Remember the "borderline irresponsible"
commercial that Mark Green did against
Fernando Ferrer? That was modeled after an ad
Walter Mondale used against Gary Hart in the
presidential campaign of 1984, according to an
adviser to the Mark Green campaign. Pollsters
for Michael Bloomberg explained how they
identified the "Middle Middle Democrats" who
could be key to a
Bloomberg victory. A consultant to Ferrer
confessed
his candidate's one big mistake. And an
adviser
to the Bloomberg campaign said that, in running
the "Kill It" ad, the Green campaign "violated
the norms
of political discourse." Yes, apparently, there are
norms.
On November 8, the political professionals who
had been maneuvering against one another for
months gathered under the auspices of New
York University's
political campaign management program to
discuss and
debate the strategies they used in this year's
mayoral campaign.
Excerpts from the discussion follow.
NARROWING THE FIELD
What were your goals in the primary campaign?
William Green (consultant to the Mark Green campaign):
Given that there were four candidates, the focus of the primary
was to get in the runoff.
Jeffrey Pollack (polling for the Fernando Ferrer campaign):
Our strategy in the first round was absolutely to get 40 percent
[to avoid the runoff]. Because there were three white candidates,
we were the only candidate who could get the 40 percent. Based
on the turnout information and other things I think it's possible
that Freddy would have reached 40 percent on September 1'th [the
day the primary was originally scheduled].
Joseph Mercurio (NYU faculty member; did the direct mail
for the Herman Badillo campaign): The Ferrer campaign is the real
story in the primary -- the ability of Ferrer to energize the
Hispanic vote in a way that had not been done. New York is still
a tribal politics city, and Freddy capitalized very heavily on
the Hispanic vote and then managed ultimately to get the black
leadership to come around and get the black vote solidified around
his candidacy. They were on their way to picking up the white
vote had there not been the attacks in the runoff.
Mark Mellman (did polling for the Mark Green campaign):
Freddy was the only minority candidate in the race, and that was
extraordinarily helpful to him. Freddy's candidacy became a cause
for his voters, and I don't think the candidacies of any of the
other Democrats were a cause for their voters.
We had radio commercials in the black
community with
Mayor Dinkins. We did work in the Hispanic
community
with Hispanic radio. But it's one thing to say,
"I1m
the white guy who's been a friend of this
community."
It's something else to say, "I am this
community."
Doug Schoen (did polling for the Michael Bloomberg campaign): The Bloomberg
campaign had the luxury of not having a very competitive primary.
We used the primary for two things. One, to get Mike's name recognition
up, to tell his story, but also to begin building our grassroots
organization.
FERRER VERSUS GREEN
Moving to the runoff, what did you have to do there?
Mellman (Green): In one-on-one races
with Ferrer we had started out with a significant
lead. His victory in the primary, the attention
that
he got and the great advertising during the
runoff
made him not only a minority candidate but
also an
appealing candidate to significant numbers of
white
voters. When we did our first focus groups, the
thing
that we were most worried about was that
Ferrer had
tremendous potential appeal to white voters.
They seem
to have chosen the tactic of trying to solidify
the
minority base even at the expense of turning off
white
voters. Had he put together a
black-Latino-white
coalition he would have been really
unstoppable. After
the primary that appeal resurfaced to some
extent.
That was obviously of significant concern to us.
Pollack (Ferrer): Coming in first place
[in the primary] was necessary to give us some
kind of
momentum and to have some people say that
there was a
juggernaut coming, although if you read the
papers the
day after the election you wouldn't know that
Freddy
Ferrer won the election. You would not know
that he
came in first, which I am confident would not
have been
the case had Mark Green done the exact same
thing. So
the momentum I thought we might get out of it
actually
was dampened.
A pattern then emerged. Mark Green had 30
percent of
the vote two years ago; on primary day he had
30
percent of the vote. Mark got 30 percent of the
vote
because that is what he always got. He had 51
percent of
the vote the day after the primary. Guess what?
He got
51 percent of the vote on runoff election day.
And in
the final round, he had 47 percent of the vote
after
the runoff and got 47 percent of the vote on
Election
Day. He is not a candidate of growth.
Therefore what we needed to do was pull off
votes. And
we needed to get to these white voters. We
tried in
whatever way we could. It was very important
to us to
not get off the message entirely and look like
we were
shifting strategies and abandoning our "Two
New Yorks"
strategy.
Then the Green campaign did strategically a
very, very
smart thing: They put up a negative ad. That
was
helped by the one mistake our campaign did
which was
our World Trade Center speech. It allowed the
press to
pile on criticism of Freddy and gave the New
York
Times a chance to do what they wanted to do
all along
which was to talk about Freddy Ferrer as a
creation of
the Bronx party organization.
