US News & World Report
By David Catanese
October 22, 2014
AURORA,
Colo. – Under a cobalt blue sky on a quiet, poorly lit street in this
east Denver suburb, Dave Lightowler is performing the toilsome task that
has helped the Democratic
Party here achieve its vaunted status.
Lightowler,
a 38-year-old technical trainer for Sprint, is one of the party’s
thousands of foot soldiers. He is traipsing door to door in the dark,
searching for the trove
of elusive voters Democrats are convinced will save Sen. Mark Udall in
his razor-thin race with Republican Rep. Cory Gardner.
At
one household, an African-American male who looks to be in his early
30s confirms to Lightowler he’s received a ballot, but looks
underwhelmed by the pitch. “Still
undecided,” he replies with a glassy-eyed stare. This man will require
another visit.
The
party’s comprehensive voter database tells Lightowler his prospect
didn’t vote in 2012 but recently registered in Arapahoe County, a key
campaign battleground. He
is one of the possible voters pollsters don’t expect to participate
this midterm election. But if he does, it’ll likely be for the
Democratic ticket, and Udall needs him.
The
Democratic incumbent has trailed Gardner by single digits in the last
six public polls, and recently has tellingly embraced an underdog status
– an unthinkable point
of positioning for the first-term senator just seven months ago. After
all, Gardner didn't even jump into the race until March, as party elites
orchestrated the ouster of less desirable challengers. He essentially
gave up a safe congressional seat for what
at best was a coin-flip's chance at a promotion.
Yet Udall told a group of volunteers at a field office late last week, "The pundits … they don't think we've got a chance."
Lightowler
is part of an army of “game changers,” as Udall himself describes them.
They are tasked with swelling Democratic turnout, jolting the likely
voter pool and
pulling off another surprise in a challenging political environment.
It
happened in 2010, when the Democratic ground game here assisted in
rescuing Sen. Michael Bennet from a tea party-fueled GOP wave. Bennet,
the chairman of the Democratic
Senatorial Campaign Committee who is now accompanying Udall on the
trail, frequently reminds the troops no public survey ever showed him
ahead of Republican Ken Buck. And yet an expansive, gritty field
operation pushed him over the top by a mere 28,000 votes.
“It can be won by field because the race is within the margin of error,” Bennet says.
A
cacophony of television and radio advertisements still saturate the
Colorado airwaves, and Udall and Gardner continue to trade daily barbs
on the stump. But the real
action in this high-wire campaign has shifted toward the ballot-chasing
– the grueling, thankless, time-consuming task of knocking on doors and
buzzing phones to prod supporters and convince those still on the
fence.
Democrats
historically have been vastly superior at "field" – the shorthand lingo
used by political operatives to describe the aggressive targeting and
mobilizing of potential
supporters who are less likely to vote. These are the people who need
an extra nudge or reminder to complete the task.
This is Lightowler’s mission.
With
an iPad in hand displaying a map and a list of targets, Lightowler
makes his way up the street of the Aurora neighborhood he’s canvassing.
Howling
barks of dogs greet him once he taps on the door of a ranch-style home.
It’s not soon after he starts his pitch that a bearded man slams the
door in his face.
“Forget it,” the man mutters before the door shuts.
Walking away, Lightowler is unfazed.
“You’ll get that sometimes,” he says.
He
lists the man as a “refusal” on his iPad, but says he’ll go back
seeking to talk to the door-slammer's wife another day.
She’s categorized in his database
as “unaffiliated” with either party, the largest portion of the
Colorado electorate.
But so was her husband.
"You Don't Talk About Fight Club"
To those working the field game, the process of how to vote is almost as important as the candidates running.
And this year, the vast majority of Coloradans won’t ever have to trek to a polling place to complete their civic duty.
