Sunday, May 11, 2008
Groups like ACT and MoveOn promised to remake American politics, but they didn't beat Bush. Is there a future for liberal People Power?
Dec 15, 2004 | Three days after the election, I called Ellen Malcolm, founder of the influential advocacy group Emily's List and president of America Coming Together, to ask her where she'd screwed up.
The question wasn't as provocative as it sounds: 2004 was supposed to have been the year of the activist. For months, progressives had been extolling the possibilities of groups like ACT, which -- by bringing together Hollywood money, Silicon Valley tech wizardry, Washington know-how, and the passion of an army of volunteers recruited from Berkeley to Burlington -- seemed to be forging a new and quite powerful force in American politics, a movement that liberals promised would not only win this election but might also rewrite the rules of the game. ACT and its sister groups were to have been the Democrats' silver bullet, the one trick -- people power! -- Karl Rove could not match.
But as the returns streamed in on Nov. 2, the promise of ACT and the other third-party liberal groups fizzled. ACT had invested heavily in mobilizing voters in Florida and Ohio, and John Kerry lost in both places. What happened? I asked Malcolm. Why had ACT failed?
Malcolm didn't want to talk about failure. "We were very successful," she said. "But we didn't win the election. We turned out many, many, many voters, including a lot of first-time voters. It was a tremendously successful effort for democracy. But we're all obviously very disappointed in the results."
At the time, Malcolm's answer was unsatisfying; given the totality of the loss it seemed disingenuous to call what happened on Election Day a success. But when I pressed her on it, asking in several different ways what had gone wrong, she was unmoved. "You're not listening to what I'm saying," Malcolm finally snapped. ACT hadn't failed. ACT had in fact met all of its state voter-mobilization goals. John Kerry won more votes than any other presidential loser in history. ACT had succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of anyone involved in the group. The only problem was that the other side, the Republicans, was even more successful.
A month and a half has passed since I spoke to Malcolm, and in that time several observers have put forward the kind of sophisticated-sounding explanations for the apparent failure of liberal get-out-the-vote campaigns that I'd wanted Malcolm to offer shortly after the election. In the New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai suggested that ACT fundamentally misunderstood the electorate in Ohio -- instead of trying to persuade suburban swing voters to consider Kerry (as the GOP had done for Bush, fruitfully), ACT spent its resources in liberal urban centers, where there simply weren't enough Kerry voters to tip the balance.
More recently, the New Republic's Peter Beinart skewered MoveOn, ACT's progressive brother-in-arms, for dismissing national security threats, and in Slate Chris Suellentrop dismissed the group as being not "an organization so much as an outlet. It's a network of aggrieved liberals, connected by the central nervous system of the Internet, and it enables its members to convince themselves they're 'doing something' when they're really not."
There's much to criticize about ACT, MoveOn, and the constellation of liberal groups that attracted so much attention and so many volunteers, and raised so much money and so many hopes, in the months before the election. They certainly weren't the silver bullet. But many critics are too quick to dismiss the very real successes of the advocacy groups, the political, financial, logistical and emotional achievements that were required to bring hundreds of thousands of volunteers and paid staffers into battleground states, and to use these people in a way that boosted turnout.
Yes, John Kerry lost. But an amazing thing happened this year -- grass-roots activism, online and in the real world, invaded the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. Ordinary people, folks who'd never before expressed the slightest interest in politics, suddenly developed an abiding enthusiasm for the game. And personal contact, the online connections and the doorstep conversations of millions of citizens, became a primary method of campaigning.
There were, to be sure, many logistical snafus in the get-out-the-vote operations mounted by the various third-party groups -- some major, most relatively minor. The most serious limitation seems to have been built into the design of the campaign: Because the third-party groups were barred under campaign finance regulations from coordinating their efforts with John Kerry's official campaign, the entire liberal get-out-the-vote operation could never have proceeded as a coherent whole. Unlike the GOP effort, the Democratic campaign was intrinsically divided, split between two sides who weren't allowed to speak to each other.
Despite those limitations, though, the core gambit worked: Hard as it may be to believe (and it is hard), the numbers prove that that San Franciscans and New Yorkers met with some success in their attempts to persuade Clevelanders and Miamians to go to the polls for Kerry. As Democrats remake their party, it would be a shame for them to discount the work of the activists, or to fail to keep the activist spirit kindled. Glitches can be fixed, and logistical failures can be addressed. Imagine what might have been had these groups not become involved in this political cycle.
"Look at what happened the last time a liberal Democrat from Massachusetts won the nomination," notes Donald Green, the Yale political scientist whose research on get-out-the-vote efforts served as the blueprint for the liberal groups' mobilization drive. "That was Michael Dukakis -- he lost decisively.... The fact that John Kerry did as well as he did is only attributable to the incredible ground effort that the Democrats were able to muster." The third-party groups, in other words, profoundly altered the physics of the presidential race. Without them, it would have been a blowout.
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