Watching Missouri from the DNC Headquarters

The new issue is at the printers. We ran out of space in this last issue for all of our content. So here is a piece by Larry Handlin we couldn't fit in about his experience watching election returns. (Note to Handlin fans: The new issue does have a different piece by Handlin.)

Watching Missouri from the DNC Headquarters
by Larry Handlin

After raising money for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee I won a chance to watch the elections from the internet strategy office for the DCCC on election day. Given early November is a rather miserable time in St. Louis for me due to allergies I chucked plans to work around town and headed east.

The War Room as it is called isn’t nearly as glamorous as it sounds, but it did contain a smart group of folks who developed one of the most effective web strategies during the campaign cycle and Joe Trippi’s team used on the Dean race was there working on the race.

After some sight seeing we settled down in the office to watch the returns come in and let folks know what we were hearing from around the country. Talking to people involved in Get Out the Vote efforts in St. Louis and St. Louis County, I knew there were huge numbers of voters at polling places and that turnout was through the roof. Dale Fisher barely had time to talk as he was being dispatched to pick up voters.

The question was whether evangelical radio which was all Bush all the time for the last few months was also motivating enough Republican voters to get to the polls as well. In retrospect, we know that effort was incredibly successful, but the Democratic effort was quite impressive as well.

Early polling started to come in and all the sources available to us indicated a Kerry lead. Much has been made of these numbers being ‘wrong’, but they weren’t. They just hadn’t been analyzed in terms of relative turnout and so they weren’t fully representative of the voters. Networks later take the numbers and then analyze them and perform some basic manipulations so they fit the turnout. Not having time to run through those, everyone took them for what they were and got back to talking to people and checking sources for what was going on out there.

The first sign of trouble was an e-mail that Russ Carnahan’s campaign thought that Federer would get no more than 46% of the vote. In a district with a wide Democratic advantage this made everyone look around at each other and wonder what the hell happened. Federer ended up with 45% of the vote. Bekki Cook’s people were reported to be panicked, but no one could figure out why.

As soon as polling closed and St. Louis County results came in, it was clear that Charlie Dooley had won with a 5% gap that couldn’t be closed in the afternoon. Of course, I was so busy that a friend had to e-mail me the explanation because I had not even thought through the implications.

That was a momentary boost. Then we started to notice huge turnouts in Florida, where one wouldn’t expect huge turnouts including Brevard County, which includes Cape Kennedy and lots of ex-military. That number told us that Florida was a lot closer than anyone expected.