Every Successful Strategy is Unique

At the Cook County Republican Convention over the weekend I was approached by a supporter of State Sen. Bill Brady. The supporter was upset with my baleful assessment of the Brady campaign's prospects. "Have you ever heard of the downstate strategy?" he demanded.

Well...I was its primary author, so I have a passing familiarity with it. Today, a little history and a few general comments on strategy.

In 1996 I was chief strategist for Al Salvi's campaign for U.S. Senate. It was the conservative's breakthrough statewide campaign. Before that, no Illinois conservative had gotten out of the 20's in a statewide Republican Primary. Hard as it is to believe, conventional wisdom held then that conservatives could not win statewide primaries in Illinois. We based the campaign on three innovative strategic approaches. The first was the downstate strategy, which almost every political professional is familiar with - and which every statewide campaign now uses to some extent. But the latter two were equally critical.

Let's start with the first, the downstate strategy. Sixty percent of the vote comes fromCook and the collars; only 40% comes from downstate. The battle in most statewide races had been largely contained to Cook and the collars, with only token efforts going downstate. I believed that if downstate were heavily and seriously contested, it could come in in a monolithic block, leaving a candidate only needing to break even or stay close in Cook and the collars. But television is not as effective downstate. The good news was that downstate had stronger nuclear communities and their political events played a much broader role in the larger social network than they did upstate.

That meant that Cook and the collars could be defended through traditional organizations and a heavy program of effective television. Going after downstate effectively would be very labor intensive. It would require strong, motivated field organizations and frequent in-person candidate visits. I never was all that fond of offices anyway, so I spent half my time on the road. Having divided the state into 17 regions outside of Cook County, my protocol was that I would never let more than three weeks go by without personally visiting every region. A real person can accomplish a whole lot more than a disembodied voice on the phone can - and when you are actually in the region, you can make your own accurate appraisal of how things stand there.

It worked - so well, in fact, that almost every statewide campaign since has adopted elements of it. Only three campaigns have used it fully the way it was designed: Salvi, Peter Fitzgerald and Rod Blagojevich. While Blagojevich used it with brilliant effectiveness in his primary campaign, he utterly abandoned it after election and became, perhaps, the most Chicago-centric governor in memory.

The second element was uniting conservatives to act as a single, cohesive organization of volunteers in each region. Until that time, conservatives had been consigned to disparate ghettoes of like-minded souls. That meant pro-lifers had no interaction with 2nd Amendment supporters who had no interaction with home-schoolers, etc. etc. Our template was that in each region, the top person would act as overall coordinator and all groups would work through that coordinator. We would use traditional coalitions, but only working through the organization we created.

The reason this had not been done before was that conventional wisdom said you could work with various conservative groups, but if you put them in the same room together a fight would break out. Oddly, this was the strategic prong I got the most internal dissent on. I finally put a stop to it when, at a meeting, a junior staffer demanded to know how I was going to do this when it had never been done before. I angrily retorted that a conservative had never gotten out of the 20's before, either, and that it might be it could not be done. But if it couldn't, then we couldn't win.

It worked, too. Once it had been established conservatives, who had been accustomed to seeing 10-15 people at their segmented meetings, began seeing 50-75 at our organizational meetings. It fired everyone's imaginations and gave them a whole new idea of what they were capable of accomplishing.

The third prong was absolutely key - and many conservatives seem not to know it was ever done at all. I did not believe that the midlevel establishment (county chairmen) hated conservative ideals; they just weren't interested in suicide missions and they were offended at the attack rhetoric that was such a staple of conservatives. We set out to seriously contest for those midlevel establishment figures.

Salvi had an engaging wit and used it to great advantage to defang the chairmen's ideas of what a conservative was. We started out with two chairmen for us and 100 against us - and it took a lot of work to get the two. The early days were brutal. Not only did many chairmen refuse to let Salvi speak at their events; they wouldn't even let us put our literature out. It was bad. But I was resolved I would take no offense - and would relentlessly follow protocol in every county. I alerted chairmen whenever Salvi was going to be in their county and invited them to introduce him. I constantly asked their advice, both on what we were doing and what we should be doing. We sought their input on who coordinators should be - and talked to the people they suggested, even if we did not choose them.

After a time a strong rapport developed. Kustra used what I call the "Important" template in his appearances - arrive late, leave early, do a walk-through but don't mingle with the crowd. It is a horrible template that can usually be gutted by a determined opponent because the candidate never develops a deep connection with the activists whose support he is seeking. The only candidate I know who won a primary using that template was Jack Ryan in 2004 - and I'm convinced the only reason he made it work was because the field was so large those who were offended by it never gravitated to a single alternative.

This also worked. In the last critical month and a half, we had a whole host of county chairmen who were working like crazy for us, even as they were formally committed to Kustra. They had to keep up appearances in order not to get punished in their patronage appointments. But it was very satisfying at the end to have chairmen who a few months earlier wouldn't even let us in their halls ask if we would be offended if they put on a dog-and-pony show on the rare occasions Kustra showed up in their counties. They would assure me that it didn't mean anything and that all the locals were in on the gag. We were glad to let them maintain the illusion - I wasn't really interested in letting the opponent know how much trouble he was in.

The whole thing worked because it was custom-designed. We had the right candidate in the right place at the right time - and used it to create a larger, more broad-based movement.

But there is a key: every successful strategic framework starts with solid fundamentals and then is custom-designed to meet the unique challenges and take advantage of the unique opportunities of a specific campaign in a particular time and place.

If I were designing a statewide campaign today, though I would never neglect downstate as it used to be neglected, I would put much more emphasis on suburban Cook County and the collars. That is because the GOP organizations there are dramatically weaker than they were 10 years ago. To be competitive in statewide races, Republicans must substantially rebuild their suburban base. That is actually the main reason I am working for David McSweeney in the Eighth Congressional District. I decided last December that if I could find a candidate in the Eighth who had the resources, was willing to start early, and was as committed to overall party-building as I am, that was where I would work.

The point is there is no 'one size fits all' strategy. While everyone loses sometimes, the general or strategist who is constantly fighting yesterday's battle usually loses.