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Yeah,
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The
Great Equalizer
The
biggest story of Election '02 wasn't the defeat of
the tax referenda. It was how a band of upstarts
used the Internet to thwart the designs of
Virginia's power brokers.
Ken
Cuccinelli is a 34-year-old patent attorney in
Northern Virginia
who says his undergraduate engineering degree qualifies
him as a “geek.” Although he had been active
behind the scenes in Republic party politics,
he had
never held elective office until he won an upset
victory in a special election this August.
Brian
Kirwin is a 33-year-old fund-raiser for a
not-for-profit organization in Hampton Roads. He,
too, had participated for years as an organizer in
local campaigns, but he has never held elective
office himself.
In
their spare time this fall, they launched a political
revolution.
What
these two young men share, beyond a passion for
politics and conservative causes, is an easy
familiarity with the technology of the New Economy:
websites, e-mail, audio clips, digital cameras and
online discussion rooms. This year, both found
themselves opposing regional referenda that would
raise sales taxes to pay for local transportation
projects. Unable to match the consultants,
researchers, pollsters and mass media buys that the
pro-referenda forces were pouring into the
campaigns, Cuccinelli and Kirwin reached for the
only tools at their disposal – tools that resided
in their PCs. And, despite long odds, they won.
Since
Nov. 5, when the insurgents defeated the tax hikes
more handily than anyone imagined was possible,
pundits and spin-meisters have parsed the meaning of
the election. The power brokers, everyone now
agrees, underestimated the intensity with which
Virginians loathed taxes and distrusted government
to spend money effectively. Obscured by the 20/20
hindsight is the fact that there were powerful
reasons to vote for the referenda, too. The
tax revenues were designated to ameliorate traffic
congestion, which in both
Northern
Virginia
and Hampton Roads is the wellspring of great angst
and frustration. What’s more, the business, civic
and political leadership of both regions lined up
behind the referenda, while opponents started out
fragmented and disorganized. With a 20-to-one
fund-raising advantage in Hampton Roads and
12-to-one in Northern
Virginia,
the endorsement of the daily newspapers and
the assurance of virtually every elected official
that the tax was the only practicable solution, the
pro-referenda forces had every reason to believe
that they would drown out any isolated voices
of
opposition.
What
the post-election commentators have overlooked is
the role of technology. Digital technology is a
volcanic force bursting through the mantle of
old-school campaigning, with its consultants, media
buyers and direct-mail wizards, whom only the rich
and powerful can afford to buy. The balance of
political power has shifted irreversibly to the people.
While
conservatives are celebrating a great victory today,
the technology favors no ideology. It so happens
that anti-tax partisans were the first in Virginia
to figure out how to use it. Next year, the
populists could be opponents of the proposed
Dominion gas pipeline, or environmentalists blocking
a manufacturing facility.
The electoral earthquake is not likely to usher in a
return of 1970s, blue-collar, keep-the-big-boys
honest populism, but it will empower the educated,
tech-savvy middle class and push its issues to the
fore. Virginia's business/political elite ignores
this sweeping political transformation at its peril.
The
battle in
Northern
Virginia
began early this year when Kenneth T. Cuccinelli ran
for a vacant senate seat in the high-tech heart of Fairfax
County.
Making opposition to the tax referendum one of his
signature issues, he beat an opponent in the primary
picked by Republican power brokers, then defeated a
well known Democrat in the general election.
Cuccinelli
never stopped campaigning. Linking up with
grassroots taxpayer coalitions and other
conservative groups, he assumed a leading role in
mobilizing the opposition to the referendum.
Technology was the key.
“I
went through the cauldron this summer, figuring out
what worked well and what didn’t,”
Cuccinelli says. “We experimented with a lot
of different methodologies for harnessing e-mail and
the Internet.” He learned, for instance, that some
of the cooler features were too advanced for many
peoples’ e-mail readers. On the other hand, he
discovered that most could use audio files. “You
want to push the envelope, but you’ve got to
deliver something that people can use.”
The
audio e-mails were highly effective, Cuccinelli
says. No need for sound studios and recording
sessions for most of them. “I’d sit at my desk
and think through a quick outline. They were quick
and easy.” When he could afford to run a radio
spot, he’d reformat the ad for e-mail and blast it
over the Internet. “It gave us credibility to let
people know that we were on the radio.”
E-mail
was crucial not only for bypassing the mainstream media but for organizing the campaign. Virtually all
the referendum foes worked for a living, so they
rarely had time to get together for strategy pow-wows,
or even to participate in conference calls.
Cuccinelli communicated mainly by e-mail with key
allies – Peter Ferrara, chief economist for the
Americans for Tax reform, Tim
Wise,
head of the Arlington County Taxpayers Association,
Arthur Purves with the Fairfax County Taxpayers
Alliance – to work out strategy. Swapping
messages, they would exchange
research and haggle over talking points. He also
used e-mail to stay in touch with his Smart Growth
allies in Northern
Virginia
and the anti-tax movement in Hampton Roads.
“There
were a bunch of little groups out there that were
trying to contribute,” Cuccinelli says. In
contrast to his state senate campaign, "this
was a cat-herding exercise.” E-mail was a far more
efficient way to stay in touch than working the
phones, with all the missed calls, voice mails and
telephone tag. Cuccinelli kept up dozens of e-mail
correspondences by working until 3:00
to 4:00 a.m.
“I can do one-to-one campaigning with a vastly
larger number of people, he says, pausing... “so
long as I can forego sleep.”