Mark's attack ad was meant to do one thing:
motivate
white Catholics to vote. If 15,000 white
Catholics
hadn't been motivated to vote [for Green] by
an ad we
would have won.
Mellman (Green): Our strategy with the
attack was not aimed at motivating white
Catholics to
vote, It was to raise questions about Freddy
Ferrer.
Our sense was that he was getting a lot of
positive
reinforcement and he was not a well-known
quantity, so
we had to raise some doubts. The analogy was
Gary Hart
and Walter Mondale [in the campaign for the
Democratic
presidential nomination in 1984]. Gary Hart had
come
out of New Hampshire with a big victory over
Mondale.
Mondale was the better known guy and ran the
famous ad
with the red telephone asking, "Is this guy really
ready? Do you know who he is?" That was the
model for
what we did and was why we used the New
York Times
editorial to raise questions about whether Ferrer
was
really prepared.
Green (Green): Mark rightly called for rebuilding lower Manhattan as
a priority when Freddy was still talking about dispersing it throughout
the city. If nothing else it gave the New York Times, the Daily
News and Crain's a reason to endorse Mark, and the Times endorsement
of Mark really took Freddy apart. They eviscerated him as an organization
hack.
Pollock (Ferrer): Our World Trade
strategy, the speech that we made, was a
mistake. But
to be fair, Freddy said all these jobs are going to
go
to New Jersey so let's find a place for them for
the
next year and let's make sure that they1re in
Brooklyn, the Bronx, in these four boroughs. He
didn't
say let's ship them out permanently. He then
went back
and did say that, which was a mistake.
Schoen (Bloomberg): We ran on a plan
which, while certainly differently from Ferrer's,
nonetheless animated the same themes. The
fact he was
a Hispanic borough president talking about
dispersing
jobs painted the perception that the plan was
patronage and designed to try to take Wall
Street jobs
and move them to Central Harlem. Ferrer was
not able
to make the case that dispersal of jobs would
benefit
the entire populace.
Pollock (Ferrer): Freddy got hammered
on it. And in some ways it was unfair, but it was
still probably tactically a stupid mistake. On the
other hand, I think Mark made a tactical mistake
which
was at the beginning he far overplayed his hand
that
it's all about lower Manhattan. He then
tempered that.
Mellman (Green): There was some
difference in the way minority voters and white
voters
responded to the World Trade Center. This was
a
horrific thing for New York, and I don't mean to
create any separation here, but there was a
difference
in the way people reacted. The Ferrer campaign
understood that and kept the focus very much
on their
previous agenda. For Freddy's constituency it
was a
secondary issue in some ways, while for our
constituency it was more of a primary issue.
Mayor Giuliani asked the three
remaining
candidates to agree to let him remain in office
for an
additional three months. Green and Bloomberg
agreed;
Ferrer did not. How would you assess each
campaign's
handling of this issue?
Schoen (Bloomberg): Mark Green did
exactly the right thing. He needed to get 80
odd
percent of the white vote. The question that
outer-borough Catholics had was, was he
somebody who
shared their view of the world. [By agreeing to
the
extension] he was able to mobilize that
constituency.
For the general election, had Mark come out
against
the Giuliani extension it would have created
even more
difficulties
Freddy made the right decision for him because
[rejecting the mayor's plan] provided a
constituency
that could be mobilized, particularly in the black
community. Both candidates did what they
needed to.
Mellman (Green): The issue that was on
the table was not the extension but the
abolition of
term limits. It was quite clear that if Rudy
Giuliani
was on the ballot, we were not going to win and
neither was Mike Bloomberg, So what was
important to
us was to prevent Rudy Giuliani from being on
the
ballot.
You have a very much tighter transition here
than you
have for the president. You don't have the
same
resources available for the city transition as you
do
for the president, This obviously was a city in
the
midst of a very deep and shocking crisis. When
Mark
was thinking about [the extension], he was
thinking
about the transition itself. The politics were that
if
we got into a general election where we were
against
it, and Bloomberg was for it that's not
something we
could really survive.
ONTO NOVEMBER
Running as a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic city,
what did Bloomberg have to do?
Schoen (Bloomberg): We knew from the
start that we needed to create a broad based
coalition. Second and probably more important
we saw a
need to create a broad-based message around
economic
change, economic development, economic
growth and
rebuilding that would be non partisan. Our
whole goal
was to say there isn't a Democratic or a
Republican
way for keeping jobs in the city or creating jobs
or
rebuilding New York.
The issue dynamic had changed. The downturn
in the
economy was more pronounced as an issue, the
issue of
rebuilding which obviously hadn't existed
[before
September 11] was preeminent in people's
minds. An
election that had been about education was
now about a
lot of very different things. So we saw ourselves
able
to build that cross-party, cross-ethnic
cross-ideological coalition. The schism between
Ferrer
and Green in the runoff gave us the opportunity
to
build on the work we had done in the Hispanic
community and to continue to try to get the
quarter of
the black vote we thought we needed to have a
real
chance to win.
