The Big Sort (37 page)

Thibodeaux runs with a group of Republican activists from the little town of Savage. They are both geographically and ideologically Savage Republicans. A confidential briefing book put together by the Bush campaign in 2004 listed several "potential weaknesses" in Scott County. For one, the boys over in Savage were a little bit
too
Republican. "There is a significant number of ultra conservatives in the county, some of whom are disenchanted with some fiscal policies," the report said. For one thing, Thibodeaux and his group were hounding the party about Bush's ever-inflating budget, and it wasn't long before the state Republican Party had dubbed them the "Savage Mafia." But if being "ultra conservative" was a disadvantage in Scott County, you couldn't tell it from the vote in 2004. The Savage Mafia put together a campaign that won Bush more than 60 percent of the county vote. And, as Thibodeaux said, they did it all according to Dowd's plan.

After Matt Dowd realized that the number of undecided voters was both small and dwindling, he and the rest of the Bush campaign adopted a strategy that bypassed independents and concentrated on turnout. They collected methods thought to boost the number of voters (those noxious computer-generated telephone calls, for example) and tested them in the 2002 off-year elections.

In 2000, Donald Green and Alan Gerber at Yale University had published research measuring the effects of different get-out-the-vote techniques. The political scientists had conducted a test during a 1998 election in New Haven, Connecticut. Some residents had received a piece of mail asking them to vote. Paid solicitors had made the same pitch over the phone to another group of people. And a third group of residents had received a visit from a paid canvasser. When Gerber and Green checked who actually voted, they discovered that direct mail and, especially, phone calls had had little effect. But face-to-face canvassing had raised turnout rates from 44 percent of registered voters to 53 percent. In a subsequent experiment, the researchers found that for every twelve front-door contacts, one additional person voted.
¹⁶
In the electoral world confronting both parties, these were huge increases. The four presidential elections from 1988 to 2000 were, on average, closer than in any comparable period over the past century. An increase of a fraction of a percent could win an election.

Both parties were familiar with Gerber and Green's research. The left-leaning ACT hired thousands of young people to canvass neighborhoods based on the face-to-face trial conducted in New Haven.
¹⁷
But the Republicans learned from their 2002 experiments that door-to-door canvassing came with an asterisk. The more closely tied the person making the appeal was to the neighborhood, the more likely it was that the appeal would result in an additional vote. A friend worked best, but if the person coming to the door was clearly from the community, that also worked well. "There was like a four times higher likelihood that voters would respond if they were contacted by somebody they knew, or if it was somebody from the neighborhood," Dowd told me in reference to his party's 2002 tests. This was an old principle of marketing. Insurance salesmen had known since the 1960s that the more they resembled a prospective customer—in age, income, and especially political outlook—the better chance they had of making a sale. Similarly, evangelists would make sure that the newly converted were first met at the altar by people of the same sex, age, and race. In 2004, Republicans rediscovered the recruiting technique that had been refined by insurance salesmen and revivalists.
^*

Republican strategists had also come to understand why it was important in these times to have somebody from the neighborhood make the appeal for Bush. Religious historian Robert Wuthnow had found a "search for connections" in America. In earlier times, Wuthnow wrote in 1998, people identified their faith by membership in a larger church. Now they were seeking kinship within smaller groups and communities.
¹⁸
Similarly, the marketing director of McDonald's had said that the country had transformed from the "me decade" to the "age of I ... And by that [I] mean: I am an individual, but I don't want to feel alone. To what group do I belong?"
¹⁹
Americans were seeking the company of others—albeit, others who were very much like themselves. J. Walker Smith of Yankelovich Partners described Americans as "hiving." Their reaction to the anxiety of the world—the uncertainty of work and health and the volatility of global politics—was to seek "the embrace of others in a safe setting abuzz with engagement and activity." They were devising personalized environments. "People want to live where they can enjoy the comforts of family, friends and neighbors," Smith told his clients. Americans were "finding comfort through connection," and the strongest connections were with people like themselves.
²⁰
"This self-selection is incredibly important," Republican political consultant Bill Greener told me in 2005. Greener lives in a heavily Democratic suburb of Washington, D.C., and has been struck by the way Americans are clustering in like-minded neighborhoods. We live in an "age of invisibility," Greener said, and people have a "constant sense that everything is a hassle, where stress surrounds everything, whether it's driving to work or trying to get something accomplished in public policy. When it comes time to go home or it comes time to go to church or comes time to enjoy other social endeavors at some level, there is the thought that 'I don't want to have to listen to all that shit' [from those with different opinions]. And that translates into what we're observing."

