Turning Point
After nearly everyone had written him off, John Kerry turned a limping campaign into a force that couldn't be beat. Here's How
Joe Ricca, a senior adviser to John Kerry and a former Iowa organizer for Michael Dukakis, was assigned the job of wooing and winning Mauro over to the Kerry campaign. At the end of December 2003, the Kerry campaign wanted--needed!--those votes that Mauro had in his pocket.
Ricca, with Kerry adviser Michael Whouley at his side, explained it this way to U.S. News .
"So John Mauro has 9,100 absentee ballots," Ricca said.
"Don't get the guy indicted though, OK?" said Whouley.
"Oh, no, they're all legit," said Ricca.
"Sure they're legit," said Whouley. "Right."
But they are legit. Unlike many states, which require a reason for requesting an absentee ballot (you are going to be out of town on Election Day or are disabled and can't get to a polling place, for instance), Iowa requires no reason whatsoever. If you want an absentee ballot, all you need do is sign a card and one will be mailed to you. And today, absentee ballots are a very big deal in Iowa because in the 2000 presidential race, they changed the outcome. If the votes only of those who showed up at the polls had been counted, George W. Bush would have won Iowa by 7,253 votes. But when the absentees were counted, Al Gore won the state by 4,144 votes. So now, both parties are scrambling to do what Mauro has been doing for years: lock up votes before Election Day even comes around. (In 2000, Mauro got a frantic call just before Election Day from the Gore campaign saying it needed 2,000 absentee ballots pronto for Al Gore, which Mauro delivered.) There was only one, tiny problem, however, with Mauro's skills and the Iowa caucuses: The caucuses forbid absentee ballots.
In theory, this is because the caucuses are supposed to be a public, deliberative process in which people talk to one another before voting. In practice, it keeps the caucuses more insular and more easily controlled by party activists. So Mauro's 9,100 absentee ballots were worthless to the Democrats running in the Iowa caucuses. Maybe. When you thought about it, 9,100 votes were still 9,100 votes, and what if Mauro's voters could be persuaded to get up off the couch and go out and vote? Which underestimates the problem. They were not being asked to go out and vote. They were being asked to spend two, three, five hours arguing with people in some overheated room on a winter's night in order to eventually line up for their candidate. So when Des Moines power lawyer Jerry Crawford, Kerry's Iowa chairman, called Mauro and asked him to meet with some Kerry people to talk about supporting Kerry in the caucuses, Mauro was not doing handstands. "I tell him," Mauro said, "I tell him, 'Hey, this isn't our bag of tea.' We do absentees. We don't do the caucuses. I've gone to the caucuses maybe twice in my life, and I have never asked anyone else to go."
Still, Crawford saw the possibilities. Because so few people vote in the Iowa caucuses--only about 11 percent of registered Democrats bothered to vote in 2000--it is tempting to see "expanding the universe" as the key to victory. Instead of putting all your resources into battling the other candidates for the 11 percent who regularly turn out, you battle where you can but save your resources for reaching out to new voters. If you can tap into the 89 percent of people who don't vote, you can ride that wave to victory. And most major candidates had a plan for doing this in 2004: Dick Gephardt targeted family farmers; Howard Dean went after the young and disenchanted; Kerry pursued veterans. This strategy has only one drawback, however: It almost never works. And that is because the Iowa caucuses are not designed to attract large numbers of voters. They are designed to keep large numbers of voters away. The party does not say this, of course. But if the party really wanted wider participation, it could have made voting much easier years ago. Instead, the Iowa caucuses are an extremely daunting process in part because party activists want to keep the process in the control of the party activists. If you make the process difficult and complicated, then only those who are truly motivated and who really understand the process will turn out.
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