[lbo-talk] How the Repugs won the GOTV battle in Ohio

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Mon Nov 22 21:37:22 PST 2004


Michael Pollak comments on the contrast between the Republican and Democratic Parties' GOTV efforts described by Matt Bai (at <http://www.zonaeuropa.com/01496.htm> and <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/magazine/21OHIO.html>):


>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.

It wasn't just the contest of new versus old, chaos versus order. It looks to me that the Republican Party's model -- relatively speaking, within the limits of top-down organizing required by the parties of the ruling class -- was more partisan, more committed to the party's presidentially candidate, far better organized, more participatory, and (most importantly) far more local-volunteer-driven than the Democratic Party's.

Here's the key difference:

"[The Ohio State director of America Coming Together Steve] Bouchard closed almost a third of the offices and pared down his canvassing staff by two-thirds. His team then focused its efforts on signing up new voters in heavily Democratic areas where a lot of new and transient voters had yet to register. Using Palm Pilots equipped with 30-second video ads to show to prospective voters, the canvassers set about identifying voters across the state: where they lived, how they planned to vote, what issues they cared about. Even building an up-to-date list of previously registered voters was a monstrous assignment in Ohio, because voters in the state don't register with a party affiliation; the only thing canvassers knew about their political orientations before knocking on their doors was whether they had voted in either party's primary in the last six years. Every night, without fail, the canvassers plugged their Palm Pilots, full of new data about the homes they had visited, into ACT's Web-based voter list" (Matt Bai, "Who Lost Ohio?" New York Times, <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/magazine/21OHIO.html>, November 21, 2004).

"[Bush's campaign manager Ken] Mehlman explained that Bush volunteers, in consultation with headquarters, set their own goals for their states and counties, and thus had a sense of ownership in the campaign. He said this new kind of grass-roots campaign sprang from the same lofty impulse as 'Survivor' or 'American Idol.' 'The lessons of reality TV are that people today are into participatory activities,' he said. 'They want to have influence over a decision that's made. They don't want to just sit and passively absorb. They want to be involved, and a political program ought to recognize that'" (Matt Bai, "The Multilevel Marketing of the President, " New York Times, <http://www.zonaeuropa.com/01496.htm>, April 25, 2004).

The Democratic Party, unlike the Republican Party, refused to tap into local knowledge of local organizers in Ohio (and probably elsewhere).

From personal observations, I knew that none of the longtime organizers in any sort of social movement (labor, community, Green, feminist, faith community, etc.) in Ohio was enlisted to map the Democratic Party's GOTV campaign -- it was all money, Palm Pilots, and inexperienced white youths hired by 527s and dispatched to communities to which they were strangers and will not come back after election day.

In contrast, Bai's April 25, 2004 article shows that the Republicans -- while tightly controlling the campaign's overall structure, message, and strategy ("despite Mehlman's 'Free to Be . . . You and Me' rhetoric, they were not, in fact, empowered to make even minuscule adjustments to the Plan" [Bai, April 25, 2004) and giving specific tasks and rewards to volunteers ("[Bush Team Leaders] are volunteers who are given prizes . . . for accomplishing six specific tasks, the first of which is to recruit five other B.T.L.'s. Volunteers are also rewarded . . . for calling in to talk radio programs or writing letters to the editor on behalf of the president" [Bai, April 25, 2004]) -- relied upon local volunteers to organize Republican supporters in their own communities. That's a better organizing model both for the short and long-term. -- Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>



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