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
John Kerry, on the other hand, trailing badly in the polls, unable to win big-name endorsements, having difficulty raising money, and with the governor of Iowa telling him privately that he had "a solid lock on a distant third," made the decision to shift his focus, his forces, and his finances to Iowa rather than pinning his hopes on New Hampshire, whose primary was eight days later. True, it was a decision aided by necessity: Kerry was doing so badly in New Hampshire that a distant third in Iowa actually looked good . But many presidential campaigns have ignored urgent necessity in order to gamble on the siren song of false opportunity. Instead, Kerry mortgaged his Boston house and rolled the dice. It was going to be Iowa or Palookaville, with no stops in between. "On the night of the caucuses," said the state's junior U.S. senator, Tom Harkin, "the two most surprised people in Iowa were Howard Dean and John Kerry."
Dean was especially shocked. "I knew how many Ones that we had, and I knew how many Twos that we had, and I knew it was enough to win," Dean said. In a political counting system so old that Moses may have used it to gauge his support among the Israelites, voters are ranked on a list from one to five. Though it differs slightly from campaign to campaign, a One is your strongest supporter, someone who has signed a pledge card promising to go to the polls and vote for you. A Two is a person who has pledged verbally to support you or has signed up at an event. Taken together, the Ones and Twos form your "hard count," those voters the campaign depends on to come out and vote. (Sort of. Actually, human nature being what it is, most campaigns figure they will get only about 80 percent of their Ones and 60 percent of their Twos on Election Day.) A Three is a person leaning toward you, a Four is supporting one of your opponents, and a Five is strongly for one of your opponents. The list of Ones, Twos, and Threes is compiled by calling or knocking on the doors of hundreds of thousands of people and asking them how they feel about the candidates. (This can also be done by robo-call, when a computer dials the phone and a recorded message asks the person to punch a button on the phone keypad to indicate level of support. The Kerry campaign was very big on the use of robo-calls, making sure whenever possible, however, that the recorded message came from a recognizable local or statewide supporter. One reason the Kerry camp liked robo-calling was that in the beginning, when Kerry was doing very poorly in Iowa, it was depressing for his volunteers to call people and be constantly told the person was not going to vote for their guy. By letting robo-calls cull the list, human volunteers could then take the list of Ones and Twos produced by the calls and follow up, making human contact.)
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