History has usually smiled on party chairmen who presided over a White House win, a success that outgoing Democratic National Committee head Terry McAuliffe can't claim. But Clio may still regard McAuliffe with favor. Though Democrats are focusing on the ideology of his possible successor -- Is Howard Dean too left? Will a centrist like Donnie Fowler turn off eager young people? -- they might do better to make sure that whoever they pick for the post this Saturday will build on the one major success McAuliffe did deliver: Over the last couple of years, for the first time since anyone has kept real records, the DNC actually raised more money than its Republican counterpart.
For the presidential race and other contests around the nation in 2003 and 2004, the DNC pulled in $389.8 million to the Republican National Committee's $385.3 million. But there was an even subtler measure of McAuliffe's achievement, as shown by the National Annenberg Election Survey. In 2000, 8 percent of those who voted for George W. Bush said they had given money to Republicans, while 7 percent of those who voted for Al Gore gave to Democrats. This year, a post-election survey found that twice as many Bush voters (16 percent) had given. But the Democratic side tripled its rate and overtook the GOP, as 21 percent of Kerry voters gave to Democrats at various levels.
All about the money: Terry McAuliffe is leaving behind a fundraising juggernaut.
(Sam Morris -- AP)
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This is an extraordinary change, considering that in 2001, McAuliffe took over a party that was $18 million in debt, with a shabby headquarters in Southeast Washington equipped with third-rate technology. He put his talents as a soft-money Svengali to work to raise the funds to rebuild the headquarters, adding about $10 million worth of technology. He got the money together under the wire to beat a ban on soft-money spending by the national parties that came into effect with the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, and spent it on the renovation despite appeals from some Democratic Party figures to use it instead on the 2002 midterm elections.
Having 60 computer servers that can send up to 1.5 million e-mails per hour, a television studio with satellite capability and a permanent national voter file with millions of names may seem as necessary to modern national politics as a printing press to a newspaper. But the Democrats had none of this until McAuliffe came along.
The change is even more impressive in light of the past. Direct mail has been a staple of Republican fundraising since the 1970s, and DNC chairmen before McAuliffe always promised to catch up on that front. None followed through until the early '90s, when Ron Brown made a promising start. But his efforts withered away in the soft-money chase of the Clinton years, when McAuliffe and others went after the six-figure checks and the party forgot the small donors whom Brown had started to find through the mails.
Meanwhile, from 1974 to 1980, the Republicans developed fundraising capacities that kept small donors in touch with the party. In recent years, the GOP has also begun to mine data on car ownership and magazine subscriptions to find likely prospects for cash and votes, while the Democrats never even had a national voter list until McAuliffe. Now they have one with 170 million names, and direct mail is working so well that it makes money even when new prospects are contacted.
McAuliffe's accomplishment might have been more difficult if Al Gore had squeaked through in 2000, because when a party has the White House, its national committee is usually subordinated to the immediate needs (or whims) of the White House, as the DNC was under Bill Clinton. But as McAuliffe told me in a recent interview, "When you're the chair without the White House, you're the boss."
McAuliffe contends that the fundraising machinery is now so well established that the Democrats "can never use money as a crutch again" to explain their failures to win the White House. He expects to leave his successor at least $1 million in the bank and a real prospect of raising $100 million this year to rebuild the party and revitalize its state operations.
McAuliffe has talked about the party's need to use its new equipment even more strategically. He credits the Republicans with being way ahead on using databases to find potential voters inside the opposition's precincts. He has put $5 million into this year's Virginia elections to test messages and techniques for finding voters, as well as to help the state party, much as the Republicans did leading up to 2004.
Democrats have lots of remaining problems, from developing attractive candidates to figuring out and then spelling out what they stand for. National chairmen, even if they get on television a lot, can't do that for a party. But as former RNC deputy chairman Eddie Mahe, now a Republican consultant in Washington, told me the other day, "I'm sorry to say that in fundraising and technology, McAuliffe put the Democratic National Party on an even playing field with the Republicans."
Or at least -- and at last -- in the same league.
Author's e-mail:
aclymer@asc.upenn.edu
Adam Clymer, former Washington correspondent for the New York Times, is political director of the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey.
