Posted By: Margaret Pozzini
By Libby GeorgeFri Nov 3, 6:04 PM ET
Most Republicans acknowledge that this is an extremely difficult election year for them. But party strategists crow that they have the ultimate advantage, which will hold down their congressional losses and enable them to maintain their majorities in the House and the Senate: a massive voter turnout machine that even some Democratic Party officials admit exceeds their own.
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National Republican campaign organizations have spent a small fortune building a database that contains the names and political priorities of millions of voters; the names of staunch Republicans who are most apt to show up at the polls dominate the list.
They are gearing up for the latest iteration of the 72-Hour Plan — a brainchild of top Bush White House aide Karl Rove and his protégé, Republican National Committee Chairman (RNC) Ken Mehlman — in which GOP operatives and volunteers flood into states and districts with competitive races to generate turnout.
National Democratic officials, who lag behind in voter outreach despite their aggressive catchup efforts, concede that they would be in trouble if they stood alone in the field against this legendary Republican juggernaut.
But they don’t.
In fact, grass-roots get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts, maintained by organized labor and liberal political action committees, have historically been Democrats’ ace in the hole. And Democratic activists contend that their traditional game plan will serve them well this year.
That, say Democrats as well as some nonpartisan experts on voter turnout, is because the party has something going for it that offsets the Republicans’ edge in voter-tracking technology: anger among the electorate — including Republicans — toward President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress. Fueled by opposition to the Iraq war, experts say that anger will motivate voters from all political affiliations to cast their ballots for Democrats this year, and may keep some faithful Republican voters from the polls.
“The farmed-out, slightly less-efficient [Democratic] effort is going to be more effective because they are operating in much more fertile territory,” said Curtis Gans, director of the nonpartisan Center for the Study of the American Electorate. “There are more Republicans with doubts.”
Gans added that the large swath of independent voters, a fast-growing chunk of the electorate, are more likely to show up for Democrats, motivated by sheer frustration with big federal deficits, the war in Iraq and a growing list of Republican ethics scandals.
And voter turnout machine or not, the Republican base is still in doubt.
“Fiscal conservatives looking at deficit and debt, and social conservatives angry that their agenda hasn’t gotten as far as they’d like,” Gans said.
There is no doubt that the Democrats, if they are to trump the Republicans in the turnout war, are going to have to use hustle to overcome the GOP’s strategic advantage. Since 2000, the RNC has been developing and tweaking its strategy to reach out to voters, one that now includes massive computer lists to enable “microtargeting” — aiming different messages to different demographics — and the vaunted “72-hour” plan.
While the Democratic National Committee (DNC), aligned with liberal groups such as MoveOn.org, EMILY’s List and the AFL-CIO, is hardly ready to concede GOTV dominance to the Republicans, experts say they aren’t quite at parity yet.
Stacie Paxton, a spokeswoman for the DNC, said they have poured roughly $26 million into the 2006 races — triple what they spent in 2002, the year of the most recent previous midterm elections — and have developed their own centralized national voter database, which they share with party organizers in districts around the country to help them microtarget.
And Jennifer Lindenauer, communications director of MoveOn.org, said the jewel in their get-out-the-vote crown is the “call for change” program that uses microtargeting in key races to allow MoveOn’s 3.2 million members to call from home or their cell phones to encourage people to vote.
“With the touch of a stroke, we can change our target list,” Lindenauer said of the program, which was just launched this year. “On a Monday we could see new data on races, and by Wednesday, they could have hundreds of thousands of calls into that district.”
She estimated that MoveOn’s members alone will contact more than 6 million voters by Election Day.
“They are playing catchup, but I think they have the intensity factor,” said Rhodes Cook, political analyst and editor of The Rhodes Cook Report, a nonpartisan newsletter. Many voters were “ready to vote (for Democrats) months ago.”
Gans added that the Republicans’ turnout efforts, while impressive, may not be quite as dominant as conventional wisdom would have it. He cited the 2004 presidential election — won by Bush with 51 percent of the popular vote and a relatively narrow electoral vote majority — in which both the Republicans and Democrats showed increased voter turnout.
“The Republicans did better in part because they have a centralized operation instead of relying on outside groups,” Gans said. “But they didn’t do that much better.”
And the DNC is not taking that matter lightly. “We’re trying to make the critical investments in ‘06 so we can win, but also make investments so we can win in ‘08,” Paxton said. “We’re going to have all this data now that will come back to the DNC . . . to build the party and our voting efforts.”
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