Whose Coalition Is It Anyway?

Xan over at corrente has a very interesting post up about “The Prosperity Project.” I wrote a long piece about it last year and blogger ate it (before I learned to save my posts.) I didn’t have the heart to re-write it and the moment passed.

But, Xan has researched this very interesting and (so far) underreported story of a soft intimidation project on the part of Republican businessmen.This is a very sophisticated operation under the auspices of BIPAC, a long time Republican business organization. I don’t know how many of you have had a boss who was a vociferous Republican, but I have. They couldn’t tell me for whom to vote, but they sure made it clear that if I spoke out it wouldn’t be looked upon kindly. And plenty of others, who normally wouldn’t care a bit about politics, suddenly found that they were favored employees by going out of their way to push the bosses political agenda. This Prosperity Project works on the assumption that managers will perform to their bosses orders and recommended Prosperity Project materials (particularly its marvelously misleading web site) to “educate” workers on issues of concern to them. It looks like they pulled out the stops in this election:

Managers at more than 50,000 companies in Ohio urged employees to vote, while trying to coax them in e-mails to look at customized internal Web sites rating politicians’ votes on business issues, a project leader said. One rating gave Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry a zero last year on votes affecting manufacturers.

Greg Casey, a former U.S. Senate sergeant-at-arms who headed what he calls business’ “below-the-radar” national effort, said it resulted in 30 million electronic contacts with workers, about 700,000 the day before the election.

Casey believes that the “Prosperity Project” had a big impact in Ohio, citing research suggesting that for every 10 employees who scanned company Web sites, one was motivated to vote. He said Ohio companies made 1.3 million employee contacts, more than nine times Bush’s 136,483-vote victory margin in the state.

Prosperity Project officials, however, say they are “respectful” to employees and merely offer them access to information affecting their companies’ prospects in a tough global economy.

I think that we are beginning to get the outlines of an election that had a number of under the radar GOP “grassroots” campaigns with little overt national direction. The Republicans seem to have been successful by presenting a candidate who wasn’t specific, but rather presented an image of leadership that people felt comfortable with. Various groups then ran a series of campaigns aimed at specific constituencies that applied their particular policy preference to this vague agenda.

But the untold story of the 2004 election, according to national religious leaders and grass-roots activists, is that evangelical Christian groups were often more aggressive and sometimes better organized on the ground than the Bush campaign. The White House struggled to stay abreast of the Christian right and consulted with the movement’s leaders in weekly conference calls. But in many respects, Christian activists led the charge that GOP operatives followed and capitalized upon.

This was particularly true of the same-sex marriage issue. One of the most successful tactics of social conservatives — the ballot referendums against same-sex marriage in 13 states — bubbled up from below and initially met resistance from White House aides, Christian leaders said.

In dozens of interviews since the election, grass-roots activists in Ohio, Michigan and Florida credited President Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, with setting a clear goal that became a mantra among conservatives: To win, Bush had to draw 4 million more evangelicals to the polls than he did in 2000. But they also described a mobilization of evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics that took off under its own power.

This is interesting because it’s exactly what the Democrats have been criticized for all these years — being a coalition of single issue consituencies developing their own agendas, not working well with others and creating havoc on the ability to govern when the party is in power. When each group thinks they are the single reason the party won an election, they tend to think they have priority and it’s a big headache. The Republicans have been pretty good at keeping their coalition together with appeals to patriotism and fear of the other. We’ll see how long that works for them. Trying to keep the New Deal coalition together was very difficult — and that was with a very impressive record of achievement that materially changed peoples lives and brought the country through a depression and WWII to a period of unprecedented prosperity.

Meanwhile, for the first time in memory, the Democrats put away their differences and worked together. And much to my surprise and delight, I’m not seeing the circular firing squad nearly as vicious as it usually is after a loss. Perhaps we can hang tough long enough for the Republicans to get a taste of governing with single issue constituencies for a while. Good luck with that.