Scoop

On Nov. 2, GOP Got More Bang For Its Billion, Analysis Shows

By Thomas B. Edsall and James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 30, 2004; Page A01

In the most expensive presidential contest in the nation's history, John F. Kerry and his Democratic supporters nearly matched President Bush and the Republicans, who outspent them by just $60 million, $1.14 billion to $1.08 billion.

But despite their fundraising success, Democrats simply did not spend their money as effectively as Bush. That is the conclusion of an extensive examination of campaign fundraising and spending data provided by the Federal Election Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and interviews with officials of the two campaigns and the independent groups allied with them.

In a $2.2 billion election, two relatively small expenditures by Bush and his allies stand out for their impact: the $546,000 ad buy by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the Bush campaign's $3.25 million contract with the firm TargetPoint Consulting. The first portrayed Kerry in unrelentingly negative terms, permanently damaging him, while the second produced dramatic innovations in direct mail and voter technology, enabling Bush to identify and target potential voters with pinpoint precision.

Those tactical successes were part of the overall advantage the Bush campaign maintained over Kerry in terms of planning, decision making and strategy. The Kerry campaign, in addition to being outspent at key times, was outorganized and outthought, as Democratic professionals grudgingly admit.

"They were smart. They came into our neighborhoods. They came into Democratic areas with very specific targeted messages to take Democratic voters away from us," Democratic National Committee Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe said. "They were much more sophisticated in their message delivery."

The ultimate test of the two campaigns is in the success of their efforts to increase turnout from 2000. Kerry and his allies increased the Democrat's vote by about 6.8 million votes; Bush increased his by nearly 10.5 million. In the key battleground of Ohio, Bush countered Kerry's gains in the metropolitan precincts by boosting his margin in exurban and rural counties from 57 to 60 percent, eking out a 118,457-vote victory.

A supposed strategic advantage for the Democrats -- massive support from well-endowed independent groups -- turned out to have an inherent flaw: The groups' legally required independence left them with a message out of harmony with the Kerry campaign.

A large part of Bush's advantage derived from being an incumbent who did not face a challenger from his party. He also benefited from the experience and continuity of a campaign hierarchy, based on a corporate model, that had essentially stayed intact since Bush's 1998 reelection race for Texas governor.

Take Office, Plan Campaign

When Bush moved into the Oval Office in 2001, planning for his presidential reelection campaign began almost immediately. Under the direction of Karl Rove, Bush's top White House adviser who served as a kind of chairman of the board, White House political director Kenneth B. Mehlman, the chief executive officer, pollster Matthew Dowd, chief operating officer, and Mark McKinnon, the principal media consultant, the Bush political team developed a strategy for 2004, began investing in innovative techniques to target voters and prepared an early and cost-effective advertising plan. During this period, the Republican National Committee, where much of the planning was based, outspent its Democratic counterpart by $122 million.

In 2001, Dowd said that "we made some of the basic strategic assumptions about what we thought the election would look like."

One fundamental calculation was that 93 percent of the voting-age public was already committed or predisposed toward the Democratic or Republican candidate, leaving 7 percent undecided.

Another calculation was that throughout the Bush presidency, "most voters looked at Bush in very black-and-white terms. They either loved and respected him, or they didn't like him," Dowd said. Those voters were unlikely to change their views before Election Day 2004.

That prompted Republicans to jettison their practice of investing 75 to 90 percent of campaign money on undecided voters. Instead, half the money went into motivating and mobilizing people already inclined to vote for Bush, but who were either unregistered or who often failed to vote -- "soft" Republicans.

"We systematically allocated all the main resources of the campaign to the twin goals of motivation and persuasion. The media, the voter targeting, the mail -- all were based off that strategic decision," Dowd said.

Republican officials said they put $50 million into "ground war" drives to register and turn out millions of new voters in 2001 and 2002, and an additional $125 million after that.

Meanwhile, Kerry, faced with a difficult primary campaign and infighting and turnover among his consultants, did not begin seriously to address the general election until after his Super Tuesday primary election victory in March, eight months before the November vote. By that time, the campaign was hamstrung by legal restrictions on any cooperation between the campaign and the independent 527 organizations running ads and mobilizing voters on Kerry's behalf.

527s' Ineffective Messages

The 527 groups, named after a section of the tax code and allowed by law to accept unlimited contributions, provided invaluable help in registering and turning out voters. America Coming Together put about $135 million into what became the largest get-out-the-vote program in the nation's history. But the 527s, fueled with money from billionaires such as George Soros, proved ineffective in helping Kerry deliver a consistent and timely message in his advertising.

