Must Read NY Times Magazine Article

by Brian Reich | 26 Sep 2006, 2:00am

The New York Times Sunday Magazine published a must-read article this past weekend about Ken Mehlman, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, and his efforts to keep control of Congress (and looking ahead, the White House) in Republican hands.   On its face, it seems like a pretty basic bio article, but dig a little deeper and you will see some key signs of the Republican strength and sophistication with regard to the use of technology to support their politics.

Some choice excerpts:

When Mehlman talks about politics, he doesn’t talk about Machiavelli; he talks about “Moneyball,” Michael Lewis’s book about how the Oakland A’s employed statistical modeling to assemble a powerhouse baseball team, sending to pasture the old-line scouts with their years of calling it from their guts. “We are the party of €˜Moneyball!”‘ Mehlman proclaimed, practically shouting and bouncing on the balls of his feet, talking to a room of slightly bewildered Republicans in California last year. “They measured everything. We are doing the same thing in politics.”

And this…

Back when Mehlman took the job of party chairman, Republican command of the technologies of winning elections seemed the icing on the cake. Now it seems more like the cake itself. If there is one defining question in this campaign, it is whether the two big Republican Party weapons in this age of Bush — voter turnout and national security in the post-9/11 era — can be wheeled out again to overcome a political environment that has curdled for the Republican Party. As in 2002 and 2004, the White House has been hitting Democrats on national security and terror in a choreographed way, with a rollout that began, predictably, around Labor Day. But Democrats are pushing back this time, arguing that Bush’s policies have if anything made the world a less safe place, an argument reinforced by the continued images of turmoil from Iraq. Polls show that the Republican advantage on the issue is not what it once was, and even some Republicans worry about how many times the White House can credibly go back to this same well.

By contrast, the intricate political machine that Mehlman has built to identify and turn out Republicans is growing, and if the election in November is close, it could provide the Republican Party with the fire wall it needs. Democrats have, if belatedly, learned lessons from what the Republican Party has done and are adopting many of the same techniques. Still, no one thinks the Democrats have caught up on get-out-the-vote, or even can catch up before Election Day. Harold Ickes, a long-term national Democratic leader and one of the smartest strategists in either party, didn’t hesitate when asked if he thought the Republican Party had lapped the Democrats in the area of targeting and turnout. “Yes — there’s no question about it,” he said. Ickes’s response was revealing because he has embarked on a private effort to build a national database of registered voters, an implicit rebuke of the slower pace of Howard Dean, the Democratic Party leader, in this area. And Ickes was warm in his appraisal of Mehlman. “The general view is, he’s very good,” Ickes said. “They have good systems and he’s a good system person.”

 And this…

Mehlman has for this election taken what the Republican Party assembled in Ohio in 2004 — a database of every voting-age resident that includes voting history, party registration, demographic data and consumer history — and expanded it, he said, to include every voting-age American in the country. “In Ohio, in ‘04, we got the tip of the iceberg,” Mehlman said. “What we did over the last two years is we got the entire iceberg.” With that kind of data, Republican campaign workers in every state in the country can identify potential Republicans who may never have voted before and bring them to the polls. To help neighborhood organizers plot their door-to-door visits — and to make what might be a dreary exercise at least interesting — the Republican Party uses satellite pictures from Google Earth to chart the routes for house-to-house canvassing.

There have been two early tests of this machine already in this election cycle, and both were encouraging for Mehlman. The most recent was in Rhode Island earlier this month, where Republicans dispatched 72-hour teams to help Senator Lincoln Chafee beat back what had seemed to be a very threatening conservative challenge by Steve Laffey, the mayor of Cranston. (Mehlman and other top Republicans concluded that they had no chance of keeping the seat in this Democratic state if Laffey won.) Turnout shattered the Republican primary record for the state, set in 1994: 62,099 people voted, a 38 percent increase. Republicans said their 86 get-out-the-vote volunteers made 198,921 contacts with prospective voters in the final 11 days of the campaign. As Chafee declared victory, Democrats could not help taking note of these numbers. And earlier, on June 6 in California’s 50th Congressional District, in San Diego, in a special election to replace Duke Cunningham, the Republican congressman from San Diego who quit in scandal, the Republican Party put the full press of a 72-hour plan to work. The Republican, Brian Bilbray, squeaked out a victory with 49 percent of the vote over the Democrat, Francine Busby. That was a race, Mehlman said, in which turnout was able to overcome a very challenging environment.

Why is this a must-read?   Too many Democrats, too many liberal bloggers, too many people in the media have already written the Republican party off this cycle.   If Democrats take either and/or both the House or Senate, the blame will go to the President, the credit to a small group of consultants, etc.   The story is practically written already.   But elections aren’t that simple.   The Republicans’ numbers are bad, the issues are not breaking in their favor, and their leadership is about as unpopular as any group of people ever to grace the political stage.   But behind all of those problems remains a very solid system for mobilizing political action when and how it matters most.   If the Democrats fail to gain a majority in the House or Senate (and my personal prediction is that the Democrats will come close, maybe win 13-14 seats in the House and 2-3 key Senate races, but ultimately fall short), the reason will be clear - at least to people who read this article.  

Turnout wins elections. And the Republicans have a system in place to ensure strong turnout even in the most dire of times.  The Democrats have struggled for years to catch up in terms of technology and strategy on this front.   There is no evidence to suggest that will change this year.   But no matter the outcome, political professionals (and particularly those Democrats, bloggers and media folks) should be watching to see how this technology gets deployed and the impact it has.

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