote program could be gauged by the number of people canvassing city streets, the people holding signs in the rain, vans carrying voters to the polls.
But Ohio, like much of the country, was undergoing a demographic shift of historic proportions, and Republicans were learning to exploit their advantage in rapidly expanding rural areas that organizers like Lindenfeld, for all their technological innovation, just didn't understand. In shiny new town-house communities, canvassing could be done quietly by neighbors; you didn't need vans and pagers. Polling places could accommodate all the voters in a precinct without ever giving the appearance of being overrun. In the old days, these towns and counties had been nothing but little pockets of voters, and Republicans hadn't bothered to expend the energy to organize them. But now the exurban populations had reached critical mass (Delaware County alone had grown by almost one-third since the 2000 election), and Republicans were building their own kind of quiet but ruthlessly efficient turnout machine.
Even on the outer edges of the cities, long lines were not necessarily the indicators of Democratic muscle that they used to be. Returning to the headquarters in Columbus, we passed a polling place at the local fish and wildlife office, where a line of voters stretched around the building, even though the polls were closing. ''You see that?'' Lindenfeld exclaimed admiringly. To him, it was another sign of Democratic enthusiasm. When I walked over to the line a little later, however, the man who was administering the site told me that, judging from his precinct lists, the majority of voters standing in line lived in new town-house developments across the highway, and they had stopped in to vote on their way home from work. Most of them, he said, were Republicans.
Bouchard did not look like a man who wanted to party when he arrived back at the little ballroom on Main Street for the victory celebration. He spent a few minutes with his wife, Jenny, and his two young sons, Adam and James, who were visiting from the family's home in suburban Washington, and then sent them back to his rented apartment. On the wide-screen TV, as Tom Brokaw consigned one state after another to red or blue status, the talk began to center on Ohio, which remained too close to call. A camera tightened over the conspicuously white stretch of real estate between red Indiana and blue Pennsylvania. Bouchard seemed to wince; the camera lens might as well have been focused directly on him. By 11, it had become apparent to everyone in America that whoever won Ohio would occupy the White House.
Bouchard kept slipping away to whatever part of the room seemed most neglected, trying to somehow be alone in a crowd. But wherever he went, volunteers seemed to follow, hoping to hear something encouraging. ''If I wasn't anxious right now, there would be something wrong with me,'' he told me. ''But I'm confident. I think all the people left out there are ours.''
On some level, though, he knew this probably wasn't true. It was apparent in his body language, the way he leaned against any wall surface he could find and stared straight ahead. It was apparent in the numbers. A group of volunteers had set up a laptop in one corner of the room, and they could see Ohio results being posted in real time. More than 100,000 votes in Cuyahoga County, home to the city of Cleveland, remained to be counted as the clock edged toward midnight, but the overwhelmingly Democratic urban precincts had already reported; it was the outlying areas of the county, more mixed in their racial and political composition, that were yet to be tallied. Around midnight, 77 percent of the state's precincts had reported their results, then 80 and then 86, and yet Bush's lead of 100,000 to 150,000 votes stayed more or less intact as the totals mounted. The volunteers huddled around the computer thought they were watching two thoroughbreds race neck and neck to the final yard, but for a seasoned campaigner like Bouchard, it felt more like watching his horse fade down the stretch. The window of opportunity for Kerry appeared to be closing.
It was around 1 in the morning when Brokaw painted Ohio red. ''It is now hard to see how George W. Bush is not re-elected president of the United States,'' the anchor intoned.
A quiet disbelief descended on the room. You could hear the creak of a folding chair, a ringing cellphone, the intermittent sob. ''This is the end of the United States of America,'' I heard one man declare as he left the room.
The volunteers who had been watching the numbers on a laptop refused to accept what was happening; they decided it was Brokaw's fault, because he had put Ohio into Bush's column, while CBS was still calling it even. Cursing Brokaw, they abruptly flipped channels to Dan Rather instead, causing a minor uproar. ''Folks, the reason we changed the channel is because NBC is the only network that called it!'' one of the frustrated volunteers shouted.
