Great profile of new RNC Chairman and Bush campaign general Ken Mehlman in the current issue of The Economist. One thing that jumps out regards tactics and the resulting outcome. Kerry's bunch outsourced their GOTV work, while Bush's campaign team - led by a savvy, patient, commited Mehlman - kept that work for the faithful, of which there were many.

In the last election, the Democrats seemed to take the more modern managerial approach: they contracted out much of the grunt work of politics to outside “527” organisations and made extensive use of paid canvassers to register and turn out voters. Trade unions paid 5,000 people to work full-time on the election, for example. By contrast, Mr Mehlman slowly built up a volunteer army of 1.4m loyal Republicans.

The volunteers made much better salespeople than the Democrats' paid hacks. (“Who do you find more believable?” asks Mr Mehlman. “A paid worker from outside or a friend and neighbour?”) They also operated under the political radar; the Democrats systematically underestimated the Republican effort. And they allowed Mr Bush's campaign dollars to stretch much further: in Ohio, the Bush-Cheney campaign had only a couple of hundred paid staff but 80,000 volunteers.

Yet this volunteer army also required an inordinate amount of management. Mr Mehlman dug up Republicans in the corners of America that campaign managers often overlooked—especially the new exurbs. He used all sorts of business metrics: marketing data to find potential supporters, performance measures to make sure they were doing their job and rewards to keep them motivated (successful volunteers were invited to Mr Bush's rallies, for example). He bristles at the idea that Democrats like Mr Dean won the internet wars. The Democrats used the internet primarily for fundraising, he says. The Republicans used it for organising, with 7.5m e-activists.

....the political terrain still looks better for the Republicans. Mr McAuliffe's successor will have to concentrate on shoring up his party's defences: hanging on to core Democratic constituencies such as blacks and Latinos. The Republicans are flourishing in almost all the fastest-growing bits of the country. If the biggest challenge in American politics is reinventing parties for the age of the internet and the exurb, then the Republicans are streets ahead of the opposition.

This from The Economist - hardly the GOP House organ. And all true, to boot.

Meanwhile, embittered Dems are sniping (here, here and here, among other places) that Mehlman may be a closeted gay, drawing this rebuttal from Powerline. Would that Dems put the same energy and passion into homegrown GOTV. Perhaps they are just not serious about winning anymore on the national stage?

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at December 20, 2004 08:11 AM

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