Near the end of August, when it was stubbornly behind President Obama in the polls, Mitt Romney’s campaign released a TV ad about the “gutting” of welfare’s work requirements. The killer verb came from a Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial: “Welfare Reform GUTTED,” adapted and splayed across the screen in a font size usually reserved for stuff like “Nixon Resigns” or “Japan Surrenders.”
On Saturday, I sat in one of the Washington Convention Center’s dark and anonymous meeting rooms and learned just how badly that ad had failed. The lesson was part of RootsCamp, an annual post-election conference of Democratic/progressive campaigners put on by the New Organizing Institute. My teachers were media trackers from the Democratic National Committee, young quants who repeatedly, politely pleaded with reporters to keep quotes and hard numbers off the record.
They did share two maps. The first one showed the media markets where the “gutting” ad ran—Virginia and some spillover in Maryland and North Carolina, colored in faded purple to measure the impact. The second showed the states where media coverage informed voters that the ad was false. Purple-mountained majesty spread from coast to coast, with states far outside the Romney ad zone learning of, then loathing, the Romney message. Why didn’t anybody else get that at the time? The titles of the next slide answered my question.
We can get outspent and still win.
Media doesn’t understand how media works.
So, Democrats outsmarted the Romney campaign. The Republican had more money and won plenty of news cycles. (He outspent Obama in every swing state except Ohio.) Republican super PACs raised more than their Democratic counterparts. The GOP claimed to double or triple its “voter contacts” in key states. Democrats won anyway, because they’d figured out whom to spend money on, and how.
RootsCamp might be the first political conference I’ve been to where some people wore purely ironic buttons—Romney-Ryan swag, tributes to a forever-vanquished enemy. Most mega-meetings in downtown D.C. bring an alien-looking group of Americans dressed in comfy convention clothes or black suits. The RootsCamp’s crowd, 2,000 strong, looked like the casting pool for a party scene on Girls.
There was no glossy schedule. Activists learned of panels and breakout talks by checking a smartphone app or visiting The Wall, a monolith decorated with 8-by-11 titles and descriptions. Among them: “Inglorious Voters,” “#whitepeopleproblems,” and “Unfuck Fostercare.” On the third floor, any victorious activist still looking for a job could meet potential employers. On the first floor, he could meet with his peers from Obama for America or MoveOn and discover what cheap tricks had bested the rich guys.
On Friday, they packed the room for a panel titled “This Shit Actually Works,” where MoveOn revealed the results of a voter turnout experiment demo-ed in Delaware’s sleepy September primary. MoveOn wanted to test what sort of generic-looking mail was most effective for getting a possible voter off the couch—a “best practices” appeal to their civic duty or “social pressure” that compared a voter with his neighbors. Daniel Mintz showed the crowd an old attempt at social pressure, a list of neighbors and their scores that “looked like crap.” Then he revealed MoveOn’s “voter report card.” Featuring smiling stock-photo children, it revealed how often the target had voted and how often his neighbors had voted.
“Turnout for the control group was control 19.3 percent,” Mintz revealed. “Turnout for ‘best practices’ was 21.5 percent. Among people who got the ‘social pressure’ mail, turnout was 22.8 percent.” The point wasn’t really to convince new voters to choose Obama. It was to activate the soft voters who Democrats knew were out there.