Bouchard, watching this unfold from the back of the room, recognized the desperation for what it was. ''I hear the PAX network hasn't called it either,'' he said sardonically. ''Let's put that on.''
He seemed exhausted, the weight of seven months of seven-day weeks beginning to collapse on itself. It was 2 in the morning. His cellphone kept ringing with calls from Washington. Preparations were being made for a recount. MoveOn.org was already organizing a rally for later in the day. Bouchard knew the numbers better than anyone, and he already knew what the outcome would be: Ohio had cost Kerry the presidency. He looked like a man who wanted to be just about anywhere other than where he was. What do you say to someone at a moment like that?
''I guess this is pretty much the worst-case scenario for you,'' I offered, unhelpfully.
''Well, you know,'' he said wryly, ''it could have been worse. At least it's not as if Ohio came in late, and the cameras all zoomed in on a map of Ohio, and the whole country was waiting, and everyone knew that it all came down to us.'' He paused for effect. ''At least that didn't happen.''
About 20 staff members and volunteers sat around the TV in the ACT headquarters and watched John Kerry concede the presidency. Several of them hadn't stopped weeping from the night before. Sarah Benzing, a 27-year-old organizer who had helped design and maintain ACT's database of Ohio voters, cried on Bouchard's shoulder. At least the people who worked on the Kerry campaign, she said, had a candidate to thank them for all their work. It was part of the strange existence of working for a political 527; the man for whom you had subjugated everything else in your life for all these months had no way of acknowledging, or even really knowing, what you had done. ''We're just sort of hanging out there,'' was the way that Benzing put it.
A day later, the national office held a conference call with all of its state staffs, and each of the state directors was asked to give a two-minute summary of what they had accomplished. When Bouchard's turn came around, he tried to alleviate the tension with a joke. ''I'm Steve Bouchard, the Ohio state director.'' Pause. ''And at least nobody got hurt.'' A staff member in the room reminded him that this wasn't entirely true. A woman had reportedly been hit by an ACT van.
Sitting in his office, Bouchard admitted that he was, more than anything else, baffled. It was impossible to know -- and would be for some time -- whether ACT's newly registered voters had come to the polls in the numbers Rosenthal had predicted. What was clear was that ACT had exceeded the goals it had set for the total Kerry vote in each of its target counties in Ohio. In Cuyahoga County, where ACT had set a target of 350,540 votes for Kerry, he received 433,262. In Franklin County, where the goal was 262,895 votes, Kerry had garnered 275,573. In fact, Kerry's 2.66 million votes were the most ever for a Democrat in Ohio.
ACT couldn't take full credit for these numbers, of course; a lot of factors, not least the work of the Kerry-Edwards campaign itself, had contributed to Kerry easily surpassing what Al Gore had achieved in the state in 2000. But ACT had done its part, both in Ohio and nationally. Kerry received a total of 4,862,000 more votes nationwide than Gore did, and, according to ACT's breakdown, 58 percent of that increase came in the 12 battleground states that ACT had targeted. Results in some states seemed to bear out Rosenthal's theory on expanding the base; in Florida, for example, according to exit polls, 13 percent of all votes were cast by first-time voters, and a clear majority of them voted for Kerry.
None of this felt very consoling, however. ''If we could detach that way, we could say, 'Well, we're a registration-and-turnout organization, and we did our job,''' Bouchard said. ''But it's hard to detach from the political reality that it wasn't enough.''