Cuccinelli
also kept a digital camera with him. One day, he
drove past a new development on U.S. 29. In front, a
large sign indicated that William Hazel, one of Northern
Virginia’s
biggest contractors and a major backer of the
referendum, was doing the site-preparation work.
Nearby, someone had posted a pro-referendum flier.
Cuccinelli found an angle where he could get the
construction work, the Hazel sign and the flier all
in a single shot. By dramatizing the connection
between the developer/construction interests and the pro-tax forces, the
photo became fodder for another e-mail blast.
The
Coalition Against the Tax Referendum website
was a useful tool as well, though secondary to
e-mail. The website posted the case for opposing the
referendum, as would be expected, but also served as
a funnel for contributions and a mechanism to
solicit and organize volunteers.
The
pro-tax forces spent about $2.5 million, mostly on
direct mail, Cuccinelli says. Between them, the
anti-tax and Smart Growth forces spent about
$200,000. Relying on the Internet for most of the
campaign, he husbanded his funds for a last-minute
media blitz: three days of radio ads, five of cable
and a bank of get-out-the-vote telephone calls.
“People
were shocked at the outcomes,” Cuccinelli says.
“They’d be really shocked if they knew how few
people we did it with.” The anti-tax coalition
fielded only one full-time staff person. All told,
the anti-tax foes could mobilize about 100
volunteers who could be counted on to help out
consistently. It was the technology of the New
Economy that transformed those 100 volunteers into a
potent political force.
Brian
Kirwin had worked on more than a dozen local
political campaigns in Hampton Roads when he found
himself the odd man out this year. He was astounded
that most of the region’s representatives to the
General Assembly, including Republicans who had
signed no-tax pledges, were backing the one-cent
hike to the sales tax.
In
contrast to
Northern
Virginia,
where the Piedmont Environmental Council and
just-elected Cuccinelli provided early leadership
against the tax, there was no organized opposition
initially in Hampton Roads. There were a number of
local taxpayer leagues with locality-specific
memberships, but nothing resembling a regional
organization.
Kirwin
started tracking the legislation as it worked its
way through the General Assembly. All he had to do
was log onto the legislature’s website. The Web is
a phenomenal research tool, he says, opening up
incredible resources that otherwise would have been
inaccessible to his penny-pinched crusade. It was
through Web research that Kirwin and his cronies
discovered a similar tax referendum in Jacksonville,
Fla.
By scrutinizing the language in that legislation,
they were able to raise troubling questions about
the wording of the Hampton Roads version.
As
in Northern
Virginia,
e-mail made it possible to coordinate the loosely
knit Ax the Tax Coalition. There were strong local
organizations on the ground, particularly in Robert
Dean's group in Virginia
Beach
and Gene
Waters' in
Chesapeake,
but coordinating them would have been difficult.
“I had to coordinate with people in James City,
Chesapeake or Poquoson. I can’t imagine that being
done without e-mail,” Kirwin says. “The phone
tree would have taken forever. But one e-mail would
get everybody together in one night.”
The
Ax the Tax Coalition couldn’t afford pollsters and
focus groups, but it did have a secret weapon:
TalkNet. The Virginian-Pilot’s electronic
bulletin board supported Internet dialogue on dozens
of topics of local interest. The referendum
bulletin board was the liveliest, reaching more than
3,100 posts by the campaign’s end. Kirwin used the
bulletin board to refine his arguments before going
public with them.
“We
test marketed every message on the bulletin board
service,” Kirwin says. “We’d float a criticism
and see what the response was. We’d hone it,
tighten the message and test it again to make it
perfect for mass consumption. … We sent up a lot
of trial balloons: What happens when we say this,
what happens when we say that?”
Ax
the Tax didn’t put up its own website until late
September. Kirwin relied mostly upon e-mail to
get the word out. While the pro-tax forces poured
money into television, Kirwin punched out short,
pithy e-mails and counted on friends and allies to
relay them to others. Says Kirwin: “Whenever we
discovered a new angle that seemed to work, off went
the e-mail.”
One
of the beauties of the digital medium is its nimbleness.
While it takes several days to script, shoot and
broadcast a television ad, Kirwin could pop out
e-mails in immediate response to the latest news.
Technology is no substitute for strategy and
tactics, of course. The pro-tax forces put up a
“dynamite” website and used e-mail as well,
Kirwin acknowledges, but he kept them off balance by conceding their
strongest issues and getting them off the table,
then pounding away with his best issues, especially
those that played upon peoples’ mistrust of the
legislature. Taking to the airwaves to dispel
Kerwin's latest ploy, the pro-tax forces did more to
propagate his issues than the Ax the Tax Coalition
could on its own.
But
tactical brilliance can take you only so far.
Without the Internet, the anti-tax movement would
have been hard pressed to defeat the referendum,
much less rack up a 62 percent to 38 percent margin
of victory. “If you’ve got a computer and an
online service,” says Kirwin, “the world is
yours.”
Virginia’s
power brokers and election professionals undoubtedly
will absorb the tactical lessons of 2002. Next year,
you can be assured, they will integrate well-oiled
e-mail and Web components into their political
campaigns. But they will never regain the
communications monopoly they enjoyed when they,
and only they, could
afford to pay for PR pros, voter polls, telephone
banks, radio and television spots and the mass
dumping of literature into the U.S.
mail.
As
someone once said of the Colt six-shooter in the
Wild West, “God created man, but it was Sam Colt
who made them equal.” The PC and a telephone line
are the great political equalizers of the 21st
century. Money still matters, but it can’t buy
elections like it used to.
--
November
18, 2002
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