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| BLUE SCARE: Will Barack Obama and Sheriff Lupe Valdez exploit more GOP mistakes in Dallas? illustration by Steve Brodner |
After his party lost every judgeship and countywide elected post to a slew of Democratic unknowns in 2006, then Dallas County Republican Party Chairman Kenn George convened an autopsy of sorts. The meeting took place at party headquarters, located north of Walnut Hill off of North Central Expressway. A dozen or so of the faithful gathered around a conference table. “It was a what-the-heck-happened meeting,” says one participant, describing the total loss in November as a grim surprise that did not wear off quickly.
George, himself accused of spending too much time in Colorado while the party foundered through that late summer and fall, was treated to several explanations for the dismal showing. That a Dallas bond election campaign drew out extra Democrats in South Dallas. That Democrats, emboldened by President Bush’s lowly poll numbers and fed up with the Iraq war, swarmed to the polls. That election day parity between the parties in Dallas County, brought on by demographic shifts and ever-narrowing Republican margins of victory, arrived two years earlier than forecast.
Nobody credited the Democratic candidates—and for good reason. Underfunded and largely ignored, none put up enough of a campaign to move the needle, and some were absolute ciphers. Alarm company owner Jim Foster, the Democratic nominee for county judge, famously filed for his ballot spot because nobody else cared to. He was considered so lackluster that Margaret Keliher, the incumbent he defeated, remembers Democratic State Sen. Royce West attending one of her fundraisers and asking her, “You don’t actually think you can lose, do you?”
The theory that best withstood scrutiny of the returns by political analyst Ed Valentine and others was not a story of Democratic vigor or South Dallas numbers. It was about GOP apathy and disaffection. More Democrats had showed up to vote four years earlier, during the last gubernatorial cycle, when Keliher, former District Attorney Bill Hill, and a long list of GOP judges all won. District Attorney Craig Watkins, who rode the Democratic wave to victory, actually gathered more votes when he lost to Hill in 2002 than when he beat Toby Shook in 2006.
Valentine, whose voter lists are widely used in area campaigns, found that in the 2006 toasting, 18,806 Republican stalwarts—those who regularly voted in past primaries—stayed home, compared to 4,147 four years earlier. If slightly more than a third of the 2006 holdouts had gone to the polls and voted their party, both Keliher and Shook would have won.
“What happened in the fall was you didn’t have anyone targeting the base like in past years,” Valentine says. “Nobody talked to them. Instead, the county party used microtargeting to go after swing voters. That’s where they lost their way.”
Heralded as the next wave in political campaigning, microtargeting is so new that 2008 was the first year it was used in presidential primaries. It attempts to take demographic data and market research on what goods and services people buy, and match that information with voter lists and surveys to predict what party or candidate someone is likely to vote for or what issues will move him. You drive an F-350, live in a ZIP code that has been traditionally Republican, and listen to WBAP, with its array of conservative gab shows? They conclude, “That guy’s a Republican.” They’re going to target you, send you something, or knock on your door.
The consumer information, purchased through database firms such as Experian or Plano’s Knowledgebase Media, might focus on magazine subscriptions or churchgoing habits or, according to one published report, whether you prefer gin (Democrat) to bourbon (Republican). Do Subaru drivers vote crunchy liberal? Data-mining for the answer, microtargeters presume to know.
The Dallas County Republican Party took a shot at microtargeting in 2006, and the beating they suffered that fall, the one that turned George Bush’s home county blue, has them questioning now whether it was a $100,000 mistake. “There is concern among candidates that we’re going down the same road we went down in ’06,” says campaign consultant Brian Mayes, who calls microtargeting part of “a tendency in campaigns to get too cute and too fancy.” Another consultant, who prefers not to be named, says the 2006 microtargeting effort was akin to “performing plastic surgery on a patient that’s dying of cancer.”
The local GOP organization’s microtargeting research, done by Gulf Direct, an Austin-based consulting company, yielded lists for door-to-door campaigning. The results, say several candidates and campaign operatives, could not have been worse. “I thought it was the right thing to do, but I was given an awful list,” says State Rep. Linda Harper-Brown, of Irving. “I went to the house of one 85-year-old man who hadn’t voted in six years.” The three-term Republican, who recalls kicking in $3,000 to help pay for her list, says she gave it to a group of University of Dallas students and lectured them, as she had such groups in the past, on what a rewarding time they were about to experience going door to door to talk to voters. “I told them that some people wouldn’t agree with them, but everyone would be polite,” Harper-Brown says. “Well, the people they went to were hostile. They kicked them off their driveways and yelled at them. There weren’t many Republicans in there.”
Harper-Brown trashed her microtargeting list and worked from a more traditional one of known Republican voters. “We ended up doing better in Irving than a lot of places in the county,” she says.
