November 9, 2002
Dear
Wonderful RCP Folks,
Hi!
I love your website. I followed it day and night throughout the
election season, and I thank God you work as hard as you do producing
such a wonderful site. I read an e-mail you received from one
of your readers about the GOP GOTV effort, and I thought I'd write
in and tell you, in great detail, how things looked from the ground.
I hope you find my account interesting despite its length.
I am a graduate student at Clemson University in South Carolina.
We were on fall break Monday and Tuesday of this week, presumably
so we could get home to vote. The Republican Party launched a
massive effort to recruit conservative college folks and homeschooled
students in South Carolina to be "72 Hour Volunteers." A 72 Hour
Volunteer is, as one would expect, a person who works as hard
as possible for the party the 72 hours before the election. I
signed up, and what followed was the most exciting four day weekend
of my life.
Friday
night I received a phone call from a Republican operative in Greenville,
SC, a very strong Republican base county, asking if I could hand
out literature the next day. I agreed, and Saturday morning at
9 a.m. we were out going door to door, in teams of two, putting
out campaign literature. The Republican Party had printed up very
snazzy brochures, and we went to targeted base precincts and passed
out the literature on foot. After working all the daylight hours,
we retired to campaign headquarters to assemble signs. After church
on Sunday, we again handed out literature in targeted precincts.
I suppose I walked about 25 to 30 miles in two days. Sunday night
we put out all of the various candidates' signs remaining in the
campaign office, and finished at about 10 p.m. All of us felt
very much like Democrats, with our serious and concerted door-to-door
GOTV effort. Republicans in South Carolina (or anywhere, so far
as I know) just haven't done things like this before as a large,
coordinated effort.
The
next day, Monday, was a different day. Our main focus was to make
telephone calls to suspected Republican voters across the county.
I believe we made over 20,000 phone calls to Greenville County
homes on Monday alone. Our lists of suspected base voters were
well made, as the majority of residents I talked to seemed very
receptive to our telemarketing efforts, something which surprised
me greatly. However the GOP operatives made the lists, they were
quite well made. I think I only received angry responses from
four or five people in the 500 calls I made, and those could easily
have been residents whose phone numbers had changed. These were
Republican base voters we were talking to, and they responded
well to our requests for their support. In the morning we worked
from the Republican campaign headquarters, but as more volunteers
were available for afternoon and evening hours we moved to various
call centers around the county. The Republican Party had rented
hotel and motel rooms around the county for use as phone banks;
we were told that this was enormously cheaper than having phones
specially installed for only two or three days. Observing the
rule that solicitation phone calls stop at 9 p.m., we then focused
on preparing for the next day, election day.
The
weather reports weren't good at all. It seemed that there would
be heavy rain in the northwestern part of the state in the morning
moving east all day. Considering South Carolina's recent voting
patterns, nothing could have been worse for Republicans. Northwestern
South Carolina, what we call "the Upstate," is a Republican stronghold,
with strong conservative voting patterns in every county, especially
Greenville. The middle part of the state, the Midlands, trends
Republican but is not a stronghold by any measure. In the Midlands
is Richland county, the location of the capital, Columbia. This
county is a strongly Democratic area. The lower part of the state,
the Lowcountry, has counties which trend Republican and counties
which often lean Democratic, especially Charleston County. The
weather situation was awful; strongly Republican areas would have
moderate to heavy rain all day, while the Democratic areas would
have a window of decent weather in the morning, with only moderate
rain after that. Everybody at headquarters was worried; we all
knew that if Lindsay Graham lost to Alex Sanders, the GOP's chances
of a Senate takeover were extraordinarily slim.
Fortunately
for us, the national party had developed a plan over the last
two years to help increase voter turnout on election day. A part
of the 72 Hour Plan, which has been mentioned in passing on the
television networks by such luminaries as Sen. Bill Frist and
Rep. Tom Davis, the election day plans were somewhat complicated.
RNC staffers had worked for the past two years analyzing precinct
data for every precinct in the entire country. We had very good
information about which precincts were Republican and which voters
in the precincts were Republican. Volunteers were put in place
as poll watchers at these precincts, armed with the lists of suspected
Republican supporters. Historically, Republican poll watchers
have been "defensive" in nature; defensive poll watchers mainly
concern themselves with preventing voter fraud and illegal intimidation
and influencing by poll workers or other voters. This year, the
poll watching strategy was changed completely to "offensive" poll
watching. An offensive poll watcher is charged with reporting
to the party who has voted and who has not and passing along turnout
information. I was fortunate to be a poll watcher on election
day. My precinct had unusually heavy turnout, especially given
the weather conditions, so I struggled to keep my list accurate,
but managed to do so fairly well.
The
entire point of keeping track of which voters have cast their
ballots was so that we could telephone our supporters who hadn't
made it to the polls yet. I made copies and handed off my list
to other volunteers who were designated to run the lists between
the polling places and the Republican phone banks. Still more
volunteers would then call the as-yet-nonvoting Republicans on
the list and urge them to get to the polls. This operation ran
smoothly until I received a phone call at 1:35 p.m. The field
contact for the state party was on the phone to me, calling me
home. Despite the unusually high turnout at my precinct, turnout
in our precincts across the state was horrible, and they were
repositioning all the poll watchers to the phone banks so we could
join the phone bank GOTV effort. Deflated and disappointed, I
said good-bye to the new friends I'd made among the polling workers,
and hurried over to the nearest phone bank with my newly updated
voter list in hand.
Upon reaching the phone bank, at a Hampton Inn in Greenville,
SC, I immediately checked in with the phone bank directors and
proceeded to call my list from a room on the fifth floor. Later
I was given other lists to call, and I called as many people as
I could, about 200, until 6 p.m. I stopped calling people, figuring
I'd done about all I could, and headed downstairs to the director's
room. After a couple minutes of chit chat I asked him how we did.
He said he had absolutely no idea. Our expectations for victory
were not high. I headed home to watch the election returns with
the family, somewhat anxious and upset, and also in for a wonderful
surprise.
The
enormous Republican victory all across the country in the major
races was the story of the night, but I was almost equally thrilled
by the state results in South Carolina. Of the ten Republicans
running for statewide office, eight of them had been victorious
including Senator-Elect Lindsay Graham and Governor-Elect Mark
Sanford. Treasurer and Superintendent of Education were the only
statewide offices we lost. The Greenville News credits the huge
Republican victory to a late tide of Republican voters in heavily
Republican precincts; it's clear that our efforts paid handsome
dividends.
Looking
back on the election, I realize that I played a small part in
an enormous victory for the Republican Party. It amazes me to
think that there must have been thousands of volunteers out there
just like me, in every state in the union, turning out the Republican
vote. It seems that Republicans have figured out GOTV strategy,
and the Democrats paid a very heavy price for it.
I hope my "ground game diary" helped you to get a feel for the
new Republican campaign strategy. Please keep up the great work
at Real Clear Politics!
Sincerely,
J. Todd Kincannon