One person's social comfort, of course, is another's social prison, and as people seek the best place to live, they create a jagged cultural landscape. Places that are economically vibrant—that produce more technology and discover more marketable ideas—generally have looser social connections. People there are less likely to join clubs, volunteer, or attend church. These places, on average, vote Democratic.
^*
Other people seem to prefer places with tighter social ties. Residents of these communities volunteer, join, and stay closer to their families. They largely vote Republican. This cultural difference had economic advantages for Democratic areas in 2004, but when it came time to build a grassroots political organization around community networks—the Apple-bee's strategy—the closer ties in Republican areas perfectly matched the Bush campaign strategy.
^†

Put simply, Republicans had more social networks to tap. In Republican landslide counties, 20 percent of the residents went to church more than once a week. In Democratic landslide counties, 8 percent did. In addition, 45 percent of the people in Republican landslide counties belonged to a Bible study or prayer group.
²¹
Those connections naturally transferred to politics. I visited with the Savage Republicans at a pizza party they held at the Tin Shed restaurant in town. I met Bob Stapleton, a commercial pilot. Stapleton had a deep interest in education and had become involved with the conservative group EdWatch, which opposes things such as "school-to-work" programs and other "European" innovations. He had also joined a Bible study group that included Randy Penrod, the chair of the Scott County Republican Party. Penrod had recruited Stapleton into the party, and soon Stapleton had become the education policy person on the party's county executive committee. "There's a synergism," Penrod explained. "Because Bob is involved with EdWatch, I asked him to sit on the executive committee. And I met him at Bible study."

Contrary to what the Democrats thought, the Republicans didn't convince preachers to organize parishioners and march them to the polls in 2004. Four years earlier, the Bush campaign
had
tried to recruit preachers, and the effort had flopped.
^*
"What we learned in 2000 is that if you want something to happen on the ground, you have to have people on the ground," Bush's Portland, Oregon, campaign leader Patrick Donaldson told me. "The pastor is not on the ground in most cases. They are spiritual leaders, and they are reluctant to use the pulpit" in political campaigns.
^†
So in 2004, the Bush campaign went after something more powerful than the minister. The campaign recruited churches' social networks. Bush workers collected rosters of church members, just as they collected the membership lists of organizations such as Ducks Unlimited (a hunters' group), the names of people who had signed petitions seeking to outlaw gay marriage, and the names of conservative homeschoolers. (Republicans were exact: they asked Donaldson to retrieve membership lists from precisely 149 congregations in the Portland area.) As the Bush campaign compiled names, it was simultaneously discovering the social networks that would become the campaign's delivery system—how the Republicans would build a local organization of volunteers and spread the word about Bush.

The Bush reelection campaign ideal would have neighbors contacting neighbors. This was the Applebee's model, the megachurch model. The campaign couldn't hire canvassers, as ACT and the Democrats were doing. The Republicans couldn't bus in campaign workers from other communities. People would notice right away if the person going door-to-door came from a strange tribe, a different hive. Patrick Donaldson in Portland said that the young ACT and
Moveon.org
canvassers coming to his door would talk about the future of "Or-e-gone," a pronunciation that grates on natives. ("It's
Or-e-gun,
" Donaldson emphasized.) Oregon pollster Tim Hibbitts watched the waves of ACT and
MoveOn.org
canvassers crash over the state's neighborhoods and concluded that they were "absolutely worthless. At best they did nothing."
^*

