New York Times - November 15, 2005
Voter Profiles for Bloomberg Went Beyond Ethnic Labels
By JIM RUTENBERG
Throughout this year's mayoral campaign, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's spending records included something called "voter list development." It looked ominous to Democrats - especially as Mr. Bloomberg poured millions into it.
L ists like this usually include voters' personal data - the magazines they buy, the cars they drive, their political affiliations. But as the cost of compiling Mr. Bloomberg's list inched up toward $10 million, not even aides to President Bush, who perfected this sort of voter identification last year, could figure out where the money was going.
Now, speaking publicly for the first time about the behind-the-scenes details of their campaign - one of the most expensive in New York City history - Mr. Bloomberg's aides have explained the mystery: rather than trying to read the tea leaves of public records to figure out voters' tastes and leanings, they had the money to simply call and ask about them directly. They called hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in what top strategists in both the Republican and Democratic Parties said was one of the most ambitious pollings of an electorate ever undertaken.
They stored the answers in a vast computerized database to develop sophisticated psychological portraits of city voters - identifying eight never-before-identified voting blocs based on people's shared everyday interests and concerns, not on their broader racial, cultural or ideological differences, aides said in interviews in the last few days.
The extensive polling gave Mr. Bloomberg's campaign a deep understanding of the city's voters, and allowed it to tailor mailings, electronic messages and prerecorded telephone calls to voters' specific interests as never before, aides said.
"We sat down in February and said we wanted to do this campaign differently, we wanted to unify the city by looking at people who had common beliefs," said Kevin Sheekey, Mr. Bloomberg's campaign manager. "We were not going to classify them by party or race; it was thought-based."
With these new, multiethnic "thought-based" groups in hand, Mr. Bloomberg's aides said they were able to transcend the traditional political fault lines of race, party and class that have been so crucial to city elections of the past, in the process developing a new model for running elections. This model, they maintain, could just as easily transcend the differences between red and blue states nationally in 2008. (The firm that created the system, Penn, Schoen & Berland, has Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as a client, and created embryonic versions of it for President Bill Clinton in 1996 and for Mr. Bloomberg in 2001.)
Among the groups were these:
¶FANS, or "Fearful and Anxious New Yorkers": described as mostly lower- and lower-middle-income New Yorkers of all races whose lives are "utterly dependent on New York surviving." They rely heavily upon the city's social services, and, perhaps working as janitors or in the airports, they depend for their livelihoods on the city's remaining financially stable and free from attack. "They were motivated by what I call security, broadly speaking," said Douglas E. Schoen, who devised the database with his business partner, Mike Berland. "They do not just fear crime, they do not just fear another terror attack; it's, 'How do I keep my life secure in an uncertain time?' " These voters, many of them members of minorities, received messages that emphasized Mr. Bloomberg's record in fighting crime and combating terrorism, as well as his record on job creation and health care.
¶"Middle Middles": Aides identified these voters as middle-class moderates of all races who said in interviews that they sought independence and honesty in their leaders. They said they admired that Mr. Bloomberg built his fortune on his own. This group, aides said, included people from all walks of life, and messages sent to them highlighted Mr. Bloomberg's "independent leadership" and his personal biography.
¶"Cultural Liberals": These New Yorkers said in interviews that they considered the financing of arts and social programs to be crucial, and that they understood that the survival of such programs depends upon careful fiscal management. Aides said it was with these voters in mind that they produced commercials and mailings promoting the increase in mammography screenings in public hospitals and the mayor's promise to do "more with less."
Campaign aides said they also grouped homeowners together, with their surveys showing that a black homeowner in southeast Queens has many of the same daily concerns as a white homeowner in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
Mr. Sheekey said it was unlikely that Mr. Bloomberg would rely on the data his campaign compiled to govern during the next four years. But he said he believed that the campaign's approach could affect how others are conducted in the future.
"It certainly lays a path for future candidates to communicate with voters on something other than race- or religion-based formulas," Mr. Sheekey said.
Certainly in the aftermath of last Tuesday's results, in which Mr. Bloomberg beat Fernando Ferrer by 20 percentage points, Democrats have engaged in deep soul searching, questioning whether Mr. Ferrer's traditional Democratic appeal based on ethnicity and class can still win elections in the post-Sept. 11 city.
Mr. Bloomberg's aides said this week that they decided from the outset that such an approach would not work for their candidate - a Republican Jewish billionaire from Boston running against a Hispanic Democrat born and raised in a city whose electoral composition is more than 50 percent minority and more than three-quarters Democratic.
Mr. Sheekey said the idea was to take advantage of a new reality: Even as the Sept. 11 attacks fade from memory, the unity the city showed afterward has remained in a way that provides new opportunities for political strategists.
"After 9/11, New Yorkers unified under a paradigm that was not race-based," Mr. Sheekey said.
And with that understanding, Mr. Schoen said, the Bloomberg campaign was able to address voters in a way that Mr. Ferrer's campaign could not. Its frequent critiques of Mr. Bloomberg as a Republican, and its descriptions of the city as "two New Yorks" separated by class, he said, were not addressing the true concerns of New Yorkers.
"If you are a poor person worried about your job, you're not talking in party terms," Mr. Schoen said. "We were talking responsively to their needs and people weren't going to respond to the old language of class and race and party."
Mr. Ferrer's aides were at a distinct disadvantage; they did not even have money to conduct traditional polls gauging who was ahead in the race. And it would be unfair to deduce that Mr. Bloomberg's campaign message was more compelling than Mr. Ferrer's when Mr. Bloomberg was showing up to 10 commercials for every one from Mr. Ferrer, they said.
"I'm sure they were using some of the best techniques money can buy," said Jef Pollock, the pollster for Mr. Ferrer. "It's kind of hard to pinpoint things that did work in the face of millions of dollars of broadcast advertising."
It is unclear whether another city candidate would ever be able to afford to replicate Mr. Bloomberg's effort. And Matthew Dowd, a top strategist for President Bush, said it was far from certain that a presidential candidate would be able to afford the sort of polling Mr. Bloomberg's campaign undertook on a national scale.
Mr. Sheekey, however, said the same aims could be achieved on a cheaper, if smaller, scale, locally and nationally.
"Could this be replicated on a national basis?" he said. "Absolutely."
Asked whether he was perhaps imagining such an attempt on behalf of Mr. Bloomberg, who has denied having any presidential aspirations, Mr. Sheekey said, "I'll let the pundits speculate."