Stuart Stevens - The Big Enchilada: Campaign Adventures with the Cockeyed Optimists from Texas Who Won the Biggest Prize in Politics

I HAD BEEN AT THE GYM for three hours when I got the call. It was what I did on Election DayI went to the gym and worked myself into a small frenzy waiting for the first exit polls. Each of us had his own ritual. One group, Matthew Dowd and Dan Bartlett and a bunch of guys from the press, had teed off at 7:30 A.M. and others were going to the movies. Me, I dont have the metabolic rate for golf or film on a calm day, forget about Election Day. I knew one guy who always went to strip clubs and maintained it was the only thing that could really keep him from replaying the election in his headthe things that he had done wrong, what could have been, the spots that never made it on the air. All this stuff he seemed able to forget while watching some girl feign love to a silver pole. Im sure it beat hanging around the office poring over the last tracking numbers like a Biblical scholar given first crack at the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Tracking numbers. For years I had lived and died by tracking numbers. Thats what those of us who are perverse enough to spend our lives in political combat call overnight daily polling numbers. As in, How was the Pennsylvania track last night? or If our fave/unfave with married women holds up in one more track, this thing is done. In life, you have to believe in something and it was pretty much essential in politics to believe your own tracking. It was like what they said about religion in combatin a crazed and chaotic world that didnt seem to make much sense from one moment (or news cycle) to the next, you needed something to cling to, something to bring order and a semblance of rationality to your world when more often than not, it felt like the sun was busy rising over that western horizon.

Tracking. Somewhere in little cubicles in some call center in Omaha (good midwestern accents, flat, and close to two time zones) or Phoenix or Chicago, perfectly innocent strangers were calling other innocent strangers to interrupt their dinner or television joy with, Were conducting a nationwide survey of voters and would like to ask you a few questions Maybe the person who answered was having an argument with their spouse, maybe their favorite team was winning big or their kid just got into college or just wrecked the car or those test results from the doctor didnt look so goodnone of that was supposed to matter. That person was expected to spend ten or fifteen minutes revealing their innermost political secrets and passions. We call that a completed interview or simply a complete. You get two hundred completes a night, subject them to this mysterious polling mumbo jumbo called weighting, and, presto, out come the voting intentions of a state the size of, well, Florida.

Of course, every pollster tells you not to put too much faith in one nights track but instead look at what they call the roll. Thats when you average together, say, three nights of tracking. Its never really made sense to me that one night was untrustworthy but if you put together three nights of these untrustworthy numbers, you came up with something so prescient you could rely on it to shift around millions of dollars of television or to decide where you were going to schedule events, dragging the whole presidential campaign traveling circus with you. Ask a pollster about it and they will say thats the beauty of statistics, that you can average together enough nonsense and suddenly it will be brilliant.

But you have to trust something, so you trust tracking. Our tracksthe Bush campaignshad been good. We liked our tracks. We had mostly happy tracks.

Then the call came from Mark McKinnon. Outside it was raining and inside everything was a pleasant blur. That morning Id been to an eye doctor in preparation for having laser surgery two days after the election, and the drops had thrust me into a fuzzy but not unpleasant world of vague shapes. I was also wearing sunglasses inside, which no doubt made me look like the biggest asshole in Austin. Major league, as we like to say. My best hope was that people might think I was actually blind and show a little pity, which was working pretty well, I think, until I realized I had been staring for half an hour up at the bank of televisions where CNN was dueling with MSNBC and Fox. That blew my blind thing and I just went back to being some jerk in sunglasses at the gym.

Then Mark called and Im surprised people didnt start hurling dumbbells at me. I would have. A jerk in sunglasses talking on a cell phone at the gym. Death.

Tight, Mark said.

What?

Tight, he said again, sighing.

Like how tight?

Like tied in the popular.

Tied in the popular? I thought. How could we be tied in the popular vote? We were going to win this thing by three or four points.

Hows Pennsylvania?

Down four.

Michigan?

Down four or five.

Florida? I realized my heart was pounding and I was holding the cell phone so tightly, Im surprised it didnt shatter like a martini glass. If we were losing Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida

Not so good. Mark sounded incredibly depressed but Mark could get that way and then bounce back sixty seconds later. Down four, he sighed.

I literally shivered. Maybe it was just standing there soaking wet on a rainy cold day in Austin in a gym that seemed to have the air conditioning cranked to high.

Im coming over, I said to Mark, who was at campaign headquarters.

Fine. Im leaving, he said.

Where you going?

Ill think of something.

But Mark was still at the campaign thirty minutes later. Our whole crew was huddled together in Matthews office looking like a suicide hotline group therapy session.

The crew was the Maverick crowdMatthew Dowd, Russ Schriefer, Laura Crawford. For over a year and a half we had been working together as Maverick Media, which had been created as the Bush campaigns in-house ad agency. We had separate offices at two production facilities in town but over the summer Matthew had begun coordinating polling and set up shop in an office next to Karl Roves in the strategy department of the campaign. (Or strateregy as everybody started to call it after Saturday Night Live mocked Bush for his tendency to mangle a sylalable or two, as he put it.)

Matthew, like Mark McKinnon, had been a Democratic political operative, the whiz kid who, as communications director for Ann Richards, had engineered the last big win Dems had in Texas, the 1990 sweep. Mark and he had worked together at Public Strategies, Austins powerhouse lobbying and PR firm, which Matthew had cofounded. When Mark signed on for the Bush presidential, he brought over Matthew to be chief financial officer of Maverick and plan the television buys for the campaign. Matthew loved numbers and it was easy to peg him at first glance as a quiet numbers guy with a pencil fetish. There were always razor-sharp pencils arranged neatly on his desk and if he was wearing a sports coat, usually there would be two or three pencils sticking up like lances from his handkerchief pocket. I always figured if he was running through an airport and tripped, there was a high likelihood he would fatally impale himself. I mentioned this to him once and he seriously considered it for a second, then shrugged and said, I need my pencils. Its worth the risk.