Last
Wednesday, ballots were delivered directly to the homes of the state’s
nearly 3 million active registered voters. This new, almost universal
mail-in system means
there’s no need to wait for Nov. 4 to step into a traditional voting
booth (though you still can). Voters simply can place their ballots back
in the mail anytime before that, hastening the pace of one of the most
closely watched and equally matched U.S. Senate
races in the country. One Udall adviser bets 90 percent of the vote
will be cast before Election Day.
Nearly
80,000 people had voted in the election as of Monday,
according to the Colorado secretary of state’s office, with Republicans
grabbing an early advantage
by about 12,000 ballots. Democrats expect that gap to narrow over the
next week before a frenzied final push for the latest deciders, who are
usually independents.
“We
hope this takes the work out of voting. This is, ‘You have a ballot in
your hand, let’s show you how easy it is,’” state Democratic Party
chairman Rick Palacio says.
Close
to 1.8 million people voted in the 2010 Colorado Senate race. Despite
polls showing dampened enthusiasm, both sides in the Udall-Gardner
battle still are girding
for a higher turnout – possibly reaching 2 million – largely because of
the mail-in ballot's ease.
Democrats
are sure the process benefits them, and have calculated privately that
hitting 70 percent turnout is their magic number for victory.
Republicans,
however, won’t talk about their targets or about much else regarding
their own field machinery. Keeping it a mystery is by design.
In
recent weeks, national reporters have descended upon Gardner's campaign
office in Englewood, Colorado, each asking the same set of burning
questions: What’s your field
operation like? How big is your army? How many doors have you knocked
on? Have you caught up to the Democrats?
Chris Hansen, Gardner’s amiable campaign manager, essentially has told the inquirers to go pound dirt. Politely, of course.
All
he allows during a brief on-the-record chat with U.S. News is “ours is
infinitely better than Buck’s,” referring to the flawed 2010 Senate
candidate who was outmaneuvered
on the ground. Buck made repeated gaffes that insulted women and gays,
while Gardner has shown some of the best message discipline of any
Senate candidate in the country this cycle.
Asked
about the glaring difference between the Gardner and Buck campaigns,
Bennet pauses, allowing three seconds to go by before answering with a
sliver of humor.
“I don’t want to say anything bad about my friend Ken Buck,” he says, before pausing again. “They’re different candidates.”
The
only other potential clues gleaned from the Gardner campaign office
visit are two numbers scribbled on a nearby whiteboard: Mail: 212,650.
Phones: 100,030.
Hansen has watched the Democrats thump their own chests in the media about their ground effort, to some amusement and amazement.
Udall’s
squad has trumpeted their 4,000 volunteers – a number nearly four times
as big as Bennet’s operation. On the stump last week, the candidate
talked about the 7,000
volunteer shifts already scheduled. The party has hired 100 paid
organizers and has set up 25 field offices around the state. Bloomberg
reported that $15 million will be invested in Udall’s get-out-the-vote
operation when all is said and done.
It
all falls under the DSCC's much-hyped national field operation: the
Bannock Street Project, named after the street in Denver where Bennet's
field headquarters sat in
2010.
“It’s
much bigger than what we had. It’s resourced more heavily than what we
had and it’s much more precise, which means that, the more precise it
is, the more efficient
you can be in the expenditure of money,” Bennet told reporters.
Last
Thursday night in Aurora, Udall declared his team had registered 50,000
people – which a Gardner aide pointedly noted is exactly 50,000 short
of the number the Democrat's
campaign hoped to register.
Team
Gardner’s approach to all the numbers being bandied about is: Let ‘em
hoot and holler. Beyond a few press clips, sharing the game plan and
specific metrics does nothing
to further the cause. Besides, it’s only to their advantage if the
opponent thinks they’re winning on the ground.
“We’ve
done what we believed is necessary for this campaign. And it’s never
been done in Colorado before,” Gardner tells U.S. News in an interview.
Asked
about how his ground effort compares to the much heralded Democratic
apparatus, Gardner replies: “First rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk
about Fight Club.”
He chuckles heartily, his rosy red cheeks radiating. But he's only half-joking.
Did They Build It?
