California Conservative

All year long, we’ve heard about Nancy Pelosi becoming Speaker. Recently, we’ve started hearing that Democrats weren’t in as strong a position as they’d like. Finally, the fMSM is starting to catch onto the fact that things aren’t nearly as hopeless for the GOP as Democrats would like. Here’s what James Carney and Mike Allen have figured out:

Thanks to aggressive redistricting in the 1990s and early 2000s, fewer than three dozen House seats are seriously in contention this election cycle, compared with more than 100 in 1994, the year Republicans swept to power with a 54-seat pickup in the House. Then there’s what political pros call the ground game. For most of the 20th century, turning out voters on Election Day was the Democrats’ strength. They had labor unions to supply workers for campaigns, make sure their voters had time off from their jobs to go to the polls and provide rides to get them there.

Demographics and GOTV machinery still matter alot. It’s part of the equation that reporters have long ignored but GOP “uberstrategist” Karl Rove paid painstakingly close watch over. It’s also the area of greatest improvement for the GOP.

Way back when, John Murtha said that he had no doubt but that Democrats would win 50 seats if the elections were held right then. I’ve said numerous times that Murtha would be well-advised to stick to politics and leave political strategery to the pros. Part of my prediction that Democrats wouldn’t win those 50 seats is because of the reasons that Jim Carney and Mike Allen cite about vulnerable seats.

Those experiments helped Republicans develop a handful of precepts that constitute the party’s playbook for this fall:
1. Learn from the past Fifteen GOP data experts spent months after the ‘04 election comparing turnout records from the swing states with the Bush-Cheney campaign’s databases to figure out the optimal amount of mail, phone calls and door knocks that would persuade a probable GOP voter to go to the polls.
2. Draw in new voters The Bush-Cheney campaign used state records to locate potential Republicans with Florida State University license plates, then had fellow Seminoles call them to sound out their views. Whereas parties used to go after certain precincts or zip codes, Republicans now know even which individual households they want through microtargeting, the use of computerized consumer data, from magazine subscriptions to charitable contributions, to help locate voters who are likely to vote Republican if they turn out. Other telltale signs of potential latent Republicanism are snowmobile ownership and enrollment in private schools.
3. Low tech can be better Caller ID, TiVo, cable channels and satellite radio all make it harder to reach voters than it was just a few years ago, increasing the importance of person-to-person appeals, the hallmark of old-fashioned, grassroots campaigns that used to connote an amateur or a low budget. “You clearly have to have TV ads,” says White House political-affairs director Sara Taylor, “but for a little less TV, you can buy a whole lot of pizzas and phone lines and salaries for young men and women right out of college” to make phone calls, knock on doors and recruit and manage volunteers.
4. Details, details The shopping list includes everything from chairs to cell phones for hundreds of workers for Republican Party victory committees, whose staffs are charged with creating state turnout machines. The GOP says their volunteer forces in ‘04 proved to be more effective than the paid workers contracted by Democrats, unions and Democrat-oriented fund-raising groups. Even Election Day comes sooner for Republicans, who have begun putting a huge effort into locking down absentee voters and vote-by-mail ballots in states that use them.
5. Spend more Republican officials estimate that at the end of August, their committees and campaigns had $235 million to spend in the two-month home stretch, a $58 million advantage over Democrats. The RNC plans to lay out more than $60 million on turnout efforts and advertising vs. the more than $14 million set aside by DNC chairman Howard Dean. Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, who has been critical of Dean’s approach, complained at a DNC fund-raising luncheon in Washington last week that the GOP “is pouring tens of millions of dollars into races, and we’re not matching that.” House Republican officials contend that many of their Democratic challengers are so little known that they could be buried in an ad blitz. “You hit them, and they fold like a house of cards,” a strategist said.

Simply put, Rove ushered in a new era of GOTV efficiency. That’s part of why I’ve said that he’s the best political strategist in recent history. President Bush, Rove and Mehlman have worked together to put together a multi-faceted approach to winning elections.

President Bush is the Fundraiser-in-chief, with Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Laura Bush, the Cheneys, Speaker Hastert and other leaders assisting in a big way. President Bush also works the ‘policy front’, keeping the GOP message appealing and important. Karl Rove is ‘The Architect’, the man who drew up the blueprint that the GOP’s GOTV operations work from. Ken Mehlman is the nuts-and-bolts guy that’s been attending GOP outreach meetings titled “Conversations with the Community”, which likely will pay big dividends in the Maryland senate race between Michael Steele and Ben Cardin.

Technorati Tags: Election 2006, President Bush, Karl Rove, Ken Mehlman, GOTV

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 1st, 2006 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Elections, RNC, W. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.