Of all the money spent on television advertising for the Democratic nominee, Kerry's campaign controlled 62 percent, according to spending totals analyzed by The Washington Post. The rest was spent on ads whose content or placement could not be coordinated with the campaign. The Bush campaign controlled 83 percent of the money spent on its behalf, giving it far more control over when and how it advertised.

At two junctures, when Kerry was either out of funds or under pressure to conserve resources for the close of the campaign, the absence of an overall strategy had damaging consequences: in March 2004, just when the Bush campaign began its first anti-Kerry offensive; and in August 2004, when the Swift Boat Veterans commercials raised questions about Kerry's service in the Vietnam War.

The Democratic media 527s "didn't do what we wanted done," Kerry media adviser Tad Devine said. "We would have run ads about Kerry, we would have had answers to the attacks in kind, saying they were false, disproved by newspapers."

Harold Ickes, who ran the Media Fund, a 527 organization that raised about $59 million in support of Kerry, said the federal election law prohibiting communication with the Kerry campaign created insurmountable obstacles in crafting effective, accurate responses to anti-Kerry ads. Ickes said he regretted not responding to the Swift Boat Veterans' attacks, but at the time he thought they seemed "a matter so personal to Senator Kerry, so much within his knowledge. Who knew what the facts were?"

Early Research Is Like Yeast

The 2002 elections, along with the Kentucky and Mississippi gubernatorial contests the following year, became testing grounds for the Republican effort to mobilize supporters. Designed to get base voters to the polls, it became known as the "72 Hour Project," whose cost Republican officials refused to disclose but is estimated by sources to have been in the $200 million range.

Under Dowd's direction, the RNC began investing in extensive voter research. One of the most striking findings, according to Republican consultants, was the ineffectiveness of traditional phone banks and direct mail that targeted voters in overwhelmingly Republican precincts. The problem: Only 15 percent of all GOP voters lived in precincts that voted Republican by 65 percent or more. Worse, an even smaller percentage of "soft" Republicans, the 2004 target constituency, lived in such precincts.

The RNC decided to cast a wider net for voters. But to work, Dowd's motivation and mobilization strategy needed expensive, high-tech micro targeting to cherry-pick prospective Republicans who lived in majority Democratic neighborhoods.

Republican firms, including TargetPoint Consultants and National Media Inc., delved into commercial databases that pinpointed consumer buying patterns and television-watching habits to unearth such information as Coors beer and bourbon drinkers skewing Republican, brandy and cognac drinkers tilting Democratic; college football TV viewers were more Republican than those who watch professional football; viewers of Fox News were overwhelmingly committed to vote for Bush; homes with telephone caller ID tended to be Republican; people interested in gambling, fashion and theater tended to be Democratic.

Surveys of people on these consumer data lists were then used to determine "anger points" (late-term abortion, trial lawyer fees, estate taxes) that coincided with the Bush agenda for as many as 32 categories of voters, each identifiable by income, magazine subscriptions, favorite television shows and other "flags." Merging this data, in turn, enabled those running direct mail, precinct walking and phone bank programs to target each voter with a tailored message.

"You used to get a tape-recorded voice of Ronald Reagan telling you how important it was to vote. That was our get-out-the-vote effort," said Alex Gage, of TargetPoint. Now, he said, calls can be targeted to specific constituencies so that, for example, a "right to life voter" could get a call warning that "if you don't come out and vote, the number of abortions next year is going to go up. "

Dowd estimated that, in part through the work of TargetPoint and other research, the Bush campaign and the RNC were able to "quadruple the number" of Republican voters who could be targeted through direct mail, phone banks and knocking on doors.

Democrats had access to similar data files. But the Bush campaign and the RNC were able to make far better use of the data because they had the time and money to conduct repeated field tests in the 2002 and 2003 elections, to finance advanced research on meshing databases with polling information, and to clean up and revise databases that almost invariably contained errors and omissions.

"Very few people understand how much work it takes to get this technology to actually produce political results. We are one election cycle behind them in this area," said a Democrat who helped coordinate voter contact in the 2004 campaign.

The Bush campaign's early fundraising success made much of this possible. By March 2004, Bush had $110 million in the bank and virtually no debt. During this period, Kerry was forced to spend all his time and money in the Democratic primaries, a fight that cost him $36 million and that left him $5 million in debt.

