-Caveat Lector-
"Democrats have a simple phrase that sums up their voter-turnout effort:
"knock and drag." A crew of paid workers storms through predominantly
black neighborhoods and coaxes, cajoles, or browbeats every registered
voter to the polls. It's a form of political activity that was
well-known in the big-city, white-ethnic machines of the past but has
only recently emerged as a key to black turnout."
NEWARK DISPATCH
Knock and Drag
by Ryan Lizza
The New Republic
Nov. 9, 2000
Regena Thomas is not a speechwriter or a campaign manager. She
doesn't craft political ads or appear on the Sunday talk shows.
Even among political junkies, she's virtually unknown. But she's
one of the most important Democratic Party operatives in the
country. In fact, Thomas—along with others like her—is a big
reason the Democrats have now exceeded expectations in three
consecutive national elections.
Thomas gets black voters to the polls. With her help and $65
million, Jon Corzine won a New Jersey Senate seat this week; Al
Gore took the state's 15 electoral votes going away. And
Thomas's turnout operation, developed in New Jersey, has been
replicated to similar effect across the country. Programs in
Philadelphia and Detroit helped Gore win crucial swing states
Pennsylvania and Michigan. In New York, Hillary Clinton's
turnout program helped her crush Rick Lazio by twelve points,
with black turnout increasing 2 percent relative to the 1998
Senate race. In all-important Florida, black turnout jumped from
10 percent in 1996 to 16 percent this year, even though blacks
make up just 13 percent of the voting-age population. In
Missouri, another swing state, black turnout jumped seven points
from 1996. "Black turnout was astronomical," says Thomas, who,
in addition to New Jersey, worked on turnout programs in
Missouri, Delaware, Michigan, Florida, and Virginia. "Our
margins of victory were in urban areas."
Democrats have a simple phrase that sums up their voter-turnout
effort: "knock and drag." A crew of paid workers storms through
predominantly black neighborhoods and coaxes, cajoles, or
browbeats every registered voter to the polls. It's a form of
political activity that was well-known in the big-city,
white-ethnic machines of the past but has only recently emerged
as a key to black turnout. In 1989, the late Ron Brown, then the
newly appointed chairman of the Democratic National Committee,
introduced a revolutionary way to conduct Democratic campaigns,
which he called the "coordinated campaign." It required all the
candidates on the Democratic ticket in each state to pool a
portion of their resources for a joint effort to turn out
Democratic voters. In 1989 test races in New Jersey and
Virginia, the plan was a startling success, and it became the
model used to elect Bill Clinton and Al Gore in 1992. After the
1994 Republican landslide, when the Democratic base stayed home,
the party refined the concept, dispatching a team of consultants
to New Jersey to poll and conduct focus groups with black voters.
"The reason that we came to New Jersey is that New Jersey's
African American voters have a reputation for being historically
one of the toughest African American electorates in the country,"
says Ron Lester, a black pollster and Corzine consultant. In
1996, Thomas put the model to work for Democratic Representative
Robert Torricelli, who was locked in a dead-heat Senate race with
Republican Richard Zimmer. But on Election Day Torricelli won by
ten points. His margin came almost entirely from black voters.
New Jersey Democrats had found the key to electoral victory.
The following year, applying the turnout techniques of the
Torricelli campaign, Democrat Jim McGreevey came from nowhere to
within 26,000 votes of unseating popular Governor Christie Todd
Whitman, with Whitman's share of the black vote dropping eight
points from her 1993 race. A study comparing the tight 1997 race
to Whitman's 1993 victory over Democrat Jim Florio—who had no
black turnout program—is treated like a state secret within the
party. "It's remarkable," says Corzine campaign manager Stephan
DeMicco, who declined to share a copy of the study with me.
"It's got too much strategic power for us.... The study of '93
to '97 has resulted in whole new approaches to electoral
targeting for us. The lessons that we learned from that study
... are being applied in many other states now."
"We actually call it ... the New Jersey Plan," says Thomas, who,
like DeMicco, is a veteran of New Jersey campaigns going back to
1996. "When we go to Georgia, they will tell you, it's the New
Jersey Plan." Thomas, along with three other prominent black
Democratic women—Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile; Bill
Clinton's political director, Minyon Moore; and Allison McLaurin
of the Democratic Governor's Association—has taken the lead in
promoting the turnout model within the party. The four call
themselves "The Colored Girls Club."
wo nights before Election Day, I find Thomas in a tiny office in
downtown Newark. Scattered about are signs reading
AFRICAN-AMERICANS FOR GORE-LIEBERMAN and STAY OUT THE BUSHES.
