Rick Ridder - Looking for Votes in All the Wrong Places: Tales and Rules from the Campaign Trail

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Copyright 2016 by Rick Ridder
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

Portions of Chapter 7 were originally published in Campaigns & Elections in July, 2013.
Portions of Chapter 8 were published by the Denver Post in March, 6, 2015.
Portions of Chapter 13 were originally published in Campaigns & Elections in July, 1992.
Portions of the chapter A Few Musings at the End were published previously by RealClearPolitics, December 8, 2014.

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First edition: November 2016
eBook ISBN: 978-1-68230-798-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68230-799-1

RICK RIDDER is President and Co-Founder of RBI Strategies and Research, a former presidential campaign manager, and a senior consultant for six other presidential campaigns. Rick has consulted for numerous U.S. Congressional, gubernatorial, and state and local initiative campaigns. Internationally, he has worked in over 22 nations, including on the successful campaigns of five heads of state. His firm is one of the few to win Pollie Awards (the Oscars of the political industry) for creative efforts, technology applications, and management capabilities (International Consultant of the Year). Rick has also been recognized with the Award of Achievement from the Gleitsman Foundation for commitment and leadership initiating social change. He has written for Salon, Campaigns and Elections, Australian Financial Review, RealClear Politics, and The Denver Post. He has appeared on The Daily Show, all major US networks, the BBC, Australian Broadcasting, and a number of other foreign broadcast networks.

Rick holds a B.A. from Middlebury College and an M.S. from Boston University, and is an adjunct professor at the University of Denvers Korbel School of International Studies. He lives in Denver, Colorado, with his wife and business partner, Joannie Braden.

For Joe Napolitan, Bill Daly, Matt Reese, and Jean Westwoodmentors who let me learn by making my own mistakes.

Change is inevitableexcept from a vending machine.

Robert C. Gallagher

My entry into political campaigning, and into associating myself with a political party, began at a young age. I remember it clearly.

Late fall, 1956. I was accompanying my mother to a meeting of the Fairfax County Democrats at Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia. As she pulled her vehiclea Nash Ramblertoward the sidewalk to park, she told me, Sit in the car. Quietly.

I protested. Can I come with you?

She reiterated. Better you wait in the car. I wont be long.

I reiterated. Cant I come with you?

She gave in. (If only all my arguments ended with such a quick victory.) Okay, you can get out of the car, if you promise to stay nearby. She reached to the floor mats and collected a sheaf of papers. And hand these to the people going into the building.

What are they?

They are papers telling people to vote for Adlai Stevenson for President. She opened the door to let me out of the car.

Okay, I said jumping down to the sidewalk. Is Daddy for him, too?

No, hes for General Eisenhower. She handed me the leaflets.

I stiffened and, chest protruding, announced, Well, I want to be like Daddy.

My mother was always open-minded. Thats fine, she said, reaching for the leaflets. But then you cant hand these out for Adlai Stevenson. And you will have to stay in the car. Quietly.

I cant be like Daddy and hand these to the people? I asked.

No, you cant! responded my mother with a stare.

Lesson one: Politics is about forcing choices.

I chose the automobile liberation and so, at age three, became a Democrat and a political operative. Later in my organizing career, I wondered what was written on those leaflets and why I was handing them to people entering a Democratic Party meeting where, presumably, all of the participants already supported Stevenson. Wouldnt it have been wiser to send me to a street corner to target swing voters?

This misdirection of resources may explain why my efforts on behalf of Stevenson did not result in victory. He lostas have many of the candidates, causes, parties, and wannabes on whose behalf I have labored.

This book started as a reaction to one of those campaignsa campaign during which staff and consultants enjoyed way too much laughter and conviviality along the way to a monumental loss. After a brief recap of our pollingwe were never going to win, as our polling had shown us from start to finishand a few more beers, wines, and whiskeys, one of our younger team members asked me, As the old curmudgeon among us, what were campaigns like before cellphones, computers, Facebook, micro-targeting, online advertising, and text messaging?

I resisted the opportunity to add microbrews to his list of nouveau campaign accoutrements. Further, I elected not to tell the assemblage that I was a key member of the Adlai Stevenson team. But I did accept the challenge of describing what campaigning was like back when many of us owned only twelve-inch black-and-white TVs. I began by recounting a few war stories from the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern, which had taken place before the birth of every other person in the room. When I finished, our campaign field director, who had been schooled in the Obama voter contact program, commented, I cant believe your McGovern door-to-door effort was so extensive and detailed. By the way, you should write this down.

I didnt immediately commit to his suggestion, but I did try to explain that strategy had not changed a great deal since 1972; it was the tools of the trade that had changed significantly, even as the purpose remained the same. For instance, we now have computers to track voters, which as a friend once said, is a really, really fast way to track and sort 3 x 5 cards that have voter data.

The stories that night did not end with the McGovern campaign, nor did my political lifealthough it took a bit of a detour post 1972. After I worked on the McGovern campaign, I was a college student, graduate student, doctoral student, law student, sportswriter, music critic, minor-league gambler on baseball games, radio and television producer, newscaster, disc jockey, ski instructor, and Boston cab driver. I had some notable successes, but finding a career path was not one of them. At best, I was headed toward becoming an academic specialist in media law who could produce rock-and-roll and country music recordings. That was an eclectic skill set, but one for which there was zero demand in the job market. Moreover, it did not seem to satisfy some more grandiose instinct I possessed to effect societal change.

That instinct, along with a distrust of excessive state police power, probably stemmed from my one week as a fifteen-year-old McCarthy for President volunteer at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. I watched from our hotel hallway as cops beat and pulled my fellow coworkers from their rooms on the 15th floor. This was only hours after the cops had bloodied demonstrators in Grant Park in what was later called a police riot. Yes, teenagers are impressionable.

In 1980, I gave up my job as a broadcast producer, which had netted me an offer to get in on the ground floor of a new cable network known as the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN). I declined, saying I didnt want to produce demolition derbies. Of course, many of my friends say that is precisely what I have been doing for the past thirty-plus years as a campaign consultant.