Berland (Bloomberg): We approached the
election very differently than politics as usual
and
targeting as usual. From the beginning, we had
made
the strategic decision to target voters on an
attitudinal basis rather than along political lines.
There was a core group of voters who were going to make the difference
in this election: middle middle Democrats. They were lower to
middle income, they were both Hispanic and white, they were predominantly
Catholic, they were in the outer boroughs. They respected that
Mike was a self-made man, appreciated the fact that he would pay
for the campaign himself and not use taxpayers' money, and they
really were enjoying the quality of life that Rudy Giuliani had
created in New York.
We went through four bases of a mail program
with
them. The first was to build our name
awareness. In
the second phase, we found out who would
support us
immediately, who would be undecided and who
could
never come into our camp. In the third phase,
we got
the issues and Mike's positions out. We started
out
with crime and education, and as the summer
went on
and the recession was looming, we moved to
more of an
economic message. In the fourth phase, we
went
straight to persuasion.
Our advertising, our mail and our phone
program was
all going through the lens of the middle middle
Democrat. When we did our ad testing, we
would test it
with the middle middle Democrat. When we did
our mail
testing we tested it with the middle middle
Democrats
because our supporters were attitudinally
aligned with
the middle middle Democrats.
Schoen (Bloomberg): Mike Bloomberg did
not want to run anything that appeared to be
just an
attack ad. Virtually all the ads we ran until the
waning days of the campaign were comparative
ads about
our approach to city government versus Mark
Green's
approach. The only ad that I can think of that
was a
straight negative ad was the final ad of the
election,
the so-called Democrats on Mark Green ad,
quotes of
what Democrats said about Mark Green during
the
campaign. We felt putting Democrats talking
about Mark
Green on one hand and in the other instance
Mark Green
talking about Rudy Giuliani were perfectly fair
and
reasonable approaches.
Berland (Bloomberg): The groups that we
were targeting didn't appreciate negatives.
They were
looking for a reason to support Mike. Our
comparison
ads were really trying to compare on the issues
that
were important in the election. Mike was very
insistent that he wanted to keep it at that level
Schoen (Bloomberg): I think it would be
useful for the Green campaign to speak to the
very
controversial decision to put the so-called "kill
it"
ad on. There is not much evidence that it
helped and
probably a lot of evidence that it hurt.,
Certainly,
it. as I know them.
Mellman (Green): We decided in the
runoff that we could and needed to run an
attack ad
that worked, and it did. In our tracking we were
behind Freddy before we did that and after we
were
ahead so I think there's little question that it
worked and it worked well
In the general election it was our hope to run a
wholly positive campaign. The bottom line is we
faced
a situation where we were being overwhelmed,
and so we
had to go out and say something that raised
questions
about Mike Bloomberg. Our first attempt at a
negative
ad was on education. As the negative ads and
the
Giuliani ads and the mail and so on kept
coming and
things weren't working, our campaign became
a little
reluctant to stick with [it].
We were four points down on Sunday night. We
could
keep doing what we were doing and lose. Or we
could
try something else at the very last minute in
hopes of
pulling out a victory. We had tested a number
of ads.
The "kill it" ad was not our most effective ad. It
was
the most noticed ad. It generated the greatest
degree
of discussion. It broke through.
Did [the ad] help or did it hurt? We were down
by
four, We lost by three. That's really margin of
error
stuff.
There are three factors you have to look at in
understanding the outcome of this election. The
first
is the spending and whether it's $60 million or
$70
million, no one has ever been outspent by that
amount
of money and won an election. The direct mail
budget
for the Bloomberg campaign was larger than our
entire
campaign budget.
We thought we had enough money for two,
maybe three
television spots. We ended up doing slightly
more than
that which is more than we should have done.
[The lack
of money] forced upon us extraordinarily
difficult
choices. Not only was Mike Bloomberg spending
a lot of
money when our money was extremely
restricted. but by
buying the amount they bought they actually
bid up the
rate [charged for ad time].
My own belief is that without that money neither of the other
factors I'm going to cite would have been decisive. The second
was September 11, and I think September 11 did two things. First
it turned Rudy Giuliani from a moderately popular mayor into a
demigod, and that demigod status enables him to be effective in
a wonderful endorsement commercial.
The second thing about September 11 is that it
provided a rationale for the Bloomberg
candidacy that
otherwise might have been absent. The
Bloomberg
campaign in a series of very effective ads
changed
people's attitudes not just about Mike
Bloomberg but
about what was necessary for the job. Absent
the
devastation of September 11, it would have
been a lot
harder to tell people that what you really need
is
someone who had created jobs and done all the
wonderful things in business that Mike
Bloomberg had
done.
