Conservative groups reaching new levels of
sophistication in mobilizing voters
By Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger, Published: September 20
President Obama’s reelection prospects look better in recent polls, but organizers from both
parties report growing evidence that new voter-outreach programs funded by conservative
groups could give GOP nominee Mitt Romney an edge if the race is close.
In the key battleground states, Obama’s celebrated network of organizing experts and
neighborhood captains is being challenged by a conservative coalition that includes the National
Rifle Association, the billionaire-backed Americans for Prosperity and a newly muscular College
Republicans organization with a $16 million budget
The conservative groups “are fully funded and ready for hand-to-hand combat,” said Steve
Rosenthal, a Democratic organizer.
Rosenthal co-founded the Atlas Project, which is tracking voter statistics and other data to guide
Democratic groups as they design precinct-level voter-outreach strategies. He describes the
Obama operation as “second to none,” but in reviewing data in recent weeks, he has grown
alarmed by what he views as a successful years-long campaign on the right that could alter the
landscape.
In Florida, for example, Republican legislation, since overturned in the courts, effectively
dampened pro-Democratic voter registration efforts during critical months in 2011 and 2012,
resulting in registration gains for Republicans in the crucial Tampa Bay area since the 2008
election.
In Ohio, the evangelical group behind a successful anti-same-sex-marriage amendment that
helped mobilize conservative voters in 2004 says it has a network of 10,000 churches and a
database of millions of rural voters who will be targeted with in-person visits and voter guides.
And in Wisconsin, a traditionally Democratic state, conservatives have built a house-by-house
turnout machine already tested in the successful campaign to fight a union-backed recall of GOP
Gov. Scott Walker in June.
Several recent stumbles by Romney have provoked a stream of media coverage about his
chances in November and Obama’s widening lead in recent polls. But on the ground, the battle
remains close. Experts say that if Obama’s lead in key states extends beyond a few percentage
points, even the most effective field operation on the right may not be enough to prevent a
Romney loss. But, they say, the operation can add two to three points to the Republican’s total
and, in a close contest, that could be a significant difference.
Obama aides insist that the president’s grass-roots network will be more effective in driving
voters to the polls than anything being built on the right, although they acknowledge that the
landscape has changed since Obama’s last campaign.
“It’s a much more robust field operation than the 2008 McCain campaign had, that’s clear,” said
Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager. But, he added, “the other side is trying to pay to
replicate what we spent years to build.”
One of the major players on the right is Americans for Prosperity, a group co-founded by
conservative billionaire David Koch. The group plans to spend $125 million on the 2012
campaign, half of it devoted to field organizing in political battlegrounds. AFP has 116 staff
members on the ground targeting 9 million voters the group has found to be “up in the air” about
how to assess Obama’s economic record, said its president, Tim Phillips.
The group has honed many of its techniques in Wisconsin, where it spent millions on the effort
to keep Walker in office. The group there is deploying a new smartphone application, Prosperity
Knocks, to guide canvassers to the right doors. Of the group’s 120,000 members in Wisconsin, it
has 4,000 super activists, dubbed “Prosperity Champions,” who have participated in multiple
actions, the group says.
“This is a totally new ballgame,” said Luke Hilgemann, the Wisconsin director for AFP, who
oversees 12 full-time staff members and thousands of volunteers in his state. “We’re matching
the left and exceeding them in lots of things that we’re doing.”
Wisconsin Family Action, another social conservative organization in the state, is sending voter
guides and DVDs to its network of 3,000 churches, said Julaine Appling, the group’s president.
“Here in Wisconsin, we’ve become pretty well-schooled in ground games,” she said.
Activists report similarly honed skills in Ohio. Phil Burress, chairman of the group Citizens for
Community Values Action and the leader of the marriage campaign in 2004, said he has been
operating half a dozen phone-bank centers since May. He said he has a database of 8.4 million
Ohioans and plans to distribute 2 million voter guides to 10,000 churches, with a focus on rural
parts of the state that he said posted low turnout in 2008.
Burress said many of his activists are motivated by Obama’s recent announcement supporting
same-sex marriage. “It’s like 2004 all over again,” he said.
In Ohio and other states, an emerging force in conservative voter outreach is the College
Republican National Committee, which has expanded this year to 63 paid, full-time field staff
members and has formed a joint super PAC with American Crossroads, the group founded in
part by Karl Rove, who was an adviser to President George W. Bush, to target young voters.
Gun enthusiasts will be hearing with greater intensity this year from the NRA, which spent an
estimated $30 million in 2008 and plans to focus less this year on television advertising and more
on voter recruiting. The group has hired 25 campaign field directors and posted them in
battleground states, while it has begun churning out hundreds of thousands of pieces of targeted
literature, said Chris Cox, the group’s chief political strategist.
Cox said advancements in technology have improved the organization’s voter-targeting abilities
“from a traditional shotgun blast into more of a rifle shot.”
One recent NRA mailing in Florida targeted Sen. Bill Nelson (D), who is running for reelection.
It featured a ghostly image of Nelson’s face and a listing of votes the NRA declares to be
undermining the Second Amendment, including the senator’s support for Obama’s “anti-gun
nominees to the Supreme Court.”
Some Democratic strategists have taken note of apparent GOP advancements in voter
registration, coming after Republican-led efforts in several statehouses to pass voting laws that
Democrats say discourage core voters such as minorities and students.
In Florida, the Atlas Project has identified Democratic vulnerability in critical areas of the state.
For example, the organization found that Democratic Party registration in the counties in the
Tampa-St. Petersburg area has dropped by about 64,000 since the 2008 election, while
Republican registration has increased by more than 50,000.
Obama campaign officials point out that registration in Florida and many other states will
continue for several more weeks and that Democrats are on track to make big gains. For the past
two months, they said, the number of registered Democrats has increased more than the number
of registered Republicans in Florida and other key states with party registration. Even in 2008, a
large share of the Democratic registration gains did not occur until the final push.
Daniel Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida who has studied the effects of voter
laws, said his data show that Florida’s Republican-backed legislation dampened registration in
2011 and early 2012, as some liberal groups stopped signing up voters. But since the courts
rejected the law in May, Smith said, “I think we are seeing an effective effort to catch up.”
Democrats on the ground remain worried.
“There’s no question the legislature and the governor made it more of a challenge” to register
Democrats this year, said Dan Gelber, a former legislator from Miami Beach who has been
assisting the Obama team with voter registration. “I would not counsel overconfidence in
Florida, notwithstanding the daily missteps of the Romney campaign.”
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