DNC to reorder 2008 primary/caucus states?

John Kerry, on the other hand, trailing badly in the polls, unable to win big-name endorsements, having difficulty raising money, and with the governor of Iowa telling him privately that he had "a solid lock on a distant third," made the decision to shift his focus, his forces, and his finances to Iowa rather than pinning his hopes on New Hampshire, whose primary was eight days later. True, it was a decision aided by necessity: Kerry was doing so badly in New Hampshire that a distant third in Iowa actually looked good. But many presidential campaigns have ignored urgent necessity in order to gamble on the siren song of false opportunity. Instead, Kerry mortgaged his Boston house and rolled the dice. It was going to be Iowa or Palookaville, with no stops in between. "On the night of the caucuses," said the state's junior U.S. senator, Tom Harkin, "the two most surprised people in Iowa were Howard Dean and John Kerry."

Dean was especially shocked. "I knew how many Ones that we had, and I knew how many Twos that we had, and I knew it was enough to win," Dean said. In a political counting system so old that Moses may have used it to gauge his support among the Israelites, voters are ranked on a list from one to five. Though it differs slightly from campaign to campaign, a One is your strongest supporter, someone who has signed a pledge card promising to go to the polls and vote for you. A Two is a person who has pledged verbally to support you or has signed up at an event. Taken together, the Ones and Twos form your "hard count," those voters the campaign depends on to come out and vote. (Sort of. Actually, human nature being what it is, most campaigns figure they will get only about 80 percent of their Ones and 60 percent of their Twos on Election Day.) A Three is a person leaning toward you, a Four is supporting one of your opponents, and a Five is strongly for one of your opponents. The list of Ones, Twos, and Threes is compiled by calling or knocking on the doors of hundreds of thousands of people and asking them how they feel about the candidates. (This can also be done by robo-call, when a computer dials the phone and a recorded message asks the person to punch a button on the phone keypad to indicate level of support. The Kerry campaign was very big on the use of robo-calls, making sure whenever possible, however, that the recorded message came from a recognizable local or statewide supporter. One reason the Kerry camp liked robo-calling was that in the beginning, when Kerry was doing very poorly in Iowa, it was depressing for his volunteers to call people and be constantly told the person was not going to vote for their guy. By letting robo-calls cull the list, human volunteers could then take the list of Ones and Twos produced by the calls and follow up, making human contact.)

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And it wasn't as if Norris had been sitting on his hands. A native of Red Oak, Iowa, he knew the state and how to run a campaign there, having run the Jesse Jackson campaign in Iowa in 1988. As a former chairman and executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party, a former candidate for Congress, and a former chief of staff for Vilsack, Norris was a major catch for Kerry. From the beginning, Norris was convinced, even when nobody else was, that Kerry could win Iowa. "I was convinced Iowa would not give the nod to Gephardt," he said. Norris didn't worry about hard counts for months. Instead, he went after leadership: county chairpersons, state legislators, environmental activists, education activists.

They were more than supporters: They were validators. "In their local communities, they were known and respected," Norris said. "When they said they were for John Kerry, it meant something." Even so, Kerry wasn't getting any traction. Dean was hot; Kerry was not. "We weren't losing our people," Norris said, "but it was getting harder and harder to get people to join us."

It was about this time that Norris got the idea of the veterans list. Veterans get a break on their property taxes in Iowa, so Norris knew a list of veterans had to exist. It was a natural target audience for Kerry, but there was a problem: There wasn't one list; there were 99, one in each county, and some counties didn't want to give it up. "It was the mentality of the small town," Norris said. "They just didn't want to make it public and so they fought us." In the end, the Kerry campaign collected about 90 lists. They were in all kinds of different forms: electronic, paper printouts, handwritten. (Iowa has some very small counties.) The cost of collecting the lists was only $25,000, but in those days $25,000 was considered real money in the campaign. But it was worth it not only for the names and votes it produced but for something almost as important: The Kerry staff in Iowa was demoralized. Getting the list together boosted their spirits.

By summer, Norris had started collecting his hard counts, but the rules were strict. If a person responded to a phone call by saying, "I'm supporting John Kerry," that was not good enough for a One. To be a One, you had to sign a pledge card or have your support for Kerry validated by a volunteer or staffer. This first wave produced about 10,000 Ones. After that, however, with Dean's popularity skyrocketing, the numbers flat-lined. Norris grew worried and ordered the field staff to do what field staffs hate to do: Recount the Ones to make sure there was no erosion. (If you are responsible for Pocahontas County, population 8,600, and you have met your quota of Ones, the last thing you want to do is find out that 60 of them have dribbled away and that you have to find 60 new Kerry Ones to replace them. It was easier to keep telling headquarters in Des Moines that everything was fine and that there was no erosion.)

