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By Erik Ness
It's just two hours before the polls close in Minnesota, and the campaign manager is lost.
Peering beyond the crack in the windshield of his gold SUV, Ken Martin struggles to navigate around Minneapolis construction. The car radio is breathless over Barack Obama’s gathering blue storm. Martin’s Blackberry chirps ecstatically as messages pour in from far-flung political friends. Already people are celebrating a historic election. But Martin is deep in his own end-game: He’s got nearly 200 people in the field, and — most important — the polls are still open. Voters are still in play.
Martin is in charge of another historic, albeit lower-profile, candidate: the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment, a ballot measure that could raise billions for conservation in Minnesota. Ten years in the making, it is the largest referendum of its kind in U.S. history. Exhaustive research had shown that it has broad nonpartisan support. But after 10 months of campaigning, Martin still can’t say whether voters will stay in the booth long enough to read the ballot question and pencil in Yes, or simply leave after choosing McCain or Obama. “Keeps me up at night,” he confesses.
“This is the time of the campaign where there’s nothing else you can do,” he adds, wanting nothing so much as to do just a little more. And so here he is on the waning edge of election night trying to get to the one place where he might yet sway a few more voters.
But when he arrives, there is not a voter in sight.
Agitated, he dials his second in command, Justin Fay. “I’m not being useful here, Justin, so you’ve got to give me a precinct, because I need to go to a place where there’s a line. Do you have any place at all?” Campaign intel delivers: Precinct 6, Ward 4, just 10 minutes away.
The polling place is a church at midblock, and the line extends nearly to the corner. It’s a beautiful autumn night, clear and mild, with a half moon rising. More than 350 people are in queue, and the atmosphere is festive. It’s an urban tableau of languages and skin colors, voters attired in everything from traditional Somali head scarves to Goth regalia. In the final tally for this precinct, Obama would outrun McCain 10 to 1, and the partisan crowd already senses victory. Voters don’t seem to mind the wait, as they snap pictures, marking history.
“We’ve got to find a place where we can talk to these people,” says Martin, spotting a campaign volunteer at the corner holding a “Vote Yes” sign. She’s one of many working at critical precincts around the state today, and she reports getting pushed around by an ornery poll watcher. All day the campaign’s last-minute visibility push has run into flak from election officials. Undeterred, sure of his rights and staying beyond the 100-foot perimeter set by law, Martin starts working the end of the line: “Vote Yes for clean water.”
First one and then another poll worker tries to shut him down. “You’re interfering with our right to talk with people and campaign on Election Day,” he argues. “I’m going to continue working until I hear otherwise.”
296 Days to Go: The Big Tent
Martin took control of the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment campaign work on January 10, 2008, more than a month before the state Legislature moved the bill to the ballot. He realized it would be an uphill fight to amend the state constitution. As a political junkie, Martin knew the broad strokes of the story well. Over the past several decades, soaring costs for health care, education and other social services had forced fiscal crises in state after state. Funding for conservation often felt the state ax, and federal dollars had declined as well. Minnesota was no exception.
As a result, The Nature Conservancy and other groups started taking their case directly to voters, asking them to fund what their legislatures would not. And overwhelmingly, voters said Yes, approving tax increases and bond issues to protect their lands and waters. From 1986 to 2007, voters supported 155 of the ballot measures The Nature Conservancy worked on, generating more than $40.4 billion in 30 states. “This has become one of the most effective ways to protect our natural resources,” says Tom Abello, a Conservancy employee and a chief architect of the 2008 Minnesota campaign.
The scale of Minnesota’s Legacy amendment — $7.5 billion over 25 years — combined with a broad coalition of 350 supporting organizations representing everything from the environment to hunting to the arts, would set an ambitious new standard. If it passed.
