Friday, Sep 5, 2008
In the spring of 2004, Moira DeNike, a sociology grad student and dance instructor in San Francisco, attended her first John Kerry Meetup. She wasn't overly impressed with what she saw. "I thought, this is nice if you're looking for a bunch of people to talk about how we all agree that Kerry should win," she says. DeNike, who was a political naif but nevertheless dead set on unseating the president, felt she needed a more constructive experience, something hands-on. After a bull session with a dancer friend, she hatched a plan -- to raise a lot of money to send a lot of people to Florida, where they would help register a lot of new voters for Kerry -- and a name: Dancers for Democracy. The money would come from dance -- DeNike organized a series of dance-oriented fundraisers (an all-day workshop, a buffet dinner with dancing as dessert) which raised several thousand dollars, enough to send six people to Miami in the weeks approaching Florida's Oct. 4 voter-registration deadline.
There's something undeniably inspiring, in a "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" kind of way, about DeNike's entrepreneurial voter-mobilization enterprise. There's a bit of hubris in it, too. Why did DeNike believe that she, personally, would be able to persuade people in Florida to register to vote? Why did she assume that she was even needed in Florida -- that she, a dancer with no political experience, could become an asset to a major national political campaign?
Those are important questions, because what DeNike and thousands of other activists like her did during the 2004 campaign was in some sense not normal. In recent American elections, ordinary voters have not often set up their own political shops, raised their own funds, and sought out flaws in the system that they believed they could fix themselves. Of course, people have always volunteered in political campaigns, especially during tense political times -- but the scale and scope of what we saw this year, and especially the sense the volunteers had that their own contributions might make a critical difference in the outcome, were novel.
DeNike says she felt a sense of mission, a thought that you hear from many volunteers across the land. She knew she could make a real difference in a swing state. "I felt like there might be a lot of people who would feel disenfranchised [in Florida], and I read somewhere that most people who don't vote, don't vote because they've never been asked to." DeNike believed that if she asked them, they would vote.
DeNike's instinct that she was needed in Florida turned out to be on the mark. After Dancers for Democracy raised enough money to send a team to Miami, DeNike phoned the South Florida ACT office to ask if she could work with the group on voter registration. But ACT told DeNike that the group wasn't working on voter registration, and that instead it was working on a voter persuasion effort. So DeNike called the local Kerry campaign office and asked if she could work with them on voter registration. "And they too said that they weren't focusing on voter registration. They said that there were other groups that were going to be focusing on that," DeNike recalls.
DeNike had stumbled across one of the main operational flaws of the liberal get-out-the-vote effort -- a lack of coordination between the Kerry campaign and its third-party surrogates. What DeNike discovered was that neither the ACT people nor the Kerry people were mounting a final new-registration push in South Florida because each believed that the other group would be handling it. That would seem to be a silly mistake -- didn't people know their roles? -- but this sort of thing seems to have occurred often in the campaign, volunteers say. Because campaign finance laws prohibited the Kerry staffers from discussing their efforts with ostensibly independent groups such as ACT, the campaign and the outside groups were often duplicating each other's work, or sometimes weren't working on what needed to be done because they assumed the other side was doing it.
The coordination problem was especially pronounced during the last few weeks and days of the campaign, when the full force of get-out-the-vote canvassers, tens of thousands of people, were going door-to-door in battleground states. "We were knocking on doors and people would say, 'You're the third person who's come by today,'" says Eric Rorer, a freelance photographer from Northern California who worked for the Kerry campaign in Columbus, Ohio. Volunteers from the various groups were running into each other on the street, Rorer says, but they couldn't pass the slightest information between themselves, even plans as to which houses they would tackle first. One ACT volunteer who canvassed in Miami says, "By the Friday before Election Day people were like, 'Stop coming around!' These people were being extremely over-canvassed -- we were hitting them, MoveOn was hitting them, the Kerry people were hitting them, the Senate candidates were hitting them, there was a mayoral candidate that was hitting them..."
Nobody knows whether this "over-canvassing" problem -- which was reported by just about every canvasser Salon spoke to -- caused many (or any) voters to become so annoyed with the process that they decided to stay away from the polls. But Donald Green, of Yale, says the situation affected the progressive groups' overall efficiency. "It was not easy for them to spread their resources intelligently," he says. Successful door-to-door operations call for a well-planned series of visits to each household over a period of weeks. But instead of each household getting a first contact from a group, then a second contact, then a third, what happened in this campaign in many neighborhoods was that "lots of people were getting many first contacts," each from a different group. "Some people got five first contacts." That must have caused no small amount of confusion, if not anger, among voters.
If some neighborhoods in the swing states were being over-canvassed by progressives, other neighborhoods may have consequently been under-canvassed by those groups. Could the efforts of the third-party groups have been more fruitful if some of their door-to-door canvassing had been shifted from reliably Democratic urban neighborhoods to other areas -- specifically, should ACT and MoveOn have concentrated on some of the suburban and "exurban" neighborhoods that the New York Times Magazine's Bai calls the GOP's secret weapon in Ohio?
"It's a fair point," says Thomas Gensemer, ACT's director of Internet strategies. But conducting a get-out-the-vote operation in non-base suburban neighborhoods would have been difficult for ACT, he notes. Under federal campaign finance law (ACT is a 527 organization, an entity to which donors can contribute unlimited sums of "soft money,") ACT could not call on voters to go out and cast a ballot for a specific candidate. In Democratic strongholds, this limitation worked out OK: The group didn't need to sell voters there on the merits of John Kerry; all it had to do was make sure people got to the polls. But how could ACT have campaigned in areas where the voters' preferences weren't so certain? It wouldn't have worked. As a third-party group, ACT had one key limitation -- it was a "campaign without a candidate," Gensemer says. "That's why our mandate from the start was much more to go after base votes. I don't know if you can do anything else in a 527 world when you're not the actual candidate's campaign. Getting out the swing voters was not the role of us and MoveOn and others."
But if ACT and MoveOn could canvass only in the cities, why couldn't the Kerry campaign have canvassed in the suburbs, spreading the door-to-door resources? The answer, again, is coordination: In key states like Ohio and Florida, the Kerry team couldn't have shifted its resources to the suburbs because it couldn't be sure what the third-party groups would be doing in the cities. It had no way of coordinating with them. So it too had no choice but to concentrate its mobilization efforts in the cities, where all the reliable Democrats were located.
The Democratic focus on urban Democratic strongholds, then, seems to have been a necessary consequence of its reliance on third-party advocacy groups. Republicans, it should be noted, didn't face this problem. Because the Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote operation was run in-house, not farmed out to soft-money third-party groups, canvassers could do as they pleased, without worrying about coordination failures, or prohibitions on how they could sell their candidate. If the Democrats faced any strategic mobilization disadvantage, Green says, it was this difference in their operations. Republican canvassers were selling a candidate, while canvassers at ACT were really selling an idea -- broad progressivism -- that they hoped would translate into action for their candidate. The match was not quite fair.
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