On the floor are two six-inch stacks of checks made out in the
amounts of $50 and $75—daily pay for part-time and full-time
campaign workers, respectively. At her desk, Thomas is poring
over pages and pages of numbers on what are called "vote goal
sheets." It looks for all the world like a thrown-together,
backroom operation.
But, despite its crude, low-tech appearance, Thomas's procedure
is very sophisticated. "We start with this," Thomas says,
tossing me a thick report titled "Electoral Targeting With Vote
Goals." It comes from a Washington-based organization called the
National Committee for an Effective Congress (NCEC), a
little-known, left-leaning operation that provides the Democratic
Party and labor unions with electoral data. Ncec's state reports
include vital information about the voting history and trends of
every precinct. In addition, they provide Thomas with a special
precinct-by-precinct report on African American and Latino voting
patterns. Using the two reports, Thomas decides which precincts
to apply the base turnout model to; then, she develops a vote
goal for each of those precincts on Election Day. "This is their
playbook, their bible," she says, showing me a list of targeted
precincts. "All my municipal coordinators have this." The sheet
shows each precinct's registered voters, turnout history,
Democratic performance, and, most important, vote goal.
Precincts where turnout is low but Democratic performance is high
are marked in red, since they constitute prime knock-and-drag
territory on Election Day. Thomas points out Atlantic City's
Ward One, Precinct Two as an example: Historically, 82 percent of
the precinct's vote is Democratic, but the turnout is a
relatively low 40 percent. "I got to bring that [40 percent
figure] up," she says.
Once targeted districts are identified, Thomas begins a
pre-program consisting of direct mail, phone calls, and visits to
voters' homes. In the precinct mentioned above, for example, the
Democrats sent six mailings to the 799 households that ncec had
identified there. Crafting the mailings constituted a challenge,
because Gore generated only tepid support among African Americans
and George W. Bush proved a difficult man to demonize. And so
Democrats did what they so often do when it comes to the black
vote: They called the Republicans racist. One flyer featured
Bush against the backdrop of a Confederate flag. Mail on behalf
of Corzine said his opponent, Bob Franks, "thinks it's OK to
teach our kids in trailers" and "will be hazardous to your
family's health." But the most effective piece of mail sent to
black voters targeted a Republican who isn't even running this
year: It showcased the infamous picture of a smiling Whitman
frisking a black man with his arms spread against a wall.
"Republicans Like Governor Whitman Think Racial Profiling Is a
Joke," the caption read.
In addition to these mailings, Thomas hit black voters with live
phone calls urging them to vote. On the Monday before the
election, voters were given a reminder call; on Election Day
itself, a massive phone bank operated from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00
p.m. "Those phones are on a continual cycle," Thomas says. "The
only way [a voter] comes out of the cycle is if [he] answers the
phone." When a district is performing below Thomas's
expectations, she can immediately retarget the phones, increasing
calls to that area.
All this is supplemented by a radio and TV campaign that reaches
saturation levels in the days leading up to the election. To
listen to hip-hop and R&B stations the day before Election Day is
to experience relentless political bombardment. "Republicans
will roll back the progress Clinton has achieved," cautions one
ad. In another, Jesse Jackson urges voters to take Tuesday off
from work, warning, "All that Dr. King achieved can be
overturned in one Supreme Court session." Minutes later Hillary
Clinton is on the air talking about racial profiling and
insisting, "If you stick with me, I'll stick with you." Next up
is her husband, the president, with a paid ad making the case for
Gore, Joe Lieberman, Corzine, and Hillary. Seconds later, Bill
Clinton is back on the same station, this time for a live
interview. "When they target the black community," says Thomas
aide Rahman "Rock" Muhammad, "they target the black community."
he night before the election, I tag along on a bus trip to put up
posters in Newark. The organization doing the postering is
called the Labor Action Committee, a group of black turnout
specialists that the Corzine campaign has hired to rack up huge
margins in majority-black cities in Essex County, such as Newark
and Orange. The Labor Action Committee is run by James Benjamin,
a union man and veteran of New Jersey campaigns who decided to
privatize his operation and cash in on the Corzine spending
spree.
