Read Online The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg - Free Book Online

Riegle’s appeals. Barabba put his Precinct Index Priority System to work finding neighborhoods whose demographics reflected a more conservative profile even if they were not traditionally thought hospitable to Republicans—the white, working-class union members who would later become known as Reagan Democrats. “Everyone had classified unionworkers all the same,” says Barabba. Now he was going to try to capitalize on that mistake.
    In September, the gap stood at 20 points, with Mackie still comfortably at 51 percent. Barabba doled out the candidate’s time in the places where PIPS told him it would be most valuable. The Riegle for Congress Volunteer Committee canvassed the most promising areas by phone to identify individual voters, while the candidate went to knock on doors in the precincts where Barabba thought his physical presence could have the biggest influence. On election night, Barabba was at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, at what became Ronald Reagan’s victory party in his first run for office. Around the same time that Reagan was declared California’s governor, Barabba got a telephone call from Michigan. It was Riegle reporting that he had beaten Mackie by eight points. The man who emerged from the Biltmore would become the greatest broadcast performer ever in American politics, but Barabba believed that what happened on the streets of Flint ought to resonate as widely. “At that point we were in an era of mass communication, and everybody thought that that would be the way to go,” says Barabba. “We kept questioning that.”
    Barabba’s success with Riegle, and four other congressional candidates for whom Datamatics played less significant strategic roles in 1966, caught the eye of the American Medical Association, whose political action committee had emerged during the 1960s as one of the business world’s leading political players. Imagining itself as a counterweight to the campaign clout of organized labor, AMPAC participated in congressional races nationwide, almost always to boost Republicans. “The guys who were heading the PAC at the AMA were disappointed at how much money was spent on political campaigns. They wanted to make sure that when the doctors got involved, their money was spent wisely,” says Barabba. During Barry Goldwater Jr.’s 1969 congressional campaign, Barabba’s analysis enabled the AMA to target telegrams emphasizing different issues by precinct in the Los Angeles area district. “We thought we could do a better job by focusing on smaller areas.” But after Watergate, as campaign financelaws curtailed the ability of outside groups to spend freely on behalf of campaigns,the AMA struggled to sustain its influence on elections.
    Across Washington, one of the AMA’s nemeses confronted a similar identity crisis and headed in an altogether different direction. The National Committee for an Effective Congress had been founded in 1948 by Eleanor Roosevelt as a backer of liberal congressional campaigns nationwide. Its financial primacy may have been threatened by post-Watergate reforms, but NCEC was intent on remaining a central player in stacking Capitol Hill with allies. What if instead of merely giving money to campaigns, committee strategists wondered, they developed common resources that Democratic candidates and party committees could use to plot strategies and tactics for districts nationwide?
    Political operatives have long thought of winning a vote as a three-step process. First a voter needs to be registered. Then comes “persuasion”: the challenge of emerging as the preferred choice among two or more candidates. Finally, once a person has been registered and persuaded, the campaign has to convert that support into a vote: mobilizing him or her to the polls through get-out-the-vote operations, often known simply as GOTV, that can include a battery of last-minute reminders by phone or mail or election day visits offering a ride to the polls.
    Every voter is