The Minnesota effort got its start in 1998, when State Sen. “Trapper” Bob Lessard decided that, as much as his hook-and-bullet constituency hated taxes, they would support a one-eighth percent sales-tax increase to fund hunting and fishing resources. But his vision didn’t gain traction until he allied it with the parks lobby. In 2005, clean water funding was added. With three solid green legs, the idea had broad support from a wide range of conservationists, including the Conservancy. Analysis by the Conservancy’s regional office had identified the state’s conservation funding shortfalls as critical, says Peggy Ladner, the Conservancy’s Minnesota state director. “We needed to do something dramatic, very high leverage,” she says. The Legacy amendment fit the bill.
Still, it languished amid partisan politics. It finally gained momentum when the arts and culture groups hitched their wagon to the measure. Hunting should not enjoy funding priority over the arts, reasoned Larry Redmond at the time. “It would be a generational mistake for us to let this go forward without attempting to attach ourselves,” the lobbyist argued to his clients. And with the blessing of Minnesota Citizens for the Arts, he crafted a fourth leg for the stool.
It has never been an easy alliance. Hunters working alongside artists? Many fought the idea. But Redmond and others pushed for inclusion, and ultimately their participation cemented the coalition—a big tent with a broad constituency.
Eventually, the disparate crowd of supporters turned its fractional army into a solid working alliance. But the groups still needed a field general. “We knew we needed to have a well-disciplined, message-driven, professional effort,” explains Ladner, a member of the coalition’s 25-person steering committee and the campaign’s top fund-raiser.
Ken Martin was the kind of seasoned campaign manager the coalition was after. He had run candidate campaigns at every level in Minnesota — state Legislature, congress, secretary of state, governor. In 2000, he was deputy state director for Al Gore’s presidential campaign; in 2004, he led the effort for John Kerry. And despite his buttoned-down wardrobe and classically Midwestern, nice-guy persona, Martin was hungry: His last campaign, for the governor’s mansion, lost by less than a percentage point.
Even so, managing a nonpartisan issue campaign for hundreds of bosses — ranging from Pheasants Forever to the Minnesota Historical Society — was going to be very different from a candidate campaign. Initially, Martin balked at the job offer.
Then he considered history. “I thought it would be exciting to work on something that’s really far-reaching,” he says. “You don’t have a candidate, and you really don’t have a party you’re advocating for. And so you get to work across all ideological lines here.” Indeed, in addition to a wide range of conservation, environment and cultural organizations, three of the four living former governors supported the ballot measure, as did every member of the state’s congressional delegation. Senate candidates Al Franken and Norm Coleman split bitterly on just about everything, but both favored the Legacy amendment.
On Valentine’s Day 2008, a month after Martin began building his campaign apparatus, the state Legislature approved putting the ballot measure before Minnesota voters. The measure asked voters to amend the state constitution to increase their sales tax by three-eighths of a percent for 25 years. The tax was expected to raise almost $300 million a year: 33 percent to protect hunting and fishing habitats; 33 percent to protect clean water; 14.25 percent to maintain parks and trails; and 19.75 percent to fund arts and cultural heritage. Amending the constitution would guarantee funding for 25 years, whatever the economic or political climate of the day.
Getting the initiative to the ballot was a huge legislative victory, but there were more battles to come. Some opponents objected to a tax increase. Others, “good government” advocates, argued against tweaking the constitution yet again (it had been amended more than 100 times already). And one of those changes made subsequent amendments more difficult to pass: If a voter skips a ballot amendment question, it counts as a No vote. Voters who don’t make it all the way down the ballot are collectively labeled “the drop-off vote.”
The drop-off would be the crux of the campaign. Polling showed that three out of five people who were potential drop-off voters would vote Yes if only they weighed in on the question. If they skipped out, the measure would surely fail. And if that happened, the loss of political capital would be enormous. Not only might it be years before another similar measure reached the ballot, but legislators also might feel justified in continuing to undercut arts and conservation funding. Says Martin, “There will be a lot of finger-pointing and second-guessing if this thing goes down.”