Tina Peyton, a campaign consultant who works with grass-roots volunteers and whose husband, John Peyton, was one of the GOP judges defeated in 2006, says flatly: “I hated those lists. I don’t think anybody checked them before we sent hundreds of people every week to walk with them.” Every weekend she pounded on the doors of unsympathetic voters in places like Carrollton and Lancaster. When one microtargeting list took her to a heavily Democratic part of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price’s district in DeSoto, she knew something must be wrong. “It was faulty data,” she says. “The message to the grass roots was we didn’t need to worry about the base. It was going to be such a tight race that we needed to hit the undecideds. Up to 2006 we had gotten the lion’s share of our base, but in 2006, we went the other way and didn’t work the base. The numbers clearly show we needed to.”
To gather and crunch the 2006 microtargeting data, the county party turned to Kevin Burnette, whose Gulf Direct marketing firm spends most of its time helping small- and medium-sized companies sell their wares. The choice of Burnette, several party insiders agree, reflected the influence of United States Congressman Pete Sessions, who hired Burnette for his own 2006 campaign, paying the out-of-town consultant between $5,000 and $10,000 a month, records show.
For the party work, Gulf Direct was paid about $75,000 to construct a database of voters thought to be receptive to a Republican pitch, and about $13,000 to parcel out data during the campaign. That amounted to nearly a tenth of the county party’s campaign budget, and in the end it still wasn’t enough to do it right, according to George. “We would have done a better job if we could have been continually refining our data, but that would have cost more money, and I made the decision to use those resources elsewhere,” he says. Microtargeters can add feedback from surveys—or in this case, doorstep visits from campaign workers—to the database, honing its ability to be predictive.
George, who made his fortune in the hospital business, compares microtargeting to medical nanotechnology that can isolate a single cell in the body. It’s effective but expensive. “Karl Rove used it very effectively in 2004, and it’s worked in other parts of the world, even if it didn’t work for us,” he says. His goal, he says, was to begin to understand the party’s “market” and reach out to “targets of opportunity.” “Our understanding of our voters was miserable. We knew whether you had voted in a primary but that’s about it,” he says.
Burnette, who admits to no faults in his database, says he took a measured approach to his Dallas County microtargeting and that there are other consultants who might have gone further out of certainty with their data mining. “I take issue with the idea that you can say, ‘It’s going to come down to the Applebee’s customers’ or ‘It hinges on the Field & Stream vote.’ Some consultants get to that level, and I don’t think it’s valid.”
He says he focused on the past voting behavior of every registered voter in the county, together with a long list of demographic data, including income, net worth, education, occupation, marital status, number of children, the year one’s home was built, its square footage, and market value. The profiles of people known to vote Republican in down-ballot races were computer-matched against those of all voters, and each voter was scored on likelihood of supporting the Grand Old Party. Those in turn were grouped into households—the relevant unit for sending mail or door-knocking—and coded green if likely to vote Republican, red if likely to vote Democratic, and amber for those in the middle.
The idea, he says, was to try to know whom to approach among the 280,000 households in the county in which someone had voted in one or more elections but never in a party primary. That group dwarfs the roughly 50,000 households, as of 2006, in which someone had voted in a Republican primary and the 70,000 that had voted Democratic. (Because Texas does not register voters by party, primary voting is the chief way the parties identify their members.)
Burnette equates his efforts to drilling for oil using seismic data. It narrows the geography, increases odds of success, and lowers the chances of going broke drilling lots of dry holes.
George says the party used Burnette’s microtargeting lists to build out from its base. “By definition, we did not walk door-to-door in Highland Park, which is a target-rich environment that everybody—Kenn George, John Corona, Pete Sessions—has worked for years,” George says. “We were prospecting, and some people went to some marginal areas. The people who are the most emotional about microtargeting went to some of the worst areas, in my opinion.”
This June, the party paid Burnette’s outfit another $13,500 to update the database, but the hangover from 2006 has Jonathan Neerman, the newly installed party chairman, playing down the role he sees microtargeting playing this year as the party fights the trends, and Barack Obama’s historic candidacy, to try to claw its way back. Neerman has been telling people like Tina Peyton that the party won’t be focusing on microtargeting this year. But in an interview, the 34-year-old attorney says he is not scrapping the database and says it might be useful in targeting swing voters in more traditionally Republican parts of the county. Still, he wants to talk more about “energizing volunteers” and “getting out the base,” two areas in which nearly everyone agrees the party fell short two years ago.
As for the statistical stereotyping behind microtargeting, Neerman says it would likely put him in the other guys’ camp. “I read the New York Times, the Washington Post, and don’t listen to conservative radio,” he says. “I think for younger voters especially, it’s difficult to paint us into a corner.”
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