Why wasn't it enough? In the days that followed, theories circulated claiming that Republicans had stolen votes from Kerry by messing with the results from electronic voting machines. But the truth was that the Bush campaign had created an entirely new math in Ohio. It wouldn't have been possible eight years ago, or even four. But with so many white, conservative and religious voters now living in the brand-new town houses and McMansions in Ohio's growing ring counties, Republicans were able to mobilize a stunning turnout in areas where their support was more concentrated than it was in the past. Bush's operatives did precisely what they told me seven months ago they would do in these communities: they tapped into a volunteer network using local party organizations, union rolls, gun clubs and churches. They backed it up with a blizzard of targeted appeals; according to the preliminary results of a survey done by the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University, one representative home in Portage County, just outside Cleveland, received 11 pieces of mail from the Republican National Committee.
This effort wasn't visible to Democrats because it was taking place on an entirely new terrain, in counties that Democrats had some vague notion of, but which they never expected could generate so many votes. The 10 Ohio counties with the highest turnout percentages, many of them small and growing, all went for Bush, and none of them had a turnout rate of less than 75 percent.
For Democrats, this new phenomenon on Election Day felt like some kind of horror movie, with conservative voters rising up out of the hills and condo communities in numbers the Kerry forces never knew existed. ''They just came in droves,'' Jennifer Palmieri told me two days after the election. ''We didn't know they had that room to grow. It's like, 'Crunch all you want -- we'll make more.' They just make more Republicans.''
In hindsight, it seemed significant that Bouchard, months before, felt constricted enough by ACT's legal and financial realities to shift its focus, moving canvassers out of more contested counties and precincts and away from the business of trying to convert undecided voters. In the end, these were the voters Kerry needed. But Bouchard and his troops ran smack up against the inherent limits of a 527 in a presidential campaign. They could turn out the vote, but they couldn't really alter its shape.
Therein, perhaps, lies the real lesson from Ohio, and from the election as a whole. From the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and especially after the disputed election of 2000, Democrats operated on the premise that they were superior in numbers, if only because their supporters lived in such concentrated urban communities. If they could mobilize every Democratic vote in America's industrial centers -- and in its populist heartland as well -- then they would win on math alone. Not anymore. Republicans now have their own concentrated vote, and it will probably continue to swell. Turnout operations like ACT can be remarkably successful at corralling the votes that exist, but turnout alone is no longer enough to win a national election for Democrats. The next Democrat who wins will be the one who changes enough minds.
''I can't think of a thing in Ohio that we could have done more to boost our vote,'' Steve Rosenthal told me three days after the election, as the trauma of the defeat began to subside. ''The shortcoming in some ways is that the national Democratic Party has built this values wall between itself and a lot of voters out there, and the Republicans took advantage of it. The rude awakening here is that I always thought there were more of us out there. And this time there were more of them.''
... Mission Accomplished.
In other words, ACT hired a known two-time loser to run the show, and then was surprised at the end when he lost.
Maybe in 2008 they can hire Bob Shrum.
And I continue to splash happily in the pool of their bitter tears.
One change though
The shortcoming in some ways is that the national Democratic Party has built this values wall between itself and a lot of voters out there, and the Republicans took advantage of it. have values that appeal.
There, much more honest.
Gaming the system is not a morally legitimate way of gaining or holding power.
The consternation and bemoanerbation is wonderful.
How about, "ha ha"?
Unfortunately, the Commies will learn from this defeat, and work harder to subvert the next election. The author spent a lot of time talking about the handcuffs on the 527's and the difficulty they had in not coordinating their campaign with Kerry. Sounds to me like they "protest too much", and I don't believe it for a moment. And, even if 527's are further restricted by 2008, they'll just have to find another "legal" way (nudge nudge, wink wink) to do their dirty work...
And Mel Gibson seems to feel the same way about the Academy Awards.
Jennifer, probably unintentionally, nails it here. Could it be that all the non-procreating homosexuals and abortion loving Dimmi's are falling below replacement birth rates?
It's simple grass roots vs professionalism. If you were an indy, and two different people knocked on your door, who would you be more apt to listen to? Your neighbor or some guy from another state?
Stern said, had assembled the best field-goal unit ever.
Defense wins championships! And you people just got an INT returned for a TD from the exurbs.