49 Days to Go: Inside the Minds of Voters
Forty-nine days before the election, Martin gathers his brain trust in a sleekly mirrored office building in southern Minneapolis. The state-of-the-art facilities at Focus Market Research are designed for peeking into the American mind. After years of polling and issue research, this is the penultimate push to understand voters, to find out what will get them to check the Yes box. One more session tomorrow night in Duluth and the final course corrections will be made, the endgame set.
The campaign’s first focus groups were organized in February, testing themes for the campaign. Opinion research by the Conservancy and others has shown that what really motivates voters is the basic need for clean water. The full measure runs to around 80 words, but the research dictated what comes first: “Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to dedicate funding to protect our drinking water sources...”
“There is a lot of information on the ballot,” says Carol Baudler, the Conservancy’s ballot initiative guru who leads a small team of campaign experts. “You have to really craft that in such a way that it says what you mean, that voters are informed by it and will vote Yes.” Officially, it’s called the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment—the Legacy amendment for short. Countless hours of research, distilled to a five-word message: “Vote Yes for clean water.”
“The amendment is probably one of the best-framed measures we’ve ever worked on,” Baudler says.
Tonight’s plan is to gauge the reaction of potential voters to video scripts, mailings and Web ads. Everything comes into play: layout, colors, attitude, style. People like nature shots, but aerial or ground-level? The ultimate goal is to find a hook. Paul Austin, head of Conservation Minnesota, used to run a political direct-mail firm, and he is helping tease out the nuances. “What are they responding to?” he asks. Is it a thing about the next generation, or is it something about what’s happening right now?” You can have all the right messages about water, but if you don’t emotionally engage voters, it won’t matter.
Twenty would-be voters sit at a table facing a moderator, a video camera and a one-way mirror. On the omniscient side of the looking glass are two tiers of comfortable leather chairs, a snack kitchen and a side lounge. Here, a dozen consultants and campaigners huddle over research materials and food before the show begins. It’s dinnertime, and everyone is digging into Italian. Some sip wine; others, more caffeine. The locals are trading insider gossip about the unfolding election season. One unsettling revelation: The opposition Taxpayer’s League has bought up a vacant pro-amendment Web domain name and redirected it toward their own site. It’s a little thing, but Martin is clearly ticked off.
Working the would-be voters’ side of the room is pollster David Metz of the California consulting firm Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin & Associates. Initiatives he’s worked on have netted $15 billion for the environment in California alone.
Each participant in the night’s focus group is a likely voter, inclined to vote Yes on the ballot measure but with only moderate interest in the issue. Metz makes a few jokes at the expense of the mysterious clients behind the glass — part of his script. Then he asks the group to review a series of ad concepts — scripts with images, each focused on the fact that not voting equals a No vote. “When you skip something, bad things can happen,” says one concept. Another shows a goofy college kid hitting his forehead as if he forgot the beer. Punch line: “Don’t oops the amendment.”
The debate gets lively, and some participants are clearly disturbed by the state’s rule on drop-off votes. They discuss the ins and outs for more than an hour, exposing a few political and cultural divides in the process.
Behind the glass, some campaign spectators watch the video feed, while others stare through the glass, their heads Ping-Ponging between speakers. Playful speculation about political orientation lightens the mood, and before every straw poll, side bets are made on the outcome. Even so, when Metz takes a final poll, support for the amendment is unanimous. Martin raises both fists, and a cheer goes up behind the glass. It’s a feel-good moment, but nothing to bank on.
A few days later, Metz delivers his analysis of why the group preferred the “Oops” ad over the alternatives. “Several said it would capture their attention and make them want to understand what mistake the man realized he had made,” Metz says. Thus, “Don’t oops the amendment” officially enters the campaign lexicon; a music-video-inspired spot is released on the Internet within two weeks.
