....DeNike had stumbled across one of the main operational flaws of the liberal get-out-the-vote effort -- a lack of coordination between the Kerry campaign and its third-party surrogates. What DeNike discovered was that neither the ACT people nor the Kerry people were mounting a final new-registration push in South Florida because each believed that the other group would be handling it. That would seem to be a silly mistake -- didn't people know their roles? -- but this sort of thing seems to have occurred often in the campaign, volunteers say. Because campaign finance laws prohibited the Kerry staffers from discussing their efforts with ostensibly independent groups such as ACT, the campaign and the outside groups were often duplicating each other's work, or sometimes weren't working on what needed to be done because they assumed the other side was doing it.
The coordination problem was especially pronounced during the last few weeks and days of the campaign, when the full force of get-out-the-vote canvassers, tens of thousands of people, were going door-to-door in battleground states. "We were knocking on doors and people would say, 'You're the third person who's come by today,'" says Eric Rorer, a freelance photographer from Northern California who worked for the Kerry campaign in Columbus, Ohio. Volunteers from the various groups were running into each other on the street, Rorer says, but they couldn't pass the slightest information between themselves, even plans as to which houses they would tackle first. One ACT volunteer who canvassed in Miami says, "By the Friday before Election Day people were like, 'Stop coming around!' These people were being extremely over-canvassed -- we were hitting them, MoveOn was hitting them, the Kerry people were hitting them, the Senate candidates were hitting them, there was a mayoral candidate that was hitting them..."
Nobody knows whether this "over-canvassing" problem -- which was reported by just about every canvasser Salon spoke to -- caused many (or any) voters to become so annoyed with the process that they decided to stay away from the polls. But Donald Green, of Yale, says the situation affected the progressive groups' overall efficiency. "It was not easy for them to spread their resources intelligently," he says. Successful door-to-door operations call for a well-planned series of visits to each household over a period of weeks. But instead of each household getting a first contact from a group, then a second contact, then a third, what happened in this campaign in many neighborhoods was that "lots of people were getting many first contacts," each from a different group. "Some people got five first contacts." That must have caused no small amount of confusion, if not anger, among voters.
If some neighborhoods in the swing states were being over-canvassed by progressives, other neighborhoods may have consequently been under-canvassed by those groups. Could the efforts of the third-party groups have been more fruitful if some of their door-to-door canvassing had been shifted from reliably Democratic urban neighborhoods to other areas -- specifically, should ACT and MoveOn have concentrated on some of the suburban and "exurban" neighborhoods that the New York Times Magazine's Bai calls the GOP's secret weapon in Ohio?
"It's a fair point," says Thomas Gensemer, ACT's director of Internet strategies. But conducting a get-out-the-vote operation in non-base suburban neighborhoods would have been difficult for ACT, he notes. Under federal campaign finance law (ACT is a 527 organization, an entity to which donors can contribute unlimited sums of "soft money,") ACT could not call on voters to go out and cast a ballot for a specific candidate. In Democratic strongholds, this limitation worked out OK: The group didn't need to sell voters there on the merits of John Kerry; all it had to do was make sure people got to the polls. But how could ACT have campaigned in areas where the voters' preferences weren't so certain? It wouldn't have worked. As a third-party group, ACT had one key limitation -- it was a "campaign without a candidate," Gensemer says. "That's why our mandate from the start was much more to go after base votes. I don't know if you can do anything else in a 527 world when you're not the actual candidate's campaign. Getting out the swing voters was not the role of us and MoveOn and others."
But if ACT and MoveOn could canvass only in the cities, why couldn't the Kerry campaign have canvassed in the suburbs, spreading the door-to-door resources? The answer, again, is coordination: In key states like Ohio and Florida, the Kerry team couldn't have shifted its resources to the suburbs because it couldn't be sure what the third-party groups would be doing in the cities. It had no way of coordinating with them. So it too had no choice but to concentrate its mobilization efforts in the cities, where all the reliable Democrats were located.
The Democratic focus on urban Democratic strongholds, then, seems to have been a necessary consequence of its reliance on third-party advocacy groups. Republicans, it should be noted, didn't face this problem. Because the Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote operation was run in-house, not farmed out to soft-money third-party groups, canvassers could do as they pleased, without worrying about coordination failures, or prohibitions on how they could sell their candidate. If the Democrats faced any strategic mobilization disadvantage, Green says, it was this difference in their operations. Republican canvassers were selling a candidate, while canvassers at ACT were really selling an idea -- broad progressivism -- that they hoped would translate into action for their candidate. The match was not quite fair.
The over-canvassing thing may be a bit overplayed here. But, on the other hand, it was a fact. I noticed it myself. We all talked about it the weekend before the election. It happened. I talked to plenty of voters in "core" Democratic neighborhoods who were sick of hearing from people like me, and I knocked on doors that had signs on them that said "No campaigning please."
However, the silver lining is this. Maybe this really will turn out to be our Goldwater '64 defeat, where we organized and organized and were mightily disappointed, but began to build a grassroots movement that eventually put our people into office and dominated national politics. And maybe this time, after the collapse of the dollar and the stock market and the painful years of sleeping on gymnasium floors, we will create something more exciting and more worthwhile than the New Deal.
Maybe?
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