> BTW, if reading this makes you want to read his previous article that
> focused on the new Republican model of GOTV organizing ("The Multilevel
> Marketing of the President"), there is a free archived version available
> here:
>
> URL: http://www.zonaeuropa.com/01496.htm
I just re-read it this article, I just want to say, IMHO, it THE KEY, even more than the recent one. It's worth reading through all the way to the end. It's amazing how correct the Republicans were in their understanding of what was at stake logistically and how it would play out. And I say this as someone who said at the time (when kelley posted it) that they were full of it. Mea culpa.
They really did beat us because their organizing model beat our organizing model. But the worse thing is: their organizing model feels right to their kind of volunteers, but it wouldn't feel right to ours. It fits their model of the family, of community, of enterprise, of the army. Our side loves chaos and newness, the Dean model and the ACT model. That's what makes us feel fulfilled and excited. But their model simply beat our model, head to head, on our best day. And reading the details here, it's easy to see why they won. And that leaves the Dem side with difficulty of building a new model that can beat theirs. Because we can't just copy theirs.
Another nice thing about this article is its explanation of how the organizing model related to the campaign emphasis on wedge issues. In Ohio, this article suggests persuasively, the prime aim wasn't to goose up the evangelical vote. It was rather a mean of splitting off rural swing voters -- an intersection that isn't often talked about because they haven't previously been enough of them to to be key, because there wasn't a large scale GOTV machine to incorporate them.
So they were going after swing voters -- even more than the Dems. It's just that they were going after a very different kind of swing voters. And they went for them very early -- 8 months before the election.
One telling footnote at the end is about the kind of payoff you get from using an organization made up of local people who are the same age as their targets (which is what they had) rather than young outsiders parachutted in (which is what the Dems had): their volunteers stopped palm pilots, because they just weren't comfortable asking all those intrusive questions. Their headquarters loved the PP's of course, because it would allow them to plug in all that data. But they gave in. Whereas on the Dem side, we were proud of our palm pilot plug-ins up until the very end, on election day.
PS -- one last thing: the lengthy introduction to this article by the person who is hosting it is quite ruefully funny. It seems to have been written last May by a Deaniac (or someone similar), arguing in a tone of absolute positiveness that this Tupperware model of the Republicans can never work, because it's trapped in the past, where the flash mob model of the future will dazzle them all.
Sadly, the opposite turned out to be true.
PS -- although I'm now convinced this earlier article is the more important one, Bai's reason one is a valuable companion piece that you'll probably want to read afterwards:
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/magazine/21OHIO.html
If they're charing for it by the time you get around it, email me and I'll be glad to send you a copy.
Michael