Turnout, Not Burnout
After all the debates, campaign stops, and TV ads, it may all just come down to this: Which party can get its voters to the polls?
BLUE BELL, PA.-Here's Rick Santorum's plan to close his challenger's big lead in the polls and pull off a surprise win next week: a phone bank staffed with a half-dozen die-hard volunteers in this Philadelphia suburb. "The Republican Party is committed to protecting America in the war on terror and securing our borders," says Jack Posobiec, a Temple University senior, into a phone receiver on the second-to-last Tuesday before the election. "Can the party count on your vote?" Posobiec takes down the "Yes" response on a sheet of paper that will be scanned into the GOP's vast national voter database, then dials the next number on his list. It's the kind of person-to-person transaction, repeated millions of times over, that forms the grass-roots ground game credited with delivering the Republican gains of 2002 and 2004.
This year, facing its toughest political climate in over a decade (Santorum is just one of several Republican senators in a fight for their political lives), the GOP is counting on that get-out-the-vote machine more than ever. "Turnout in an off-year election is more important than in a presidential election because voters on both sides are less motivated," says a senior Republican adviser. Turnout this year is expected to be down by more than a third from 2004, which is why more than 20 GOP phone banks and volunteer centers across Pennsylvania have already contacted more than a million voters most likely to back Santorum-who is running up to 12 points behind challenger Bob Casey Jr. "The goal is to get [Casey's lead] to single digits by Election Day," says Santorum campaign manager Vince Galko. "The grass roots will take it from there."
Dispirited. With only days to go, however, achieving that goal appears iffy, at best. The revved-up Republican base that staffed the election-eve blizzard of phone calls and door knocks in 2002 and 2004 as part of the GOP's "72-hour plan" now appears dispirited. At the Blue Bell phone bank, one volunteer called a half-dozen Republicans who'd expressed interest in joining this year's "72-hour task force" before finding a taker. The Democrats, meanwhile, say they've improved their ground game since 2004, when the Democratic National Committee's voter file-the road map for turnout efforts-was so glitch-prone that Ohio's Democratic Party couldn't access it until a week before Election Day. In dozens of close races nationwide, the ability of the GOP turnout effort to deliver again, or the Democrats' ability to best it, will determine the outcome next week-and, with it, which party controls Congress.
The Democrats, by relying on organized labor, had historically maintained an edge on turnout operations-until President Bush was elected. But the GOP, under the direction of White House political chief Karl Rove and Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, began running its turnout operation like a business, giving state parties customized volunteer recruitment and voter contact goals. In this cycle, Mehlman received weekly reports from state parties that showed how well each was managing its "metric" goals, starting a full year before Election Day.
Fueled by $30 million from the RNC, Republican officials insist their turnout machine is still humming. They point to victories this year in the special election to replace former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham in California and in Rhode Island, where the party backed Sen. Lincoln Chafee against a formidable primary challenger. "I see increasing levels of energy manifested in more volunteers than ever," Mehlman tells U.S. News. In Ohio, where Republicans are trailing in the Senate and gubernatorial races, and where Democrats are expected to pick up as many as five House seats, the state GOP last week reported making 175,000 voter contacts in one day, a new record. "Democrats can talk up their poll advantages," says state party political director Jason Mauk. "Those numbers are a mile wide and an inch deep if you can't turn them into votes."
But the true test of the GOP's 72-hour campaign-a misnomer, actually, since the effort has been underway for more than a year-comes this week, when they'll see if they can match the 1.2 million volunteers they had nationwide in 2004. Even a more modest grass-roots army may be difficult to muster this year, with so many evangelicals, who provided much of the activist muscle for Rove and Mehlman in 2004 and cast 2 of every 5 Bush votes, now undecided. With the Mark Foley scandal and the failure of the Republican-controlled Congress to deliver on conservative causes like a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, "even the most loyal Republican evangelical would conclude that faith should not be placed in either party ..." says Colin Hanna, president of the Pennsylvania Pastors Network, which organizes conservative Christian voters.
Reminders. Democrats, meanwhile, say their base is fired up. "A lot of our direct mail is just pictures of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld," says Pennsylvania Democratic Party chair T. J. Rooney. "All we have to do is remind them who these guys are." Maybe. A Washington Post/ABC News poll last week found no difference in the "intensity" between the two parties, with 80 percent of Republicans and 78 percent of Democrats voicing enthusiasm for voting this year.
And given the breakdowns in the DNC's 2004 turnout effort, plus the extent to which voter turnout was handled by outside groups like Americans Coming Together, the Democrats' revamped ground game still has a lot to prove. The DNC has overhauled its voter file, with more accurate data and a new technological platform that allows it to be continually updated by state parties. The file is being leveraged by the hundreds of organizers hired under the auspices of chairman Howard Dean's 50-state strategy, which aims to rebuild the national party in every corner of the nation.
DNC state-level organizers have been contacting drop-off Democrats-those who vote in presidential elections but not midterms-and have reached half a million in Pennsylvania alone in the past year and a half. Roughly 4,500 of those contacted have taken an active role in this election, displaying a yard sign or staffing a phone bank. "We're doing exactly what we need to do to be organized ..." says Claire McCaskill, the challenger to Republican Jim Talent in Missouri's tight Senate race. "This year just feels so much different than last time."
Unlike the centralized Republican effort, the DNC and the Democrats' House and Senate election committees are each running separate turnout programs. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has put $10 million into its effort, more than twice as much as in 2002, and started working last summer with 40 Democratic House campaigns-mostly challengers-to create field programs that could replicate the GOP's 72-hour plan. The DCCC is also microtargeting voters for the first time, identifying Democratic voters in majority Republican areas rather than simply working Democratic strongholds.
"Drumbeat." Even with such innovations, Democrats are still leaning heavily on Big Labor, particularly the AFL-CIO. In Pennsylvania alone, members have been making 112,000 phone calls a week since August to the state's roughly 1.4 million union households. In a Philadelphia phone bank housed inside a tractor-trailer, a dozen middle-aged union workers last week dialed into Pennsylvania's 10th District to promote Democratic challenger Chris Carney over Rep. Don Sherwood. "In 2002, our message wasn't as well received," says James Weyrauch, a Department of Labor employee working the phone bank. "It's because we didn't have the Iraq war."
But some Democratic candidates are facing their own base motivation problems, with recent polls showing lower-than-normal black support for Democratic Senate candidates like Missouri's McCaskill, who wasn't cracking 50 percent black support in a poll earlier this month. Other polls show African-Americans more likely than whites to doubt that their votes will be counted because of voting controversies in recent years. "I hear Talent really trying to address some issues near and dear to the African community," says St. Louis Rep. William Lacy Clay, a Democrat. "I don't hear the same drumbeat from the McCaskill camp."
While acknowledging McCaskill's ties to the black community, St. Louis NAACP Vice President Claude Brown says Talent "has done a tremendous job recruiting African-Americans." But, he adds, "people are really angry. If nothing else gets African-Americans to the polls, it's anger." If that's still not enough, perhaps a call from one of the two parties will do the trick.
With Silla Brush
This story appears in the November 6, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.