18 Days to Go: Rural Hearts and Minds
Eighteen days before the election, Shannon Robinson is at the Twin Rivers Center for the Arts, checking her kiosk of campaign signs and brochures. The center, housed in a renovated Christian Science Reading Room that feels more like a medieval church, is the umbrella arts council for Greater Mankato. It facilitates collaboration between dozens of arts organizations and the wider community. Mankato lies 70 miles south of Minneapolis where the Minnesota River executes a broad northward dogleg en route to the Mississippi.
Here, and in dozens of smaller cities and towns, the campaign has mobilized its supporting organizations. Hunting and fishing are strong local traditions, but this is also a university town with an energetic arts community. It’s a perfect place to witness the campaign’s big and lumpy tent.
When the Legacy amendment surfaced a few years ago, it bothered Robinson, a fiscally conservative Republican. “My main misgiving wasn’t even necessarily about the tax increase,” she says. “It was about amending the constitution.” She got over it, figuring if legislators didn’t have the foresight or courage to fund arts and the environment, then the people would. Robinson notes that money for arts programs has been especially tight since 2003, when budgets were slashed. Referring to the Legacy amendment, she says, “I see this as a pretty serious quality-of-life thing.”
It’s also an investment. A 2007 study by the Minnesota Citizens for the Arts calculated that the arts generate $205.2 million a year for the state. Arts groups have been highlighting the Legacy amendment in galleries and before performances. The funding boost it promises would be tremendous, Robinson says. “I’m willing to pay a little bit more to ensure Mankato remains a thriving cultural center.”
A few hours later and a couple miles away, Garry Leaf is making a similar argument, with a different supporting cast of facts and figures. Chief proselytizer for Sportsmen for Change, which champions sportsmen’s rights and habitat protection in Minnesota, Leaf has been traveling the state in his Jeep, pulling a trailer filled with lawn signs. Tonight, his rig is parked outside a Gander Mountain store.
Tucked in a corner room of the big-box sporting-goods retailer, Leaf shows little concern for a light turnout — just three hunters and three media types. It’s pheasant season, (and duck season just across the line in the Dakotas), and this quarter of the state already has been relentlessly canvassed by hunting groups that support the amendment. Leaf launches a PowerPoint and spells out why these men should vote Yes on the ballot. The obvious: Hunting and fishing mean a lot to Minnesotans. No other state has a higher percentage of people who fish or hunt. And protecting the state’s natural resources is at the core of the ballot measure.
As the considerable inventory just outside the door demonstrates, there is also a big economic upside. Expenditures for fishing, hunting and wildlife watching run to $4.2 billion annually, supporting more than 57,000 jobs.
All of that is at risk. Before the economic downturn, Minnesota was the fastest-growing state in the upper Midwest; an influx of 1.2 million people was projected to bring about more than 1 million acres of new development by 2030. The state has already lost at least 50 percent of its original wetlands and 90 percent of prairie wetlands. Less than 4 percent of its old-growth forests remain.
These trends affect hunting and fishing, and much more. Minnesota stakes a fair portion of its reputation on its 10,000 — actually 11,842 — lakes. But of those lakes and rivers that have been tested, 40 percent aren’t safe for fishing or swimming. It’s a staggering number, and one that strikes at the heart of the state’s sense of itself.
As with the arts, the problem is attributable to a consistent decline in state investment. Over the past three decades, an average of just 1.8 percent of the state general fund has gone to conservation and the environment. But by 2007, budget deficits had cut funding to only about 1.2 percent, the lowest level in 30 years. According to Leaf, the support is so pitiful that long-range planning at the state natural resources department had begun to hinge on the assumption “that, eventually, Minnesota would pass a dedicated funding system,” he says. “Without it, there really isn’t the money to deal with some of the problems we’ll be facing.”
17 Days to Go: Crunch Time
The next morning, the campaign’s operations committee gathers at 2334 University Ave. in St. Paul, close to both Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota campus. Modern campaigns have their science, but their superstitions, too. Among the state’s small corps of campaign managers, it’s generally believed you can’t win a statewide race without an office on University Avenue. Martin reports that fact as if he doesn’t believe it, but here he is, just across the street from the building where he ran Kerry’s 2004 campaign.
