Republican Board of Equalization Member Bill Leonard has been fostering an ongoing discussion about the California Republican Party’s Victory Program (Get-Out-The-Vote). He posts over on his blog here, but gives me leave to post his stuff over here, too. So his latest thoughts are below, and a few blog posts down, Brandon Powers has posted a memo from the CRP Board of Directors on some of these issues…
FROM BILL LEONARD
In my November 20th newsletter I asked for a financial and performance audit of the California Republican Party’s 2006 campaign effort. While I have learned a lot since then thanks to conversations with key party and Schwarzenegger campaign officials, it is still important that we look at what happened, what worked, and what did not work and why.
I have learned that there was a huge amount of voter contact to Republicans with mailings and phone calls, but I am still trying to find out what kind of voter identification took place and how that information was used. Voter ID is when a campaign contacts you and asked you if you will vote for Governor Schwarzenegger and the rest of the ticket. If you say “no” then that is the last contact made. If you say “maybe” then some follow up is done with more literature or some persuasion phone call. If you say “yes” then you are thanked, the information is noted, and you are asked to vote absentee or you are checked on election day to make sure that you did vote. I do not know if this was done or how much it was done. This is a very labor intensive program, but if it is not completely implemented with the election day precinct check then it can be nothing more than lots of annoying phone calls to voters.
I have learned that a variety of scripts were used in the campaign phoning operations either featuring the Governor, the entire ticket, or one of the statewide candidates. But I do not yet know who chose which scripts to use and what information was used to choose a script for that day or that region. Some have suggested that with our Governor so far ahead in the polls that the scripts should have featured other candidates. Others have suggested that the scripts should have taken advantage of the Governor’s popularity to link him favorably with each of the statewide candidates. Obviously hindsight is a wonderful viewpoint, but I am not sure that these decisions would have been applauded at that time. Generally, governors do not have coattails to pull along other candidates, but I would like to see research asking that question — would Schwarzenegger’s extraordinary popularity have been able to be transferred to McPherson, McClintock and the others?
I did find out that there was mischief with the door hangers. Someone whose name I have not yet been given wrote the copy for the door hangers mis-stating the party’s position. It forced the CRP Board to have an emergency meeting to make an uncomfortable decision that is would be too expensive to reprint everything but cheaper to affix a cover label stating that certain of the ballot measures were not endorsed by the party. I have been in lots of campaigns where printing mistakes were made and procedures not followed. I believe that party leaders were not personally responsible for this mistake. However, the people who created the party’s misleading literature were well aware of the party’s well-publicized positions on the ballot measures. They need to be identified and held accountable. At a minimum, they should apologize to delegates for the extra expense they caused the Party. What is more, they should apologize for damaging the credibility of the Party’s official campaign literature by intentionally misleading voters about the Republican Party’s positions.
So, I now have a better idea of how many contacts were made and we have the complete statewide election results that now show that the turnout was actually higher than 2002 instead of a record low. Certainly some of those voter contacts by the Republican Party contributed to a higher turnout, which I applaud. I still await the breakdown of the voter turnout to see if those counties that were better organized or a focus of a larger campaign effort did achieve higher turnouts than other areas with lesser efforts. And I applaud the leaders of the Republican Party who are willing to fully disclose the details of the 2006 campaign so that we can all learn from our successes and our disappointments.
