How Bush pulled it off in Ohio
Unprecedented push in townships paid off for GOP
Sunday, May 15, 2005
Darrel Rowland
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Election 2004 analysis
Final precinct-level data just released by the Ohio secretary of state illuminate surprising details about President Bush’s victory in this battleground state. And campaign leaders for Bush and Sen. John Kerry are revealing for the first time how they struggled in the final hours to win Ohio.
The big white board at Sen. John Kerry’s secret Ohio campaign headquarters displayed good news to Jennifer Palmieri on election night.
Results from targeted urban counties were meeting or exceeding the campaign’s goals to win the state that would determine who sat in the White House the next four years.
Palmieri, the campaign’s communication director in Ohio, saw Kerry rolling up a 356,000-vote advantage over President Bush in Ohio’s six biggest cities — 121,000 more than Vice President Al Gore’s margin in 2000. In fact, the Massachusetts senator outperformed Gore in all of the state’s 35 largest cities.
"We thought the margin would hold up, because Bush can’t lose someplace like Franklin County by that many votes (almost 50,000) and still win Ohio," Palmieri said.
Kerry simply crushed Bush in numer- ous areas, winning at least 90 percent in almost 600 precincts — a stunning 1 out of 20 statewide. Bush won 90 percent in a mere seven precincts.
By the end of the count, Kerry would wind up with more votes than any presidential candidate in Ohio history.
How could he possibly lose?
About a mile north of the Kerry enclave, Bob Paduchik also was optimistic as he looked over a different set of numbers projected on the wall of a Hyatt Regency meeting room. Those figures came from a computer operated by Mike Dawson, a top aide to Sen. Mike DeWine and political numbers cruncher.
The running compilation, fed by GOP spotters at elections boards throughout the state, was always about 100,000 votes ahead of the national TV networks, said Paduchik, Bush’s Ohio campaign manager. And the campaign’s totals always showed Bush with a narrow but clear lead, despite early exit polls that seemed to predict a Kerry win.
Still, Paduchik was nervous.
When Bush and his top political adviser, Karl Rove, made an unusual Election Day visit to Columbus that morning, Paduchik basically promised them Ohio.
"Karl came back to my office . . . and I told him, ‘Man, I feel really good,’ " Paduchik remembers. "I later assured the president of the same thing."
Afterward, Paduchik thought uneasily about what he’d essentially guaranteed: higher turnout in areas where voter participation already was quite healthy, a get-out-the-vote effort unseen in American history, and an unprecedented vote total for Bush.
How could he possibly win?
Even as the glowing numbers went on the board in the Kerry camp’s second-floor hideaway at E. State and S. 4 th streets Downtown, staffers heard rumblings about dubious exit polls and a massive turnout in rural areas, Palmieri recalls.
So the Kerry team dragged out a second dry-erase board and started putting up results from more rural counties.
It took only a moment, Palmieri said, for the campaign’s field director, Beth Leonard, to state the obvious: "This is bad."
And it quickly went from bad to worse.
"By 11 p.m., Beth said ‘We lost,’ and Beth is the last person to give up," Palmieri said.
The Kerry campaign was fully aware of the energized Republican base and the fervor among many religious voters over state Issue 1, which amended Ohio’s Constitution to define marriage as solely between a man and woman. But Palmieri said the Democrats figured those were the same people who loyally vote in every election, and thus Bush wouldn’t benefit much from a group that already turned out in high numbers.
It was perhaps the most fundamental miscalculation of the presidential campaign.
"Who knew they had room to grow?" Palmieri asked.
Ken Mehlman knew.
As Bush’s national campaign manager, he and Rove devised an audacious strategy that presumed Republican voters "underperformed" in 2000. They developed a "72-hour plan" emphasizing an intense push in the final three days of the campaign to persuade the GOP faithful to show up in much greater numbers in 2004.
Monitoring key states from Bush re-election headquarters in Arlington, Va., Mehlman realized the campaign was meeting its ambitious turnout goals by as early as 2 p.m. in some areas. And that meant exit polls showing Kerry winning Ohio and elsewhere were wrong.
"I talked to the president and his dad on the phone, and I said, ‘Don’t believe those polls,’ " Mehlman said. "They were encouraged by that."
In Ohio, Mehlman said, the Republican campaign focused on about 7,000 of 11,366 precincts.
"We focused very hard on not just the base but also swing voters and Democratic voters."
