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
They were more than supporters: They were validators. "In their local communities, they were known and respected," Norris said. "When they said they were for John Kerry, it meant something." Even so, Kerry wasn't getting any traction. Dean was hot; Kerry was not. "We weren't losing our people," Norris said, "but it was getting harder and harder to get people to join us."
It was about this time that Norris got the idea of the veterans list. Veterans get a break on their property taxes in Iowa, so Norris knew a list of veterans had to exist. It was a natural target audience for Kerry, but there was a problem: There wasn't one list; there were 99, one in each county, and some counties didn't want to give it up. "It was the mentality of the small town," Norris said. "They just didn't want to make it public and so they fought us." In the end, the Kerry campaign collected about 90 lists. They were in all kinds of different forms: electronic, paper printouts, handwritten. (Iowa has some very small counties.) The cost of collecting the lists was only $25,000, but in those days $25,000 was considered real money in the campaign. But it was worth it not only for the names and votes it produced but for something almost as important: The Kerry staff in Iowa was demoralized. Getting the list together boosted their spirits.
By summer, Norris had started collecting his hard counts, but the rules were strict. If a person responded to a phone call by saying, "I'm supporting John Kerry," that was not good enough for a One. To be a One, you had to sign a pledge card or have your support for Kerry validated by a volunteer or staffer. This first wave produced about 10,000 Ones. After that, however, with Dean's popularity skyrocketing, the numbers flat-lined. Norris grew worried and ordered the field staff to do what field staffs hate to do: Recount the Ones to make sure there was no erosion. (If you are responsible for Pocahontas County, population 8,600, and you have met your quota of Ones, the last thing you want to do is find out that 60 of them have dribbled away and that you have to find 60 new Kerry Ones to replace them. It was easier to keep telling headquarters in Des Moines that everything was fine and that there was no erosion.)
But Norris wanted his recount. By September, he was assembling his precinct captains. By October, Kerry's internal polling in Iowa showed improvement, but some people on the campaign didn't believe it. "Some started to question Mellman's methodology," Norris said. "They wondered what universe he was polling." In the last month before the caucuses, the numbers from the field were gathered in what everybody called the Blue Room, because unlike the Dean campaign, which used a complicated color system, Kerry used one color: blue. The bluer the map of Iowa got, the better it was for Kerry. "And it just kept getting bluer and bluer," Norris said. When he heard reports that Dean was getting 3,500 volunteers to come in for the last weeks of campaigning, he was not impressed. He had asked for 500 volunteers, got them, and wanted no more. It was difficult to train and organize even that many people. But he still had a big problem: Even though the numbers were improving, Norris couldn't get the money he needed for mailings to voters or TV ads.
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