Volunteers seem a thing of the past, at least in the Corzine
campaign, which essentially operated as a low-paying jobs program
for thousands of people across New Jersey. Where exactly all
these workers came from became a campaign issue in the final days
of the race, when The New York Times discovered that many were
being shipped in from homeless shelters and drug-rehab centers in
Pennsylvania. Most of the men I spent time with had no
discernible affinity for Gore, Corzine, or any other Democrat.
Nor is there much in the way of on-the-job cheer: During the ride
to Newark, the team leader, Bruce, scolds everyone because two
staple guns went missing the night before. "No one is getting
paid if one is missing tonight," he says. He warns the workers
that they can be easily replaced because "there are plenty of
folks who want to do what we do." When he asks if there are any
questions, the only response is, "When do we get paid?" Later, an
argument breaks out on the bus over who is assigned to what job.
Apparently those who put up posters earn $5 more than those who
distribute literature, and several men who want to do poster
detail are told they can't. "You can't even buy a bag of weed
with five dollars," a guy behind me laughs.
But, in the end, the blanket coverage—the mail, calls, ads, and
posters—is still only a warm-up for the ground game that Thomas
has planned for 559 African American precincts on Election Day.
I spend November 7 with Benjamin's Labor Action Committee, which
has 39 vehicles and hundreds of paid workers covering Essex
County.
The operation works like this: Benjamin assigns a watcher to the
polls in each targeted district; those poll watchers report vote
counts back to headquarters every two hours. There, in the
"count room," staffers monitor the returns and decide which
precincts are meeting their goals and which aren't. When a
precinct is underperforming, Benjamin can increase phone calls to
people in that precinct or send in a team of "flushers" to
knock-and-drag voters to the polls. Meanwhile, sound trucks roam
the targeted precincts, playing music and urging people to go to
the polls.
Things go smoothly throughout the morning and early afternoon,
with most precincts meeting or exceeding expectations. But, at
about 2:30 p.m., Benjamin gets a phone call that throws him into
a panic. Rushing into the phone-bank room, he yells, "All calls
into Newark! Turnout is not as high as it should be." Minutes
later, he begins sending teams into Newark and nearby Irvington.
"We're going to do a pullout," he announces. We jump into a
minivan and race to a satellite office in Irvington, where we are
met by dozens of Benjamin's workers. Benjamin shouts a request
into his cell phone, and 50 students from Seton Hall University
are on their way to reinforce his ranks. Benjamin collects
everyone in a parking lot and dispatches them into the field in
small teams. "Understand the mission," he instructs his flushers.
"The mission is to get a registered voter out of their home and
to the polls. Ladies and gentlemen, we are in very bad shape. I
want you to load up on everything that moves." He then takes
aside a sound-truck driver and traces a route for him to follow.
Minutes later, the teams are blanketing the streets, knocking on
doors and dragging out voters.
After Benjamin has dispersed his forces, he takes me with him for
a quick check of the other field offices, including one
responsible for turning out the vote in Newark's housing
projects. (In one of these projects, Corzine's outreach effort
consisted largely of having his photo taken with a popular
resident nicknamed Big Mama. "It's simple: Take a picture of Jon
and Big Mama," Thomas explained to the Newark Star-Ledger, "put
it on a flier. Nothing fancy.") I return to Thomas's
headquarters around 6:00 p.m. to find her laughing and talking
on the phone. Having left the Newark operation to Benjamin, she
spent the day in the southern part of the state, strengthening
the turnout effort in places like Trenton. "I just got back from
South Jersey," she says into the receiver. "There's a precinct
down there that never ever got over ninety-two [voters]. They
were at one hundred two at one p.m." When I tell her about the
trouble in Newark, she phones the Corzine war room and has the
latest results sent over. They show that at 5:00 p.m. all her
precincts were on target to meet or exceed their goals. She has
just helped win New Jersey for Gore and elect Corzine to the U.S.
Senate. In fact, Thomas tells me, those were just her public
vote goals. She actually has two sets of targets: the set she
gave to her coordinators and a set with even higher vote goals
that she kept to herself. Well, not completely to herself; she
privately challenged Benjamin to meet the higher goals. "Me and
Benjamin have a thousand-dollar bounty internally on this," she
admits.
When I ask if she owes Benjamin $1,000, she smiles and nods her
head.
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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