Rove called the Bush campaign "the most successful and biggest grass-roots effort in the history of American politics."
Such an effort was needed to counteract a concerted Democratic effort to unseat Bush.
"They hated this man, and that hatred united them," Rove told Republicans in southwestern Ohio’s Butler County this month.
Democrats "thought they were going to win. They thought they were going to win because they thought they had us beat in Ohio."
Months before the election, when Rove and Mehlman outlined the goals for such things as turnout, volunteers and voter contacts in Ohio, Paduchik now says, "I’d have never thought it was possible."
Neither Mehlman nor Paduchik would divulge the goals.
Paduchik said several local political veterans in the Buckeye State regarded the numbers as unattainable.
"There were some counties where we had a hard sell," he said. "Butler County was one of those counties where we sat down with those folks and they said, ‘You’re crazy.’ "
While Butler County came around to give Bush the biggest victory margin in the state, Paduchik said he had to take the rare step of firing two or three campaign executives in other counties because "They didn’t buy into the philosophy of a new way of doing things."
"This race was so damn intense, I’ve never seen anything like it before," Paduchik said. "This was like the election for breaking all the rules."
Carlos Todd, chairman of the Butler County Republican Party, recalled frequent calls from top party and campaign officials.
"I’ve never had as much pressure put on me in all the years I’ve been in the electoral process," said Todd, chairman since 1991.
Paduchik recounted a Bush visit to Warren County in which the president astounded the local chairwoman by reciting the number of campaign calls and door-to-door visits her team had completed in the county.
One example of the campaign’s lofty goals: insisting on 350,000 Election Day calls to nudge likely Bush voters to the polls. Paduchik said he was secretly hoping for as many as 400,000 but, by day’s end, his troops had made 450,000 calls.
"The 72-hour campaign was like a machine on cruise control," he said. "It was getting the job done."
The Ohio Bush campaign had practiced. It led the nation during a "test drive" of the 72-hour campaign the previous summer, Paduchik said.
"We did things as a party that I thought Republicans were genetically incapable of doing," said U.S. Rep. John A. Boehner, who lives in Butler County’s West Chester. "Because I’d never seen it in my lifetime."
A key was merging marketing data with voter registration records to predict which candidate Ohioans would support at the polls, he said. Bush could expect votes from 80 percent of gun owners, 70 percent of those who attended church regularly, and so on.
"If you drove a Buick, chances were very good you were going to vote for Bush," Boehner said. "It was just the opposite for Volvo drivers."
The list enabled the campaign to pick out which voters they wanted to get to the polls.
"We knew who the targets were in every precinct," Boehner said. "And there were precincts where 99 percent of those targeted voted."
Northwest of Cincinnati, Green Township is an example of one place the Bush effort pushed high turnout to new heights. In 2000, 78 percent of the voters went to the polls — one of the higher levels in the state.
In 2004, Green Township’s turnout jumped to 85 percent. And Bush easily carried all 73 precincts, giving him almost 2,500 more votes than in 2000.
That outcome was multiplied in townships across Ohio — especially exurban communities near metropolitan areas.
Statewide, voter turnout in townships hit 75 percent last year, an eight-point leap from 2000. Bush beat Kerry by 22 percentage points in those areas, adding 92,000 votes to his total from four years before.
"We looked at areas where we thought there were potentially new voters," Mehlman said.
The Bush campaign redefined presidential campaigns in Ohio, which has been the nation’s election bellwether (along with Missouri) for 105 years.
"The basic fundamentals of the way to get the job done is here to stay," Paduchik said. "I think it’s changed the way we do politics in Ohio, and really anywhere else, for that matter."
Skeptics doubt that the 2004 campaign can be replicated, because it was the first presidential election since the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, the country was at war, Bush has a unique relationship with religious conservatives, and state Issue 1 was on the Ohio ballot.
Mehlman and Paduchik insist that Bush would have won Ohio even without the gay-marriage amendment. But others, such as Todd, the Butler County chairman, don’t think so.
Palmieri has no doubt: "We lost because of gay marriage."
And Kerry apparently is still wondering what more he could have done to win Ohio.
"Kerry doesn’t know what he should have done substantially different," said U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland, a Democrat from Lisbon, in eastern Ohio. "He stopped me in the hall and said, ‘Ted, I should’ve gone door-todoor in southeast Ohio.’ "