investment?
Malchow found few takers even when he began offering his targeting service at cost, charging campaigns only the five thousand dollars in call center fees. “Everything he said made perfect logical sense to me. But he had a hard time selling it to other people—getting them to change the old tools they were using and people were comfortable with them. And a lot of people didn’t understand what Hal was saying,” says Anil Mammen, who worked for Malchow at the time. “Convincing people to ignore people they would otherwise mail or contact people they would otherwise ignore is a major hurdle. You’re making an argument that’s counterintuitive and your evidence is something they haven’t seen before.”
If you wanted to build a business designed to resist learning from itself, Malchow was discovering, it would look pretty much like the American electoral campaign. Candidates, who effectively serve as chairmen of their corporate boards, tend to come in two types: those who have won their last race and think they have cracked the code, or those who have never done it before and understand little about the increasingly specialized work done by campaign professionals. “Their job is to run government,” says Mellman. “They certainly aren’t immersing themselves in the tactics and techniques of campaigning, and nor should they.”
Meanwhile, the candidate sits atop an evanescent multimillion-dollar business that has only one goal: market share on a single Tuesday. Election outcomes end up being treated as their own measure of political success, even though everyone involved knows that the final tally is shaped by factors both bigger and smaller than the acumen of any particular person involved. As soon as the votes were counted in Oregon, Wyden’s campaign, and itslate tactical shift from attacks on Smith to positive issue-based ads, was memorialized in triumphant terms. Smith’s is recalled for having squandered a financial lead and structural advantages. Yet the result was decided by only eighteen thousand votes, such a marginal difference that a labor conflict distracting one of Wyden’s union allies could have inverted the result. (Smithwas elected to the Senate later that year to succeed Hatfield, and served two terms before losing his seat to Democrat Jeff Merkley in 2008.)
“There’s only winning and losing,” says Malchow. “You could run the best campaign for a loser against a huge headwind and against a whole lot of odds come close—and you’re still a loser. If you do something different, everyone will point at the thing you did different and say that’s why you lost. So if you’re the campaign manager you don’t do anything different. If you follow the rule book strictly they can’t blame anything on you.”
The paper trail that might illuminate what actually happened—the binders filled with polling data, the hard drives filled with databases accounting for every direct contact made with a voter—usually ends up in the nearest Dumpster. Often no one even convenes a postmortem among the staff operatives, consultants, and candidate to talk about what went wrong and why. “There’s a real penalty for having a nickel left in the bank,” says Laura Quinn, a deputy chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore. “So if you have any money left over for post-election analysis you must have done something wrong—that’s the theory.”
And then everyone goes on to the next campaign. Malchow never worked for Wyden again.
In January 1999, Malchow was summoned to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to meet with the brain trust for Gore’s nascent presidential campaign. Malchow’s PowerPoint peregrinations had brought him a fair bit of notice, if little new business, among Democratic operatives. Now he was being invited to make the biggest pitch of all: trying to sell a front-running presidential candidate on the value of an altogether new system for targeting a national voter
Malchow found few takers even when he began offering his targeting service at cost, charging campaigns only the five thousand dollars in call center fees. “Everything he said made perfect logical sense to me. But he had a hard time selling it to other people—getting them to change the old tools they were using and people were comfortable with them. And a lot of people didn’t understand what Hal was saying,” says Anil Mammen, who worked for Malchow at the time. “Convincing people to ignore people they would otherwise mail or contact people they would otherwise ignore is a major hurdle. You’re making an argument that’s counterintuitive and your evidence is something they haven’t seen before.”
If you wanted to build a business designed to resist learning from itself, Malchow was discovering, it would look pretty much like the American electoral campaign. Candidates, who effectively serve as chairmen of their corporate boards, tend to come in two types: those who have won their last race and think they have cracked the code, or those who have never done it before and understand little about the increasingly specialized work done by campaign professionals. “Their job is to run government,” says Mellman. “They certainly aren’t immersing themselves in the tactics and techniques of campaigning, and nor should they.”
Meanwhile, the candidate sits atop an evanescent multimillion-dollar business that has only one goal: market share on a single Tuesday. Election outcomes end up being treated as their own measure of political success, even though everyone involved knows that the final tally is shaped by factors both bigger and smaller than the acumen of any particular person involved. As soon as the votes were counted in Oregon, Wyden’s campaign, and itslate tactical shift from attacks on Smith to positive issue-based ads, was memorialized in triumphant terms. Smith’s is recalled for having squandered a financial lead and structural advantages. Yet the result was decided by only eighteen thousand votes, such a marginal difference that a labor conflict distracting one of Wyden’s union allies could have inverted the result. (Smithwas elected to the Senate later that year to succeed Hatfield, and served two terms before losing his seat to Democrat Jeff Merkley in 2008.)
“There’s only winning and losing,” says Malchow. “You could run the best campaign for a loser against a huge headwind and against a whole lot of odds come close—and you’re still a loser. If you do something different, everyone will point at the thing you did different and say that’s why you lost. So if you’re the campaign manager you don’t do anything different. If you follow the rule book strictly they can’t blame anything on you.”
The paper trail that might illuminate what actually happened—the binders filled with polling data, the hard drives filled with databases accounting for every direct contact made with a voter—usually ends up in the nearest Dumpster. Often no one even convenes a postmortem among the staff operatives, consultants, and candidate to talk about what went wrong and why. “There’s a real penalty for having a nickel left in the bank,” says Laura Quinn, a deputy chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore. “So if you have any money left over for post-election analysis you must have done something wrong—that’s the theory.”
And then everyone goes on to the next campaign. Malchow never worked for Wyden again.
In January 1999, Malchow was summoned to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to meet with the brain trust for Gore’s nascent presidential campaign. Malchow’s PowerPoint peregrinations had brought him a fair bit of notice, if little new business, among Democratic operatives. Now he was being invited to make the biggest pitch of all: trying to sell a front-running presidential candidate on the value of an altogether new system for targeting a national voter
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