"Nobody was giving a thought at all to the general election," said Kerry pollster Mark S. Mellman. Until that March, "it was: How do we survive this week?"

Bush Ads Undermine Kerry

Two days after Super Tuesday, the Bush campaign, anticipating Kerry would have no money to respond, began a $40 million, six-week televised assault designed to crush the Democratic nominee before he could get off the ground. "We had a financial advantage over them for four to six weeks. That's why we did what we did," Dowd said.

With a $177 million ad budget, the Bush campaign and its allies ran more than 101,000 anti-Kerry "attack" or negative ads, more than the combined total of "positive" and "contrast" ads, according to the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project, based on data from Nielsen Monitor-Plus ratings of media buying effectiveness.

Less than 5 percent of Kerry's ads were "attack" or negative, according to the Wisconsin advertising project, and the remaining 95 percent were positive or contrast ads.

During March and April, before the candidate had replenished his war chest to finance TV ads, Kerry strategists were convinced that Kerry needed a barrage of positive biographical ads describing him in a sympathetic light to counter the negative picture drawn by the Bush ads. But when the Democratic 527s began their ad campaign, they aired negative ads reflecting their intensely anti-Bush donor base.

By the time Kerry had raised enough money to begin his positive ad campaign two months later, the Bush "attack" ads had helped convert the ratio of Kerry's positive to negative ratings in battleground states. Kerry's positive ratings fell from 40 percent to 35 percent, and his negative ratings rose from 24 percent to 36 percent at the start of May, according to the National Annenberg Election Surveys.

The negative Bush barrage was followed in August by the Swift Boat Veterans ads, the first one airing on just four cable channels at a cost of $546,000. The Swift Boat Veterans eventually would raise and spend $28 million, but the first ad was exceptionally cost-effective: most voters learned about it through free coverage in mainstream media and talk radio.

An additional Republican television commercial that significantly affected the race, according to surveys, was a positive spot financed by a second GOP 527 group, Progress for America. It invested $17 million in "Ashley's Story," which featured Ashley Faulkner, 11, whose mother had been killed in the attack on the World Trade Center, describing her meeting with Bush.

GOP Dollar Power

Overall, Kerry, the DNC and the Democratic 527s spent $344 million on ads, while Bush and the GOP counterparts spent about $289 million, much of which was disbursed in the final three months. Arguably, Republicans got more bang for their bucks.

The Bush campaign's early strategy decisions shaped GOP spending. Under the guidance of Rove, Dowd and Mehlman, the Bush campaign had financed early research into ways to communicate to center-right voters through nontraditional media.

The Bush campaign concluded that many of their voters did not trust the networks and the establishment press, and therefore did not trust messages transmitted through them.

Mehlman said that talk radio and cable television "are more credible" to potential Bush voters. Ultimately the Bush campaign invested an unprecedented $20 million in narrowly targeted advertising on cable and in radio, with a heavy emphasis on religious, talk and country and western stations, and such specialty outlets as golf and health club channels.

"They did a lot of stuff really well. They were ahead of us," said one of the Democrats' get-out-the-vote managers who did not want to be identified. "They had a strategy set by the beginning that they were going to live and die by. And we didn't."

In an election with a 2.6 percent margin of victory, the Bush campaign was run to ensure that every dollar went to fulfill core strategies, that resources were allocated to capitalize on Bush's strengths and on Kerry's vulnerabilities, and that the money necessary to finance research, technological advance, television and the ground war was available when needed.

At the July Democratic National Convention in Boston, McAuliffe commented on the disciplined Republican team: "We are up against the dirtiest, meanest, toughest group of people we have ever faced. They have money, they have power, and they ain't going to give it up easily."

Researcher Alice Crites, database editor Sarah Cohen and research database editor Derek Willis contributed to this report.

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SIDEBAR
2004 Campaign Spending: Who, How and When
How the Two Parties Split Their Millions

The 2004 presidential campaigns and the national parties handed out bigger contracts, hired more consultants and bought more television time than ever, with both sides channeling millions of dollars to consultants specializing in media, direct mail and fundraising.

Here is how it was spent.

