Posted on 08/03/2002 12:03:14 PM PDT by Pokey78
There is nothing as fickle as history, since it is being rewritten all the time. And in the official history of the Democratic Party, the name Al Gore currently has "loser" plastered all over it. Even his running mate, Joe Lieberman, thinks Gore blew the last election. And ABC News's influential political crib-sheet, The Note, said last week just about everybody in the party and press is convinced that Gore's 2000 effort was "horrendous."
There is one group, however, who thinks the Gore campaign did a swell job: the Republican National Committee. "The Gore campaign was good," Blaise Hazelwood, the RNC's political director, says. "It was a good grass-roots effort." One could dismiss this as political spin–the Republicans praise a bad Democratic campaign so the Democrats will repeat it–except that the RNC has spent nearly $1 million to find out what Gore did right and the Republicans did wrong in 2000.
"The weekend before the 2000 election we had a pretty good feeling," Hazelwood says. "Then Election Day happened, and it was, 'Oh, my gosh, what happened?' " The Republicans were shocked by what the Democrats have since forgotten: Gore, as "horrendous" as he was, garnered 543,000 more votes than George W. Bush. It wasn't supposed to be that way, not according to the polls. So the Republicans studied the last 72 hours of the election and came to one overall conclusion. "The Democrats have a better voter turnout operation than we do," Hazelwood says.
The Republicans had, over the years, become victims of their own success: Since they raised more money than the Democrats, they could afford to spend heavily on get-out-the-vote ads, professional phone banks, and computerized voter lists. The Democrats were left with bodies, especially the bodies of labor union volunteers going door to door. "The Republicans have the technology," says Donna Brazile, Gore's campaign manager and now head of the Democratic National Committee's Voting Rights Institute. "We do knock-and-drag, and they do right-click."
Top to bottom. Soon after Bush took office, the Republicans assembled the 72-Hour Task Force to scientifically test what worked. "We did a top-to-bottom review," Hazelwood says. "We studied everything that Republicans do for turnout compared to what Democrats do." The task force then went into the field in 2001, amazingly getting Republican candidates to agree to let it test certain methods in certain counties in real elections.
And, as it turned out, the Democratic methods, Al Gore's methods, worked best. It was best to have teams of political workers going door to door months before Election Day to find out what issues were motivating people, follow that with targeted mailings, and follow that with more visits to make sure people voted on Election Day. Another conclusion: Have local people make the phone calls to voters. Fewer calls will get blocked by Caller ID, and local voters respond better to local accents. Does all this sound obvious? It is, but try to get candidates to go along with it.
For decades, candidates have been fascinated with TV ads, and for decades their consultants (who make big bucks on the TV ad buys) have been pushing glitzy commercials instead of the grunt work of field operations. "The Republicans have gotten away from using people," Hazelwood says. "A volunteer walks into the office, and we don't know what to do. Or it's before Election Day, and our last TV ad goes on the air and it's like, 'What do we do now?' "
The Republicans think they now know: 41 states currently have 72-hour directors who will oversee get-out-the-vote efforts and make sure teams will be knocking on doors armed with Palms, ready to "hot-sync" the results to a master database. The Democrats? "The Democrats have not studied the last election," Brazile laments. "After every election we throw away what we learned. Right now, I am doing 20th-century politics, and the Republicans are doing 21st-century politics." She has one hope, however: Maybe someday the Democrats will stop criticizing Gore for what he did wrong long enough to start analyzing what he did right.
Yeah, it's called fraud.
It was best to have teams of political workers going door to door months before Election Day to find out what issues were motivating people, follow that with targeted mailings, and follow that with more visits to make sure people voted on Election Day. Another conclusion: Have local people make the phone calls to voters. Fewer calls will get blocked by Caller ID, and local voters respond better to local accents
And the most important strategy: Make sure you have your people working at the polling places, and have them stuff the ballot box, tell people how to vote, mysteriously "lose" ballots of presumed opponents' voters, etc. It's also helpful to get a judge or two on your side....
