Were the 527’s Really Failures?

By DHinMI

Hotline On Call tells us that AFSCME President Gerald McEntee says that the Dem-allied 527’s dedicated to get out the vote (GOTV) efforts in 2004 were "‘trounced’ by the GOP's ‘neighbor-to-neighbor strategy.’” 

I’m not so sure if you talked with McEntee in depth that he would so sweepingly dismiss the 527’s that did GOTV like America Coming Together (ACT), which received a huge portion of its funding from labor unions like AFSCME. There are two key differences between Democratic needs and funds that made ACT a good move for Democrats in 2004.

It’s important to understand that Democratic GOTV is in some important ways logistically easier to accomplish than Republican GOTV. There are many, many places in America—primarily communities of color in urban areas—where if you walk down the street and blindly knock on doors, 8 or 9 out of every 10 people will be prospective Democratic voters. The problem with many of these people, in terms of Democratic performance, is that many of them aren’t inclined to actually vote. Thus, there is a strong correlation between geography and Democratic GOTV targets. Furthermore, it’s easier to somewhat blindly pull everyone out to vote in the most strongly Democratic areas without worrying about pulling out Republican votes. 

That leads to the second factor that justified a strong emphasis on the 527’s; namely, soft money. Loosely defined, “soft money” refers to specific types of funds that can’t be used by federal candidates or political parties. Such prohibited funds include corporate or union treasuries funds. These are separate from the PAC contributions that individual union members or business employees voluntarily contribute to Political Action Committees. [PAC funds are hard money.] The other main type of soft money donations are extremely large contributions (beyond the legal limit a person or a PAC can give to a candidate or political party). Soft money cannot be used for what’s called “express advocacy;” roughly any communication directed to the general voting public that conveys the message “vote for” or “vote against.” [Hence, all those adds that urge you to call your Congresswoman so and so and tell her to cut your taxes and quit torturing baby lemurs.]

After the Shays/Meehan campaign reform bill (AKA McCain/Feingold) passed, federal candidates could no longer solicit or use soft money. Since Democrats had access to much more soft money (because of organized labor and extremely wealthy donors, especially among the ranks of Hollywood types, high tech people and developers), in the lead up to the 2004 people looked around for what they could do with the soft money they had effectively used to blunt the Republicans’ typical advantage in hard dollars. Thus, the 527’s made sense, because the greatest number of easy GOTV targets were clustered, and you could blindly go through +80% Democratic districts—there are lots of those, and almost no +80% Republican areas—and pull everyone out with a generic “don’t forget to vote” message that didn’t depend on who they were voting for. 

The Republicans had different needs. There are few places in America that are over 70% Republican. Thus, it’s dangerous for Republicans to blindly pull out all potential voters, because you might inadvertently pull out lots of Democrats, thus rendering your investment in GOTV of very low marginal utility. For the Republicans, they needed to make sure that they were identifying who might vote Republican and pull them out, and to leave the potential Democrats alone. They needed to use hard money to do that. Thus, their GOTV was paid for through Republican channels instead of the completely separate operations required of the Democratic 527’s. (It’s against election law to coordinate activities between 527’s and campaigns.) 

As you see, the 527’s took advantage of an opportunity—lots of soft money that would otherwise go unutilized—and it made strategic sense. However, the problem is that it’s an insufficient GOTV operation. The 527’s achieved some major accomplishments in 2004. It was almost entirely because I knew that ACT and the others would significantly increase Dem turnout that I was confident Kerry would win. And Kerry did receive approximately 5 million more votes that Al Gore did, and Gore won the popular vote and received more votes than any candidate since Reagan in his 1984 landslide win over Mondale. The problem for us was that the for the first time the GOP focused on GOTV, and plucked out lots of votes from the ranks of independents and those who seldom voted. Some of them clearly were pulled out by the unprecedented church outreach, which in some cases is getting extra scrutiny from the IRS as possibly violating tax laws. But the Republicans also did a lot of hard money voter ID, leaving the likely Dems alone but making sure the potential Republican voters were nagged and practically dragged to the polls to ensure they voted. 

It’s this targeted GOTV that Democrats need to emphasize more in 2006. It’s especially important in most Congressional districts, because if a seat is competitive it’s probably almost entirely white, rural or suburban, and contains few concentrated clusters of Dem voters who need to be pulled out to vote. But that doesn’t replace the need for the mass “pulling” of voters in wide expanses of solid Dem precincts, which are usually crucial for statewide success. (Just think about all the discussion about Louisiana if it never recovers much of it’s black population, as the huge Dem vote in NOLA was necessary for statewide Democratic success.) 

So, Gerry McEntee is correct in emphasizing more targeted GOTV, especially in a lower turnout mid-term election, and especially in evenly matched Congressional districts and states without much of a minority vote clustered in high-Democratic areas. But I hope Democrats don’t give up entirely on 527’s. After all, there’s not much else we can do with out built-in soft money advantage. And we can’t win in most places if we ignore voters in the low-turnout, high-performance neighborhoods.

 

Comments

[emptypockets]

on unions giving money to pro-labor (read: Dem) candidates, see also this piece in Times today. Punchline is that despite loss of 4 unions' membership and 25% decrease in budget, AFL-CIO is increasing its campaign spending to $40M (from $35M in 2002).

If I read it right though that is not money going to 527s, that is money directly spent organizing union members (?): The money will not be used for contributions, but to mobilize union members.

[DHinMI]

Yeah, the link in this piece is about the same thing. And the money they're talking about is the soft money, in this case from union dues. It can be used to say "vote for" or "vote against" or variations of the same when the communications are directed at union members.