The Bush campaign turned to relative newcomers nurtured by White House political adviser Karl Rove. Their companies received at least $250 million from the Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee. They are:

• Mark McKinnon (Public Strategies Inc.), a Texan and a former Democrat who put together the 12-member ad-making consortium, Maverick Media, which was paid $177 million, mostly for radio and TV time. Maverick consultants McKinnon, Alex Castellanos (National Media Inc.), Stuart Stevens (the Stevens and Schriefer Group) and Madison Avenue executives Bruce Van Dussen and Harold Kaplan agreed to be paid fees instead of a percentage of their ad buys. Sources estimated Maverick's consultancy fees were as much as $6 million.

• Tony Feather, political director of the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign, a principal in the direct mail and voter contact firm, Feather Larson & Synhorst DCI, which was paid $21.3 million.

• Todd Olsen and Heather Shuvalov, who bought Rove's Austin direct-mail firm, forming Olsen & Shuvalov, which was paid $41.3 million.

The Kerry campaign hired mainly consultants entrenched in the Democratic establishment, led by Robert Shrum, a speechwriter, media adviser and strategist on eight losing presidential campaigns dating to Edmund S. Muskie in 1972. The Kerry campaign and the Democratic National Committee also used a consortium, called Riverfront Media, which was paid $150 million for TV advertising. The first receiving the Democratic work were:

• Shrum, Tad Devine and Michael Donilon's firm, which was paid about $5 million.

• James Margolis's firm, Greer Margolis Mitchell Burns and Associates, and Bill Knapp's firm, Squier Knapp Dunn Communications, which divvied up $5 million.

• Democratic media consultants David Axelrod and Steve Murphy, who split about $1 million in fees for DNC independent expenditure ads.

How to sell a candidate to a Porsche-driving, Leno-loving Nascar fan
From New York Times, December 6, 2004
By Katharine Q. Seelye


Click for full image

After the 2000 presidential campaign, strategists for President Bush came to a startling realization: Democrats watch more television than Republicans. So by buying millions of dollars’ worth of television advertising time, Republicans were spending their money on audiences that tended to vote Democratic.

What to do? With the luxury of four years until the next election, the Bush team examined voters’ television-viewing habits and cross-referenced them with surveys of voters’ political and lifestyle preferences.

This led to an unusual step for a presidential campaign: it cut the proportion of money that it put into broadcast television and diverted more to niche cable channels and radio, where it could more precisely reach its target audience.

While advertisers of commercial products have been heading to cable for years, presidential campaigns have generally relied on the reach of broadcast television to try to influence the widest possible audience.

But the Bush team’s micro-target strategy could change all that, making an enormous difference to cable channels and networks as they vie for the escalating amount of money in politics. Candidates, political parties and independent groups at all levels of government spent at least $1.6 billion on television commercials this year, more than double the $771 million they spent in 2000, according to the nonpartisan Alliance for Better Campaigns. At least $600 million of this year’s total went to the presidential election alone, more than twice the amount spent in 2000.

Kenneth M. Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which analyzes political advertising, said the Bush campaign’s use of targeted data and its exploitation of cable was likely to be the beginning of a trend, particularly as advertisers pursue new ways of reaching consumers using technology like text-messaging and cellphones.

“We’re talking very, very small effects, but we live in a time when small effects can be decisive,” Mr. Goldstein said, citing Mr. Bush’s 537-vote victory in Florida in 2000, which catapulted him into the Oval Office.

Donny Deutsch, the New York advertising guru, said that now, “the selling of a candidate is no different from the smart media buying for toothpaste and automobiles, especially as people fragment their media habits.”

As the Bush team analyzed the data, stark differences between the viewing habits of Republicans and Democrats quickly emerged. The channels with the highest proportion of Democrats were Court TV and the Game Show Network; for Republicans, Speedvision and the Golf Channel.

During the week, Republicans switch off the tube earlier than Democrats do. (Republicans who stay up are more likely to tune in to Jay Leno, while Democrats flock to David Letterman.) Such revelations persuaded the Bush team to alter its media-buying strategy. In 2000, the campaign spent 95 percent of its media budget on network television; this year, that dropped to 70 percent.

The campaign spent no money on national cable channels in 2000; this year it spent $20 million. It spent very little on radio in 2000; this year it spent $12 million, much of it going to religious, talk and country music programming.

“This year, we reached a wider audience of potential Republicans than we did in 2000,” said Matthew Dowd, a top strategist for Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign.

Democratic strategists working for Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign said they had much the same consumer data as the Bush team, but they stuck largely with broadcast television because that was where their viewers were.

“You’re tying one hand behind your back if you’re not using the most sophisticated tools possible,” said Mark Mellman, a top polling and media strategist for Mr. Kerry.