"The Republicans have gotten away from using people," Hazelwood says.
By contrast, the Dems have raised Using People to a form of high art.
What those liberals who spout this little fact won't admit is that the 543,000 more votes than Bush got came in states like New York and California...States Gore WON...It's Overkill!
To put it in perspective, it's like the Rams beating the Cowboys 10-9 or beating them 50-9...You still get just one win out of it, even if you pour on 40 unnecessary points. Gore having half a million votes more than Bush from two or three states he'd already won doesn't mean he should win states he DIDN'T win. It's a strong reason FOR the electoral college protection that keeps the major states from deciding it all at the expense of the minor states.
First you find out if they are real republicans or if they are just spys like in the last election wanting to steal ideas and video
I’m familiar with the local organization. The Democrats bus their people in; drive their friends to the polls and, in general out-hustle the Republicans on the ground on Election Day. Meanwhile the only Republican effort is handing out literature at polling stations.
The Republican idea of a get-out-the-vote effort is a literature drop and direct mail.
I have long had a dream of creating a data base of Republican voters in my town, getting the funds together and hiring a couple of buses. These buses, with volunteers, drinks and snacks on board would go door-to-door picking up voters and dropping them off. Make voting day a block party. This would be machine politics at its most powerful.
This is true. I think the problem is that Republicans have an inherent weakness compared to the Democrats on this issue of turnout. It's not just a matter of strategy on/near election day, it's a natural and inevitable result of the philosophical differences between the parties.
I imagine that one reason Democrats get such high turnout on election day is that they go around scaring people into voting. To blacks they say in essence that if Republicans win, lynching and slavery will come back. To old people they say Republicans are going to throw them out on the street and cancel all their SS checks. To gays they raise the spectre of persecution, imprisonment via anti-sodomy laws. That's why Dems get such a high turnout, because short-term irrational fear is such an effective motivating factor.
This is an option that is probably simply not available to Republicans. What Democrat caricature can Republicans exaggerate to scare Republicans into turning out in greater numbers? They could try to say that Democrats will increase taxes on everyone lower middle class or wealthier to 100%, or that they will outlaw heterosexuality, or that they will turn white people into slaves. (The equivalent of the slanders which Dems spread about Republicans, you see.) The problem is that no one will believe them, and the media wouldn't even let get them away with saying such things in the first place. (Unlike when Democrats say such things.)
It's an inevitable and unavoidable disadvantage which Republicans have. Perhaps there are other ways besides scaring people to grab a big turnout on their side, and they should certainly try. But if there were a better way than scaring people, the Democrats would likely already be doing it. But they don't. All they do is scare people about Republicans, and it works.
I'll never be convinced, though, that the Thursday night disclosure of that 30 year old DWI incident -- a disclosure that festered over that long weekend -- didn't move votes by at least a per cent or so.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think Bush had any moral or legal obligation to disclose it earlier; but I wish he had.
The Repubs won't bring it up, nor would I expect them to, but that has to have been a huge lesson. IMHO.
I really hope people read this post; Freepers, show this to all your conservative friends. Okay, Gore’s margin of victory is officially half a percent. The most accurate counting machines run a margin of error of 2.5 percent. See, Gore’s margin of victory is within the margin of error of the best counting machines, meaning that we really can’t be sure who got more popular votes. This liberal argument is just 4th class crap.
Like it or not, there is not substitute for retail politics. I know, I've been there. And I also know that we weren't going door to door for GW like we did for his father back in 1988. The RNC is wise to study Gore's last week. It was his best week, and it almost worked.
The Pubbies are following Sun Tzu's wise admonition that if one knows oneself and one's enemy, one cannot help but win a thousand battles.
Be Seeing You,
Chris
Further, the democRATS are consistently against requiring a photo-ID or any substantial ID from voters. This should be a warning to Republicans that fraud is prevalent.
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