[emptywheel]

DH

Could you address the role of the marketing-style GOP targeting that was so successful last time? It seems to me they did a lot based on demographic analysis, using marketing data rather than just knocking on doors. And particularly since these white suburban swing districts are also harder to walk (or the newfangled young communities with lots of locked in apartment and condo developments, where you CAN'T walk them), I'm curious how much of the IDing was marketing data (the old Mercury Mariner owners are the most reliable Republican voters in the book, though I'd bet they're ignoring all non-White Mercury Mariner owners, which is a significant demo) and how much was old-style IDing.

[DHinMI]

Gotta run--was just shutting down--but briefly, that was a big part of how they made their GOTV efficient and avoided Dems. And that stuff was:
A. Done with hard money
B. Begun well before the election, even in early 2003, and funded through the RNC

It made their IDing more efficient and less likely to turn up a Dem. And they did some registering based on that data (no doubt many of them the socially conservative Evangelicals Rove kept talking about). ACT, on the other hand, if they did a registration drive, couldn't avoid anyone who appeared likely to be a Dem. Thus, it made ACT much less effective in swing areas; in fact, ACT mostly stayed out of swing areas, and couldn't effectively do GOTV of Dems in Republican areas.

[DHinMI]

Typo: ACT, on the other hand, if they did a registration drive, couldn't avoid anyone who appeared likely to be a Repub.

[Mimikatz]

Isn't another problem for the Dems the custody of the info after the election? The RNC builds a database, but the 527 GOTV info can't be shared with the DNC. And if a presidential candidate won't share his database either, then the Dems pretty much have to start from scratch each election, no?

[DHinMI]

Yeah, but GOTV lists aren't anywhere near as valuable as fundraising and volunteer lists. You have to update the voter files constantly, especially in the high dem areas (which tend to have lots of students, renters, transients, etc.)

And one of the things Dean is doing that's almost completely below the radar screens of the DC chattering classes is to build the capacity of state and local party orgs to use, maintain and build upon their own voter file data. We had already gotten a head start on that in Michigan, but in a lot of states they didn't have anything, and that's the type of thing emphasized in the grants from the DNC to the party organizations.

[polis]

Check this out:
Bill Clinton Urges Governors to Help Change Nation's Eating Habits

[emptywheel]

We had already gotten a start in MI.

Except for one lonely county that refused to play by the rules and work with the state database.

[-(

[Susan S]

Florida Dems are getting access (for a price) to a new voter file system that's supposed to be phenomenal. It's actually a website that precinct captains will be able to log on to and update immediately after canvassing. Our county hasn't bought it yet, but will soon. Friends of mine live in a neighboring county which has already purchased the file and will begin training their volunteers soon.

[Susan S]

To clarify: my friends will actually be teaching other volunteers how to use the system.

[John Casper]

DHinMI interested in your take on the trustworthiness of the Federal Election Commission. McCain has been hammering that it is corrupt. Bush just made Vivica Novak's husband a recess appointment to it. Bush's other recess appointment to it was some kind of GOP election "hit man" IIRC with respect to either Florida, Ohio, or both.

[DHinMI]

John, isn't FEC bi-partisan?

As we've seen with the DOJ staff attorneys who objected to the TX redistricting plan, I suspect that for the most part the staff at the FEC is generally sound. Where the Bush appointees come in to play are the advisory decisions. It was a big concern in 2004 whether the FEC would screw the Dems on the decisions about whether they would allow the Dem-aligned 527's to do what they ended up doing. There may be similarly important decisions pending, but I'm not sure of what they are.

[janinsanfran]

I'm currently doing some training of folks who plan to do para-party activities in the next couple of election cycles -- community groups that work parallel to Dem party campaigns and the unions. Some of them are going to be good enough to do the high Dem precincts with very little regular Party input, especially in urban communities of color. This kind of GOTV is not rocket science.

The good news is that some Dem levels are getting into microtargetting -- crossreferencing consumer data with voter data to find the Dem needles in some pretty confusing haystacks. The current Campaigns and Elections has a terrific, descriptive account of how Virginia Governor Kaine used microtargetting in the DC exurbs to figure out what issues resonated with which demographics (white housewives in their 30s with education, for example) and managed to win counties that Bush carried in 2004. Unfortunately the article requires subscription.

This is the sense in which McEntee is right: the 527 structure in 2004 did not lend itself to finely targetted GOTV. I worked in New Mexico and watched the Dem 527s falling over each other, flailing really. Because I was doing local candidates in the exurbs, I also saw the Rep effort, very carefully working targetted new voters using volunteers from the churches. The Dems looked like a happy fractious mob; Reps looked like dedicated, boring members of the solid middle class. We saw the results.

[orionATL]

republican vote inducing efforts may have been more effective than democratic vote inducing efforts in the 2004 elections

but

i personally would be skeptical of any analysis of this issue that did not take into account the possibility,

if fact, i personally have come to think

the liklihood

that voting machines were manipulated to provide support for republican candidates in excess of actual republican voting.

i consider this the most serious problem facing democrats in the coming congressional elections.

the decision to use diebold in california may be perfectly reasonalbe

but to me it smells of anticipated manipluaton of voter totals.

[RonK, Seattle]

DH's analysis is well taken, as far as it goes, but the parties (and their allies) are in an evolutionary arms races, and the other side has the sharper, pointier sticks.

We invested in generations of ID/GOTV strategies. They invested in generations of persuasion/conversion strategies. GOTV is minimally cumulative. ID is weakly cumulative. Persuasion is strongly cumulative, cycle over cycle.

GOP doesn't microtarget just for turnout. When they win, they win followers -- not just elections. When they lose, they still win followers (in 50 states and 435 districts).

A secondary effect of Dem's turnout emphasis is that we put most resources into districts with fewest conversion proospects, forgoing even fortuitous conversions.