really do this. He would have had to go to all the players and say we’re going to do something different this time,” Malchow reflects. “If they roll their eyes, it’s not good business to battle over it. There’s only so much you can lobby people for something that they’re not interested in.”
Malchow felt the same way as he bounced around Washington conference rooms promoting his other agenda. In each new conference room, he would reveal a PowerPoint presentation that described his CHAID method and how he had tried to put it to use in Oregon. Some of the campaign operatives, party officials, and consultants who saw Malchow’s slides were intrigued, but none was sold. He came to realize that his foe was not only inertia, but also an institution that had developed a monopoly on the left’s campaign data. The National Committee for an Effective Congress scores that had thwarted Malchow’s efforts in Oregon existed for every precinct in the country, and a generation of Democratic operatives had been taught to treat the hundred-point figures with reverence. It was NCEC scores that made politics modern, the place where the guts of ward heelers were pushed aside by the statistical rigor of the computing era. Malchow’s proposal to throw out these talismanic scores, built from actual vote totals, and instead use polling to conjecture how an individual might vote looked—to nearly everyone in the Democratic campaign establishment—like alchemy.
Upending the party’s culture of precinct targeting with individual-level modeling would require what Malchow called a “battle royal” withMark Gersh, a brilliant but headstrong New Jerseyan who had worked on Capitol Hill before joining NCEC in 1978. Gersh built the committee into an indispensable player in Democratic campaigns, personally emerging as such an unrivaled expert in political geography that Gersh assumed a lucrative sideline helping broadcast networks call winners and losers on election night. When Malchow heard about a conference being planned in Las Vegas for Democrats rethinking get-out-the-vote strategies after the 1998 elections, he called friends to wrangle an invitation—but was told Gersh would never let him near it. “You get this model, and it’s hard for anyone to rearrange the model,” says Malchow. “All the parties at the table have a financial interest in the model.”
The development of the political consulting profession meant that campaign conference calls were filled with an ever-increasing number of specialists all fighting to expand their slice of a limited pie. For the phone vendor, more phone calls were a natural solution; for the media consultant, a bigger ad buy would always do the trick. Everyone had an interest in promoting their own tool and whatever theory of the electorate helped to make a case for their tactics. They usually got paid for each piece of mail or phone call they put out, or a percentage of each ad buy they placed. But it was never a fair fight. It didn’t hurt that the television was the one place where a candidate, retiring to his hotel room at the end of a long day on the trail, could actually spot his investment.
As he shopped his newfangled targeting system, Malchow was selling an investment that would either be invisible to candidates or seem redundant to them. After all, the significant cost in targeting was for a large-sample survey that overlapped with what pollsters were already being paid to do—and the best he could promise is that it would rearrange the campaign’s existing mail strategy. When Malchow explained CHAID targeting to pollsters, he realized that they not only played little role in planning a campaign’s mail program but often considered themselves rivals to it. Even though they served dramatically different functions for a candidate, pollsters and mail vendors fought for a share of the same budget.What interest did a pollster ever have in making the mail program a more efficient
Malchow felt the same way as he bounced around Washington conference rooms promoting his other agenda. In each new conference room, he would reveal a PowerPoint presentation that described his CHAID method and how he had tried to put it to use in Oregon. Some of the campaign operatives, party officials, and consultants who saw Malchow’s slides were intrigued, but none was sold. He came to realize that his foe was not only inertia, but also an institution that had developed a monopoly on the left’s campaign data. The National Committee for an Effective Congress scores that had thwarted Malchow’s efforts in Oregon existed for every precinct in the country, and a generation of Democratic operatives had been taught to treat the hundred-point figures with reverence. It was NCEC scores that made politics modern, the place where the guts of ward heelers were pushed aside by the statistical rigor of the computing era. Malchow’s proposal to throw out these talismanic scores, built from actual vote totals, and instead use polling to conjecture how an individual might vote looked—to nearly everyone in the Democratic campaign establishment—like alchemy.
Upending the party’s culture of precinct targeting with individual-level modeling would require what Malchow called a “battle royal” withMark Gersh, a brilliant but headstrong New Jerseyan who had worked on Capitol Hill before joining NCEC in 1978. Gersh built the committee into an indispensable player in Democratic campaigns, personally emerging as such an unrivaled expert in political geography that Gersh assumed a lucrative sideline helping broadcast networks call winners and losers on election night. When Malchow heard about a conference being planned in Las Vegas for Democrats rethinking get-out-the-vote strategies after the 1998 elections, he called friends to wrangle an invitation—but was told Gersh would never let him near it. “You get this model, and it’s hard for anyone to rearrange the model,” says Malchow. “All the parties at the table have a financial interest in the model.”
The development of the political consulting profession meant that campaign conference calls were filled with an ever-increasing number of specialists all fighting to expand their slice of a limited pie. For the phone vendor, more phone calls were a natural solution; for the media consultant, a bigger ad buy would always do the trick. Everyone had an interest in promoting their own tool and whatever theory of the electorate helped to make a case for their tactics. They usually got paid for each piece of mail or phone call they put out, or a percentage of each ad buy they placed. But it was never a fair fight. It didn’t hurt that the television was the one place where a candidate, retiring to his hotel room at the end of a long day on the trail, could actually spot his investment.
As he shopped his newfangled targeting system, Malchow was selling an investment that would either be invisible to candidates or seem redundant to them. After all, the significant cost in targeting was for a large-sample survey that overlapped with what pollsters were already being paid to do—and the best he could promise is that it would rearrange the campaign’s existing mail strategy. When Malchow explained CHAID targeting to pollsters, he realized that they not only played little role in planning a campaign’s mail program but often considered themselves rivals to it. Even though they served dramatically different functions for a candidate, pollsters and mail vendors fought for a share of the same budget.What interest did a pollster ever have in making the mail program a more efficient
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