The additional money in this election allowed the Republicans to experiment with a different media mix and to apply techniques used by advertisers of consumer products.

“Politics is a mass product: 50 percent of American adults ‘consume’ the election,” said Will Feltus, senior vice president for research and planning of National Media Inc., which bought media time for Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign.

The most alarming realization for the Bush team, he said, was learning that Democrats watch more television. “It’s like Coke finding out that they can’t get to their consumers on television as easily as Pepsi can,” Mr. Feltus said.

The Republicans’ data, compiled by Scarborough Research, a leading market research firm, showed that nationally, Democratic voters were 15 percent more likely on average to be watching television than Republican voters. The research did not investigate the reasons for the lopsided viewing, but some analysts surmised that it had to do with Republicans not trusting the broadcast networks and with more programming being aimed at women, who tend to vote Democratic.

Mr. Feltus said that the Bush campaign, which began analyzing the data shortly after Mr. Bush took office in 2001, ran test projects in 2002 in the Senate race in Texas and in a Colorado Congressional race. The data in Colorado revealed, among other things, which roads Republicans drove as they commuted to work, helping the Republicans determine where to place billboards.

This year, before the Democrats had even selected a presidential candidate, the Bush strategists were considering advertising in movie theaters and health clubs. The data showed that Democrats were more likely to go to the movies than Republicans, so they dropped that idea. But it also showed that health clubs were a good way to reach Republicans and swing voters ages 18 to 34. So the campaign bought time on a cable channel that goes into health clubs across the country. It had reams of data that were not of immediate practical value but that helped the campaign understand its voters: for example, Porsche owners were more likely to be Republican; Volvo owners, Democratic.

Evan Tracey, who analyzes political television advertising for the Campaign Media Analysis Group, said the Bush campaign helped solidify its base of Republicans early with targeted cable commercials. These commercials, he said, were filled with “images of people saying grace and talking about faith and being optimistic about America, but there was also a lot of negative on Kerry.”

The Democrats said they used similar data, with help from a new group called Media Vote, based in Los Angeles, but came to different conclusions about how to use it. They focused strictly on the battleground states, buying on local cable instead of national cable but still mainly relying on local broadcast programs.

The Republicans mostly bought on national cable channels instead of breaking down those purchases by market. This had unexpected benefits, like helping Mr. Bush in Hawaii, a reliably Democratic state that Republicans had not focused on. In October, Mr. Bush was suddenly running strong there, a result of his presence on national cable, Democrats said. That forced the Democrats to buy advertising time in Hawaii and route party notables to the state to try to counter Mr. Bush’s gains.

The data also yielded unexpected insights. One of the shows most popular with Republicans, especially Republican women ages 18 to 34, turned out to be “Will & Grace,” the sitcom about gay life in New York. As a result, while Mr. Bush was shoring up his conservative credentials by supporting a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, his advertising team was buying time on a program that celebrates gay culture.

The Bush team broadcast commercials 473 times on “Will & Grace” in markets across the country from Jan. 1 to Nov. 2, according to the Wisconsin project. (The Kerry campaign broadcast commercials 859 times on the show.)

Mr. Dowd said the campaign had not tailored its message to match the demographics of the “Will & Grace” audience or any other audience but rather wanted to reach more viewers who might vote Republican. Besides, he said, “people are interested in broad national messages.”

Mr. Goldstein said Republicans did not customize their message because they had one basic point. “If your message is ‘Kerry is bad,’ you don’t have to tailor it,” he said.

The Democratic strategy was to focus on swing states and tailor the Kerry message to the market. In Pennsylvania, for example, the campaign ran commercials in Pittsburgh with workers talking about their jobs; in more liberal Philadelphia, it ran commercials with the actor Michael J. Fox, who has Parkinson’s disease, talking about expanding embryonic stem cell research.

But such targeting did little to resolve the question of how much difference advertising makes in a presidential campaign, particularly when there is so much of it.

The real force of political advertising may be felt when it is absent.

Bradley Perseke, a Democratic strategist who bought the television time for Mr. Kerry, said that Mr. Bush’s get-out-the-vote effort probably made more of a difference in the election than his advertising, although if one candidate had not advertised at all, that candidate surely would have lost.

Mr. Dowd of the Bush campaign agreed up to a point. “What is discussed in earned media is more important than what’s on the paid media,” he said of news versus advertising. “But if they are in concert and the message is consistent, it has a tremendous effect.”