The Republican campaign also recruited what it called "navigators," people trusted in particular communities who could be the personal representatives of George W. Bush. This was a strategy taken straight from the marketing world that, again, worked best within homogeneous communities. Elmo Roper first proposed in the 1940s that 10 to 12 percent of the population consisted of opinion leaders, influencing others in their choice of goods, services, and, perhaps, presidents.
^†
Companies have tried to identify these "influentials" and convince them to use their products in the belief that they would bring many other customers along. Procter & Gamble, for example, began its Tremor advertising unit in 2001. Tremor identified influential teens who, on average, had 170 friends. Companies would give these young people free stuff and ask for their thoughts about, say, a new shampoo or a movie trailer. The strategy was to get these teens talking, to generate a buzz. By 2004, Tremor had 280,000 teens in its network and a client list that included Sony, Valvoline, DreamWorks, and Coca-Cola.
²²

The Bush campaign identified its navigators with Applebee's in mind. One was Wes Mader, the rail-thin former mayor of Prior Lake, in Scott County, Minnesota. Mader had grown up in a thin-soil Wisconsin farming community. His mother had been orphaned at age five; his father had lived to be ninety and would never accept a senior citizen discount. Mader had made his own way, becoming president of an aerospace firm and raising a family that still lived nearby. "There's a sense in Prior Lake and in Scott County that families are the fundamental building block of society," Mader told me as we sat in his lakeside house. "That's the attitude that's here, and it's an identifiable value of the Republican Party." The former mayor, successful businessman, and utterly trustworthy neighbor was, according to the GOP strategy, the Scott County incarnation of George W. Bush. He was one of thousands.

The campaign was particularly interested in how its canvassers approached people identified as likely Republicans. Those going door-to-door were asked simply to tell why they backed Bush—to, in effect, witness their support for the president. Patrick Donaldson, who led the Bush campaign in Multnomah County in Oregon, said that his organizers urged canvassers not to argue with voters. He told his volunteers, "You aren't trying to change the world. You aren't trying to convince anybody of anything. [You] are trying to talk to friends and neighbors and family, saying, 'Here's who I support and here are the reasons why.' If they don't support who you support and they give you the reasons why, that's wonderful. The discipline was we're not here to engage in any sort of disagreement at all. It's not going to happen." In Scott County, canvassers were given the same orders. The strategy wasn't to convince people to vote for Bush, but to build a Bush community. "We made it all social events, and that's why we were more successful," said Robert Thibodeaux. "As opposed to going to somebody's door and saying, 'Hi, will you support the president because of this, this, and this?' We said, 'Hey, we're having a party at somebody's house to watch a video about the president, have some drinks, and just talk about things in the nation and Scott County.' If they come to a party and they're in a room with thirty other people, they realize it's okay to talk."

The technique of seeking connection as a means to conversion is familiar to anyone involved with an Evangelical church. The generation of ministers who opened churches in the new suburbs realized that people couldn't be bludgeoned into the pews. People came to faith most often through a network of friends and family. Friendship came first and then conversion. These ministers practiced what became known as "friendship evangelism" or "lifestyle evangelism," which is based on the biblical command that Christians be "witnesses" (Acts 1:8).
²³
Much of this church practice originated outside America, specifically with Pastor David Yonggi Cho, the Korean inventor of the cell system. Pastor Cho has said that his cells attract new members through friendship and service. These groups "select someone who's not a Christian, whom they can pray for, love, and serve." Pastor Cho said, "They bring meals, help sweep out the person's store—whatever it takes to show they really care for them ... After three or four months of such love, the hardest soul softens up and surrenders to Christ." Instead of a preacher trying to hook one convert at a time, Cho cast the neighborhood cells as nets—a technique that has grown his Yoido Full Gospel Church by more than 140 new members a day.
²⁴
Cho's practice transferred to the United States (Chicago-area megachurch preacher Bill Hybels writes about "contagious" Christianity) and eventually, in 2004, to the Bush campaign.