Before getting started, Paul Austin, of Conservation Minnesota, screens a new video just uploaded to YouTube and Facebook. The slide-show animation features George the Strait Talking Moose, a spoof on the country star George Strait, singing to the tune of “Check Yes or No,” Strait’s chart-topping tune about an intercepted grammar-school love note that asks, “Do you love me? ... Check Yes or No.” The lyrics have been cleverly tuned to the Legacy amendment’s message points, while the original refrain, “Check Yes or No,” speaks directly to the “vote the whole ballot” idea.
Then Martin gets down to business. He has the results from another weekly poll: “There is no erosion of our support,” he says, “and it would appear that with leaners, we actually picked up some support.”
“But let’s not fool ourselves,” he adds, curbing the enthusiasm. “It’s a snapshot in time, a lot of time left, 17 days. Things certainly could turn on a lot of different factors. We’re still right on the bubble of where we need to be.”
“Good news: We don’t have to change our plan,” says Martin. “Bad news ...,” Austin interrupts: “Yesterday wasn’t Election Day.”
This is crunch time. Next week, Austin, Martin and a handful of other spokespeople will cram into the Vote Yes Express — a windowless van wrapped with campaign messages — for a three-day media blitz, hitting as many markets as possible. The loops will be long and grueling, 10 or more stops a day at local parks or other scenic areas. They’ll meet local supporters, then provide the state perspective for any media that show up.
“We’re going to hate each other by the end of this,” says Austin, laughing.
Then Martin drops a bomb. “We got some bad news yesterday — “the Fargo Forum decided to come out against this,” says Martin in a calm but quietly angry tone. “We had been working that paper over like crazy.”
Fargo is in North Dakota, of course, but the Forum is the primary daily paper for a good chunk of northwest Minnesota, and the company owns 26 other papers, both dailies and weeklies, that publish in Minnesota. Martin had met with the editor and the owner, and both seemed confident and effusive in their support. “When I saw that editorial, I called [opinion editor] Jack [Zaleski] immediately,” reports Martin. “What he said to me was that the full editorial board met and had a debate on this. It was very close. Ultimately, this came down to the constitutional dedication.”
Martin is frustrated, but he focuses on the backup plan: a network of local “validators” — community members with standing who can step forward and be the local voice for the amendment: write an op-ed, talk to an editor, phone a radio show. “We need to get those local validators lined up, ready to go, making those calls,” he says.
The remainder of the meeting is a little testy, as the committee deconstructs the editorial loss and plays “what if”: So far, the opposition has been poorly funded and strategically inept. What if that changes? If they have a late October surprise, how will Martin’s team respond? The exercise goes on a little too long. “You plan your work, and you work your plan,” Martin says gruffly, clearly ready to move on.
7 Days to Go: The Final Push
The last week unfolds in a blur, and under a growing cloud of concern. The opposition doesn’t pull off an ambush, but The Pioneer Press in St. Paul and the Minneapolis Star Tribune both take stands against the amendment. Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who had been neutral, tells an interviewer that he will vote No. And each day the economic news gets grimmer, every penny looking more valuable.
For the campaign team, now it’s a numbers game. Martin focuses on the final push to get as many people as possible to vote the whole ballot. Through a tool called microtargeting, which uses computers to sift through vast amounts of consumer data and then correlate that to potential political views, the campaign is able to determine in which precincts voters are most likely to fill in the top of the ballot and skip the rest. These target precincts are now ground zero. Over Saturday and Sunday, more than 100 volunteers distribute 60,000 pieces of campaign literature. The phone banks call hundreds of likely voters in those same neighborhoods. Justin Fay, Martin’s second in command, has spent more than two years working on the amendment, and he’s in charge of the final offensive: precinct maps to guide the nearly 200 volunteers to their strategic locations on Election Day. Throughout the weekend, the energy at headquarters is palpable as the campaign hums down the final stretch.
