THE 2004 PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES

Thinking Outside the Box

Kerry for President

The 2004 Iowa Democratic presidential caucuses were a must win for frontrunners John Kerry, Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean. The victor would use that momentum and the "front-loaded" presidential primary and caucus calendar to quickly seal the Democratic nomination.

Yet in a tight contest for what was expected to be between 100,000–150,000 Iowa caucus-goers, the key to winning this unique election was expanding your base. The Strategy Group successfully helped Kerry do just that, winning the Iowa caucuses by 8,000 votes with an outside-of-the-box strategy that doubled the number of veterans who attended their Iowa caucus on a cold January night.

How We Did It

We knew Dean would try to expand his base with first time voters, primarily young people. Gephardt would do the same with union members. So we decided to expand Kerry's base with a niche only Kerry, a Vietnam veteran, could appeal to: fellow veterans.

It wouldn't be easy, Iowa Democratic veterans traditionally did not participate in the caucuses. In fact, the number of veterans who attended a caucus in the last 30 years had never exceeded 11,000.

Further, a list of Iowa Democratic veterans did not exist. So we built our own by sending organizers to each and every one of Iowa's 99 county auditor offices to collect lists of individuals who received county property tax exemptions. These would likely be veterans.

We matched this list back to the voter file and found approximately 75,000 veterans who were eligible to attend the caucuses and had not previously done so.

Then we developed an aggressive direct mail program to most efficiently and effectively target Kerry's appeals to this finite universe of veterans. The series of persuasion mailings, followed by a series of mailings designed to encourage their attendance at their caucus, often featured other veterans who supported Kerry.

Approximately 125,000 Iowa Democrats attended their caucus in 2004 including 22,000 veterans — twice the highest veteran turnout in the previous three decades. The surge in veteran attendance increased the total number of Caucus attendees by 18 percent, and expanded Kerry's base by enough to win by 8,000 votes.