The fracturing of the Democratic Party: There's
no
question that there was fracturing. What I think
is
abundantly clear though is that the black and
Hispanic
community at large did not initially have the
same
reaction to Mark Green and Mark Green's
campaign as
the leadership did. If you look at the polling
right
after we won the runoff, we were getting the
kinds of
margins among black and Hispanic voters that
we needed
to win. The [negative] reaction wasn't there in
the
community at large. It was there among certain
elements of the leadership. Those people chose
to vent
their anger as publicly as possible, and the
Bloomberg
campaign brilliantly used that and used those
comments
to drive that wedge very effectively.,
Pollock (Ferrer): Mark [Mellman] brought up three points as to why Green
campaign lost and not one of them was Mark Green, which I find
remarkable. This is a man who needs to look in the mirror and
ask himself why he lost and not just pass the blame to Freddy
Ferrer and the Hispanics. I was there when Mark Green like a total
idiot said to a group of elected officials "I can win without
you. I can't govern without you." The arrogance of that man to
say that was a mistake, a mistake by the way which he acknowledged
one week later in another meeting
The Green candidate deserves a lot of
responsibility
for why he won or lost. Other Democratic
candidates in
the face of all this money etc., etc, I think would
have won this race.
Mitchell Moss (NYU professor who advised the
Bloomberg campaign): What I am concerned
about is why Mark Green did not have an ad
with any
major Democrat. Mark Green had endorsements
every
day., Mrs. Clinton, the former president, Senator
Schumer. Why did he never have a commercial
with a
Democratic elected official supporting him. You
remember when he won the runoff. he was up
there with
him family. I said that's Mark Green's problem.
He had
nobody around him who was an elected official.
The
singularity of the campaign, the unwillingess to
use
other Democrats made him vulnerable.
Mellman (Green): There was an ad with
Cuomo, which probably no one saw. It was a
spending
question. We were going to have a limited
number of
positive points Should we talk about Mark
Green and
his vision or should we use other people?
What are the long-term effects of this
campaign on New York City politics?
Green (Green): The Democrats have to
figure out how to make the party unified again
and win
election like they1re supposed to.
Mellman (Green): The thing that has
been most disquieting to me is the way in which
the
racial politics has been handled. I1m speaking
personally here. If the Amsterdam News [which
endorsed
Michael Bloomberg] talked about Freddy Ferrer
and his
gang of Latinos from the Bronx, could anyone
have
said, "I accept that endorsement but I would
have used
different words"? But when the Amsterdam
News says
"the gang of Jews from Brooklyn," [Bloomberg]
can say,
"I accept the endorsement but I would have
used
different words." At the same time, a New York
Times
editorial that attacks a Latino saying that his
plan
is borderline irresponsible is considered racist
There is something about this that is
disquieting In
this city, Al Sharpton is the person who gets to
decide whether something is racist or not. I
think
that's dangerous. We1re veering into
dangerous
territory that has more profound implications
than
electoral implications.
Berland (Bloomberg): This campaign and Mike Bloomberg
as a candidate is the first time in New York politics that we1ve
seen a broad coalition of support. He won the white vote, he almost
won the Hispanic vote and got sizable percentage of the black
vote. His vision from the beginning was to try to transcend politics
as usual, transcend party lines, transcend racial lines and really
try to unify the city. What this election show is that it is possible.
Mercurio (Badillo): In recent
years,
the non-primary voting Democrats, are really
mislabeled. They1re enrolled in the Democratic
Party
because most things happen in primaries,
there's a lot
of history here with the Democratic Party, there
really isn't a Republican Party locally. That 30
percent of the Democratic Party has been up for
grabs
in recent years.
Pollock (Ferrer): In the end,
Mark
Green ends up being the Shimon Peres of New
York
politics: He loses the big ones but wins the little
ones. It's very hard to beat $50 million or $70
million. The Latino vote does not come out of
the
civil rights movement as black voters do and
therefore
their ties to the Democratic Party are not nearly
what
the African American vote's tie to the
Democratic
Party is. It cannot be taken for granted, which is
what they proved in this election. But more than
anything, rumors of the Democratic Party's
demise are
grossly exaggerated. This was a campaign that
was
about an individual, and the two individuals who
were
on the ballot at the end of the day were Mark
Green
and Rudy Giuliani. That was what the election
was
about
Schoen (Bloomberg): What I
think is
probably most hopeful about this election from
Bloomberg's perspective is that he did run a
race as a
unifier and had some considerable success at
unifying
the city. Whether that will continue or not is
unclear. We don't know what's going to
happen, we
don't know what kind of success he's going to
have But
his ability to try to bring New York together at
a
time when we are facing incalculable social and
economic ills is something that I think we
should all
earnestly applaud.