But on Monday morning, one day before the election, the news is grimmer still: A new Star Tribune poll says amendment support is slipping. If that’s right, the measure is going down.
Election Night
“I always love election night,” exclaims Martin, who finally abandons the line at Precinct 6, Ward 4, around 7:30. “There is just something in the air. Can you feel it? There is just that real palpable excitement.” His phone rings, and it’s his friend Buck Humphrey, grandson to former Minnesota presidential candidate Hubert. He’s working Florida for Obama, and he’s jubilant.
Now it’s time to monitor the returns with campaign staff and supporters. Soon after the polls close, the faithful begin to gather in the Park Square Theatre in downtown St. Paul. Local election coverage is being projected in the theater, and there’s a cash bar and food in the lobby.
But the real action unfolds around the wireless network in the basement — four laptops on a small table behind an old ticket taker’s window.
The amendment’s fate is unknown, but it’s clear that Obama is on his way to the White House. It’s not even 9 o’clock when CNN flips Minnesota to blue and the first amendment numbers trickle in. “Ken, this looks pretty good,” reports Brian Rice, a lobbyist for the parks element of the coalition. “We’re leading in every congressional district.”
But every 10 minutes or so, the results change, and with each update the prospects look worse: 8:56, 9:03 — by 9:16 it’s a trend. “This is when it’s going to start getting dicey,” announces Martin to the room, which is getting more crowded, but quieter. By 9:30 the amendment is in free-fall. Martin looks grim and resigned. It was his job to lead the charge, but he also knew the deck was stacked against him. And now there really is nothing he can do.
Then Rice spots something. “There is something ridiculously wrong here,” he says. Martin had created a model predicting how the vote would go, district by district. And yet the actual numbers coming in now from the first district differ wildly from the model. “That’s not true,” Rice says, looking at the numbers on his computer. “It just can’t be.” He adds, “Every other district is within the range. They’re miscounting those ballots down there.”
The team begins parsing the numbers. After half an hour, the campaign workers are sure there’s an error, but nobody is answering the phone at the secretary of state’s office. Martin grabs Rice. They’re going to rattle the cage. If the race is called before they figure this thing out, it’s going to be a mess extracting the real result.
The men are gone for nearly an hour before calling in a report sometime after 11 o’clock. The secretary of state thinks there’s some database problem that’s distorting the returns on the ballot measure, and he’s trying to fix it. The crowd here wants to believe, yet can’t trust the numbers. The returns get impossibly worse.
And then, finally, the database fix takes hold, and the amendment climbs back to safety again.
At midnight, the coalition declares victory, and the toasting and backslapping ensues. Rice pops the cork on champagne bottled a decade ago, the year it all began. Finally the party moves out of the crowded basement, back into the theater, even spilling outside. Some campaign staff turn cartwheels in the light rain. Passersby, mostly Obama revelers, look happy, then confused — especially when somebody yells, “We beat Obama!”
Postgame Analysis
Yes, the campaign even outran Obama. “No candidate in Minnesota electoral history has ever received more votes than the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment,” says Martin, after a few weeks of sleeping in. In the end, the plan succeeded. A campaign that had cost $3.7 million had generated $7.5 billion — a whopping return on investment. The strategy to get people to vote the whole ballot worked. Statewide, people voted on the question nearly 4 percent above expectations. In the 100 targeted precincts, they voted nearly 8 percent above.
In the middle of the worst economic crisis in 50 years, a body politic had overwhelmingly supported investing in clean water, in conservation and in their cultural heritage.
“It wasn’t the perfect campaign, that’s for sure,” says Martin, ever the perfectionist. (You just know he’s got a list somewhere — lessons learned for next time.) But for now, he can relax a little. “When all is said and done, this ended up being the largest vote-getter in Minnesota politics,” he says. “Clearly something worked.”
Nature picture credits: Photos © Ariana Lindquist
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