There’s no real way to know how far Republicans have come in their effort to neutralize the Democratic advantage on the ground.
“If they do have a program, it’s untested,” Palacio says.
But
the task was a high enough priority for Hansen to employ door-knockers
to contact unaffiliated households in the spring, back when Gardner was
still seen as a relative
long shot to pull off a victory.
According
to a Republican source with knowledge of the Gardner effort, Hansen
hired 500 college students in May to form the foundation of the
campaign's ground game. By
August, that number had ballooned to 1,000.
The
eight-hour shifts were long, draining and often humbling experiences.
Some of the students picked up Rosetta Stone courses in Spanish to
better communicate with the
Hispanic voters they were encountering.
Afterward,
Gardner’s political director would brief the ground warriors on how
best to compose follow-up postcards for their targets.
“You’ve got to personalize it. Remember their dog’s name,” were the instructions, according to the source.
Gardner’s
campaign now pays around 2,000 canvassers, and Republicans in the state
are confident Hansen's early groundwork will pay dividends. But it
wasn’t always smooth
sailing.
In
August, Gardner’s campaign faced a potential “mass donor defection,"
according to the GOP source, after frustration boiled over about the
lack of response to Udall’s
incessant TV attack ads. Hansen embarked on a weeklong trip to
assuage deep-pocketed GOP contributors, assuring them that Udall’s
single-minded assault on Gardner's "personhood" position – related to
legislation that would treat fertilized eggs as human
beings – “seemed shrill and over the top.” He urged calm, telling them
the campaign was properly conserving resources for the fall, when
eyeballs on ads really matter.
In
early September, Hansen phoned the Republican National Committee with a
request for an additional 500 staffers to be deployed in critical
Arapahoe County. He got them,
and just weeks later, Gardner saw his first string of public polling
showing him ahead of Udall.
The donors stopped griping.
“I
think the early work done by Chris Hansen when nobody was paying
attention is going to make the difference,” says the GOP source, who is
unaffiliated with the Gardner
campaign. “This is the biggest race of his career, and I think he knows
it’s the biggest race of his career.”
“We’ll Give You Popcorn”
“Seriously,
we’ll give you popcorn, we’ll give you some cookies. You’ll get dinner
afterwards. But for right now, call,” shouts a perky but direct
20-something field organizer
to the more than 90 people who have shown up at the Democratic field
office in Aurora Thursday night.
This
organizer and her fellow office captains are pleading for “Six and
Six” – for each person to volunteer for six shifts over the next 15 days
and then an additional
six over the final four days. Leading by example, Udall marks his own
name down for a shift on a large poster hanging on the wall.
At
best, the most effective field programs can create a 2 to 3 percentage
point bump. The cavalry galloping into town is one indication that both
campaigns think the
race in this purple state may come down to that slim of a margin.
“I’m feeling like it's going to be really close,” Bennet says.
Sens.
Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. – as well as
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – all have recently headlined
rallies designed specifically
to urge Democratic activists to ramp up their engagement.
“When
you stop at a light and somebody’s standing next to you … OK, so I’m
not proud, I did that,” Warren told Udall supporters during a stop
Friday.
Still,
as polls have drifted in Gardner’s direction in recent weeks,
Republicans view Democrats' emphasis on their boots on the ground as
affirmation that they’re behind.
Josh
Penry, a former state senator who managed the 2010 U.S. Senate campaign
of Jane Norton, asserts that much of the bravado around the Democratic
ground game is pure
Rocky Mountain myth. In 2010, Republican turnout topped Democratic
balloting in the state by more than 100,000 votes. It was the
independents who had peeled away in dramatic fashion.
"It
was GOP turnoff, not Democratic turnout, that decided that race," Penry
says. With Gardner this year, "Democrats are facing a massively
formidable candidate and campaigner,
and the Jedis of Bannock Street aren't the only ones who know how to
turn out the vote."
In two weeks, both parties will know which field game was just a field of dreams.
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