But Norris wanted his recount. By September, he was assembling his precinct captains. By October, Kerry's internal polling in Iowa showed improvement, but some people on the campaign didn't believe it. "Some started to question Mellman's methodology," Norris said. "They wondered what universe he was polling." In the last month before the caucuses, the numbers from the field were gathered in what everybody called the Blue Room, because unlike the Dean campaign, which used a complicated color system, Kerry used one color: blue. The bluer the map of Iowa got, the better it was for Kerry. "And it just kept getting bluer and bluer," Norris said. When he heard reports that Dean was getting 3,500 volunteers to come in for the last weeks of campaigning, he was not impressed. He had asked for 500 volunteers, got them, and wanted no more. It was difficult to train and organize even that many people. But he still had a big problem: Even though the numbers were improving, Norris couldn't get the money he needed for mailings to voters or TV ads.

Enter Michael Whouley. Suddenly it was not just John Norris on the phone to headquarters begging for money, but Michael Whouley saying we need the frigging money and we need it now. And the money came: for phone banks and mail and television and those "signature" items that made Whouley Whouley. Among Kerry's ground troops in Iowa, Dec. 19, 2003, is a day they still talk about, a day that is burned in their psyches and a day they will probably bore young staffers with for decades to come. "December 19," a top Kerry aide in Iowa said, "is the day the field staff got to meet Michael Whouley." The meeting took place in Des Moines's First Unitarian Church, which was appropriate. "To them, Whouley was almost a godlike figure," said the aide. "Norris and I had given the field staff many, many pep talks. But Whouley electrified them. He lit the room on fire with his passion for John Kerry. 'We're not just going to do well,' he told them. 'We're going to win!' "

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: One Democrat found narrowcasting just in time. John Kerry's victories in the 2004 Iowa and New Hampshire primaries were national news, but few knew the whole story of Kerry's stunning comeback. He was behind in the polls and couldn't find a way to reach voters through all that political noise. But the Kerry campaign had discovered a way to identify and talk to thousands of voters who'd been turned off by political ads. It wasn't campaign workers who found them, it was a couple of off-the-shelf PCs sifting reams of demographic data.

Overseeing the operation was a little-known Kerry consultant named Kenneth Strasma.

KENNETH STRASMA, Kerry Campaign Consultant: Democratic primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire were getting called by 10 different candidates for months and months, and it was getting very hard to reach people. So what we did is, we looked at all the information we had from the folks we'd called so far and came up with a Kerry voter profile, which gave us the percent likelihood that someone would say, yes, they'd support Kerry, if we called them.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: This sort of voter profiling – which both parties used to chase down swing voters in the general election – incorporates behaviors we don't normally associate with voting, like whether you have caller ID, a sedan or a hatchback, or more than one pet. The thing about narrowcasting is that it gives politicians a chance to say things to some people they might not want others to hear.

You can take the most controversial message that maybe wouldn't work on TV but still deliver it to the 20,000 people in a certain district who will respond favorably to it.

KENNETH STRASMA: Oh, absolutely. There are – some of the biggest motivators in terms of issues are also the most divisive issues. On one end of the spectrum, you've got abortion rights, pro-life/pro-choice, and you've also got gun control and gun ownership rights. And those are both messages that people aren't likely to go up on TV with in a national campaign because they're very polarizing. But there are advocacy groups on both sides who've gotten very good at figuring out where their voters, who vote based on those issues, are and getting a message to those people without necessarily getting a divisive message to the whole electorate.

GEORGIA PROTESTER: Roy Barnes sold all us Georgians out!

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: In 2001, President Bush's chief strategist, Karl Rove, conducted a series of experiments in narrowcasting for the GOP. The following year, the state Republican parties put Rove's findings into practice. In Georgia, they were used in a campaign to unseat a slew of incumbent Democrats.

VOTER: I mean, it – you know, the flag did have something to do with it.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: The GOP used the incendiary issue of the Confederate emblem on the Georgia state flag to galvanize a select group of usually apathetic male voters.

GEORGIA PROTESTER: You mess with our flag, you pack you bag!

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: Targeting their message door-to-door and through telemarketing, the team drove high numbers of rural males to the polls and delivered a Republican sweep.

STUART EWEN, Hunter College: When you start sending messages which appeal to sort of, you know, white people in pick-up trucks, and then you're also sending messages to black people in Cleveland, and it's a qualitatively different kind of message, you're really trying to stir – or you're really trying to appeal to those aspects of people which sees themselves as different from each other.

PETER SWIRE: Instead of being Americans, we're sliced into 70 demographic groups. We might be sliced into hundreds of subcategories under that. And then the worry is that we don't share anything as a people.

STUART EWEN: The result is living in a society where people, rather than having an idea of the common good, increasingly see their own personal well-being or their own community's or ethnicity's well-being as the essential issue of democracy.