GOP voting machine keeps Dems on toes

Get-out-vote plan will tighten races, insiders predicting

Chris Barge, Rocky Mountain News

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Democrats running with the wind at their backs may be headed for a wall when the GOP cranks up a get-out-the-vote machine perfected over the past five years.

Operatives inside both parties predict that Republicans will close the gap in all close races during the crucial days before the election the GOP calls the "Final Four."

Suburban Denver's 7th Congressional District, which has seemed to lean Democratic in recent weeks, was a testing ground in 2002 for what was then a new Republican secret weapon that relied more on technology and marketing than shoe leather. It gave Republican Bob Beauprez the 121 votes he needed to win.

Republicans say they are ready for a national rollout of that effort, and Democrats in the know are worried.

Campaign manager KC Jones opened her laptop computer on the long, clean table in the front room of Republican Rick O'Donnell's headquarters recently and logged on to a program that most people have never seen.

The Google-based, interactive spreadsheet tracked the get-out- the-vote effort Jones says will keep the congressional seat Beauprez is giving up to run for governor in Republican hands.

She could see that volunteers and staff for O'Donnell had knocked on 24,000 doors and called more than 76,000 voters. The screen told her how much progress each of her field directors had made in staffing volunteers to work during the crucial last 96 hours of the campaign.

On the right side of the screen, she saw that her Aurora field manager - one of six field managers working the ground campaign - was also online and available to chat if she needed anything.

"Politics is a science now," she said. "This get-out-the-vote program has been perfected for the last five years."

Today, Republicans can identify and track supporters using a database called Voter Vault. Campaign managers like Jones have at their fingertips information on individuals gleaned painstakingly and at great cost from consumer data, voting habits and thorough polling.

The Republicans are counting on that precision for their best get-out-the-vote results ever.

"We've seen a get-out-the-vote program move an election five percentage points," Jones said. "That's out of the norm. But if you don't think I'm oiling the machine to overperform, you're crazy."

Steve Welchert, adviser to O'Donnell's Democratic rival Ed Perlmutter, says the Republican machine is particularly troubling this year when a presidential race isn't on the ballot to drive more voters to the polls.

"If it's usually worth three points, it might be worth 4 1/2 points this time," he said. "It keeps us up nights at the Perl-mutter campaign."

Prior to 2000, Democrats were known as the party that could come from behind in the final stretch.

The joke was that GOTV meant "get on the van" in Democratic circles, while it meant "get on TV" inside the traditionally better-funded Republican campaigns.

But the 2000 presidential election was a wake-up call for national Republicans shocked that George W. Bush did not win by the comfortable margin they'd predicted.

Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman and others realized there was a lot they could learn from databases that tracked such things as the magazines people subscribed to and where they went to church.

It would come at a price, but in the long run, they predicted, the investment would pay off.

By 2001, national Republicans had set upon a plan to take "microtargeting" of voters a quantum leap forward. In certain congressional districts across the country, they bought mailing lists from publishers of magazines that typically appealed more to Republicans than Democrats. They dispatched volunteers to reach out to conservative churches and other membership organizations such as the National Rifle Association to obtain their membership lists.

They also invested more time and money into phone and person-to-person surveys of Republican and independent voters, figuring out which issues resonated with which voters.

Voter Vault was created, and all of this microtargeted information on voters in these targeted congressional districts went in it.

"In 2002, Colorado was one of the model states that actually did what we had tested in 2001," said Jones.

Welchert, who then advised Beauprez's opponent Mike Feeley, watched helplessly as, for the first time in his memory, Republicans clobbered Democrats in getting their voters to the polls.

Still smarting from that loss, Welchert sat Perlmutter down a year ago and reminded him what went wrong the last time the district was an open seat. He made Perlmutter promise to do everything he could to match the Republican get-out-the-vote effort this time around.

On a "macro level" at least, Welchert says he's confident Perl-mutter's campaign, and hopefully those of other Democrats, have risen to the challenge.

Perlmutter has matched O'Donnell's six field directors, and volunteers have sent mailings, called voters and knocked on doors.

"It's considerably more than we had four years ago," Welchert said. "We are 110 percent stronger than what we had on the ground in 2002."

More than anything, Perlmutter and Democrats across the state seem to be banking on discontent with the Iraq war and Republican congressional scandals to carry them through Election Day.

Big Democratic names such as Barack Obama and John Edwards headlined get-out-the- vote rallies this week in Colorado. Former President Clinton flies to the state Wednesday.

Democratic confidence is running so high that leaders like Sen. Ken Salazar are telling crowds they predict a "Colorado miracle" on Nov. 7 - a clean sweep of each of the state's seven U.S. House districts.

The political preening has gone largely unanswered by Republicans who say they're too busy getting out the vote to worry about holding feel-good news conferences and rallies.

"This is serious, serious business for us," said state GOP spokesman Bryant Adams.

Since winning Colorado's 7th District four years ago, the GOP has expanded its microtargeted database to include Republican and independent voters statewide.

Four years later, the Democrats don't appear to have anything resembling Voter Vault.

"It's very expensive," Welchert said. "Not just to build it, but to maintain it."

But while Welchert admits he is envious of Voter Vault, he and other Democrats emphasize that elections these days are still about more than microtargeting voters.

"Here's the bottom line," said Billy Compton, political director for the Colorado Democratic Party.

"The best database in the world and the best, well-oiled, get-out-the-vote machine are totally meaningless if you don't have quality candidates that connect with Colorado voters, and that's what they don't have."

Republicans across the state dismiss such confidence.

"Going into the Final Four, no matter where you are in the polls, a cocky attitude can be a fatal mistake," GOP political consultant Steve Truebner said.

Starting Friday night and on through "E-Day," as they call it, Republicans will pack a sprawling office in the same Wheat Ridge complex where O'Donnell's campaign is headquartered.

On land lines and cell phones, in vans and by foot, they will staff 400 shifts, making sure every last Republican and GOP-leaning unaffiliated voter in Voter Vault casts a ballot.

"If it's anywhere close, we honest-to-God believe our efforts will put us over the top," the state GOP's Adams said.

Microtargeting

The Republican database, called Voter Vault, is so sophisticated it can tell a campaign field manager the name, number and address of an occasional unaffiliated voter in Golden. It can tell them what magazines that voter subscribes to, whether they go to church and what memberships they have.

• If that voter subscribes to Field and Stream, is an NRA member and attends church regularly, a GOP campaign worker has probably knocked on the voter's door, asked what issues are important to the voter and left a 38-page campaign brochure.

• If the voter said he or she was pro-choice but fiscally conservative, the campaign volunteer entered that into Voter Vault. That way, Republican candidates like Rick O'Donnell, who is pro-life, knows to talk with the voter about taxes instead of abortion if he ever calls them.

• If the voter told the volunteer he or she was undecided, they probably got a phone call from O'Donnell about the issue they cared about most.