Union members could be persuaded to vote, Rosenthal found, when an informed canvasser came to their doors and talked to them about the issues.
That's what we did.
(The campaign's Ohio spokeswoman, Jennifer Palmieri, told me that the only time Kerry operatives had stumbled across ACT's work in the state was when they went to rent vans for Election Day and found that ACT had beaten them to it.)
I'm calling BS on that one. That's a CYA effort to avoid being caught up in McCain/Feingold violations because of ' Coordination'. I gaurantee that there was some liason between the two groups if nothing else.
''You really can expand the electorate, and that's what I think we have to do,'' Rosenthal told me
Rosenthal got it right. We beat him at his game. The goal in my county was to get 48,000 votes. That's 4000 more than 2000. We got 58,000. We're the fastest growing county in the state, but we also have to register the new ones moving out here.
..and Lake Erie is but a short hop to Canada.
They could have answered the question in 25 words or less.
"The entire campaign was a con game, and Buckeyes saw them coming a mile away. Hatemongers like Steve Rosenthal lost Ohio along with Kerry himself."
"conservative voters rising up out of the hills and condo communities in numbers the Kerry forces never knew existed."
Images of George Custer at Little BigHorn come to mind...
He's dressed like a loser, too.
They also totally misjudged the Ohio economy. One of their mantras was about the "unemployed steel worker and his family." If they had had the sense to check, they would have seen that steel mills have been hiring for the last year and a half. Another mill just broke ground a few weeks ago- in Cleveland.
The other indicator is in the reporter's frequent reference to "shiny new townhouse communities and McMansions" and all the republicans who "stopped off to vote on their way home from work" and the "growing rings of new townhouses around the central cities."
Doesn't sound iike a state with depression era unemployment to me. The 'rats totally believed their own rhetoric, and paid for their arrogance in due course.
I looked up that site.
It makes my hair stand on end.
Following are some of the stated goals of the ACLU, from its own published Policy Issues:
the legalization of prostitution (Policy 211);
the defense of all pornography, including CHILD PORN, as "free speech" (Policy 4);
the decriminalization and legalization of all drugs (Policy 210);
the promotion of homosexuality (Policy 264);
the opposition of rating of music and movies (Policy 18);
opposition against parental consent of minors seeking abortion (Policy 262);
opposition of informed consent preceding abortion procedures (Policy 263);
opposition of spousal consent preceding abortion (Policy 262);
opposition of parental choice in children's education (Policy 80)
But how can one confirm these "Policies?"
Going to the ACLU site shows no mention of these published policies.
One problem. I'm think Cleveland is shrinking, and I know Youngstown is shrinking. The exurbs are growing, and they are GOP.
What gnawed at Bouchard was that nowhere we went in Franklin County, a vigorously contested swing county, did we see any hint of a strong Republican
It showed. We lost Franklin by 41,000 votes.
Republicans vote in the morning, while Democrats vote late.
Two things. Unions got election day off. That was also when dems did better among working class voters.
The officials in charge told me that 1,175 of the 1,730 registered voters on the rolls had cast their ballots. In other words, turnout in those precincts was up to an impressive 68 percent
My dad's precinct(I voted absentee) got an 85% turnout. At 10AM(when you'd think lines were shorter), it was lined up outside the door. It went over 70-75% for Bush.
The 10 Ohio counties with the highest turnout percentages, many of them small and growing, all went for Bush, and none of them had a turnout rate of less than 75 percent.
That makes up for the trends in Franklin.
The rude awakening here is that I always thought there were more of us out there. And this time there were more of them.''
It's no longer FDR's party. It's no longer the party of the working man. It's the party of Hollywood and handouts. We get it. Steve Rosenthal doesn't want to get it.
One thing you must say for the Dems. They certainly do have a flair for the dramatic. Geez. Get over yourselves people.
"It's like, 'Crunch all you want -- we'll make more.' They just make more Republicans.'"
LOL! Jennifer Palmieri you ignorant slut, you made my day!
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