WHY CLEVELAND FELL SHORT.
Blind Side
by Jason Zengerle
The New Republic
Post date 11.05.04 | Issue date 11.15.04
CLEVELAND, OHIO
It's 4:15 in the afternoon on Election Day, and Desmond Jones and Prophet Seay are speeding toward a polling place at an elementary school on Cleveland's predominately black East Side. They are two of the more than 500 African American canvassers that the Ohio Democratic Party has enlisted to get out the black vote here, and their mission at the moment seems simple enough: Obtain a list of all the people who have already voted in that precinct, something the poll workers are required to post twice on Election Day, first at 11 a.m. and then at 4 p.m. But the poll workers at this precinct failed to post the list in the morning, and the hunch at John Kerry's local headquarters in the affluent suburb of Shaker Heights is that they won't post an afternoon list, either. That is presumably why the brain trust running Cleveland's African American get-out-the-vote (gotv) effort has put Jones and Seay on the case.
As two of the more personable--and, frankly, handsome--canvassers, the thinking seems to be that the duo might be able to charm the predominately female poll workers into giving them a peek at the list. Sure enough, Jones, a spoken-word poet with a shaved head and a diamond stud in his left ear, begins to flirt with the woman in charge of the list. "I'm just here to see if you're doing OK," he says, dropping his voice to a low Barry White baritone. Meanwhile, Seay, an aspiring actor with coffee-colored skin and cascading dreadlocks, stands behind Jones and smiles. It only takes a few minutes for the poll worker to melt and hand over the list.
Cross-checking the names with their own roster of 104 voters the Democrats have targeted in this precinct, Jones and Seay make a discouraging discovery: Only 31 of their targets are marked down as having voted. But, a few minutes later, when Jones and Seay get on their cell phones and call some of those missing from the precinct's list to urge them to vote before the polls close at 7:30 that night, those people say they have voted already. It turns out that not only did the precinct's poll workers fail to post the voting list, but they also didn't keep an accurate tally of who voted. "There's not a lot you can do," one gotv staffer later complains, "when they don't follow the simple rules."
Indeed, for all the fears about Republican attempts to suppress the black vote in Cleveland, either through dirty tricks--like spreading rumors that people with outstanding warrants or unpaid child support would be arrested if they showed up at the polls--or through an aggressive use of the Ohio law that allows challengers to contest the eligibility of individual voters, the biggest obstacles the Democrats' African American gotv efforts faced here were of a more mundane, bureaucratic variety. "Our worst fears weren't realized," says one Democratic lawyer who worked on voter-protection efforts here. "It was the kind of thing you usually expect--long lines, broken equipment, poorly trained poll workers--that caused the biggest headaches." Ultimately, those headaches weren't enough to stymie the African American gotv effort in Cleveland; it actually exceeded expectations. But it was not sufficient to counter unprecedented Republican turnout elsewhere in Ohio and propel Kerry to victory.
If Kerry was going to win Ohio, the thinking among Democrats went, he had to turn out an unprecedented number of black voters in Cleveland. With that in mind, Democrats relied on an African American gotv strategy never before tried in this city. Traditionally in Cleveland, African American gotv efforts have started in earnest only the weekend before the election, when canvassers descend on the city's eleven predominately black wards, plus the predominately black suburbs of East Cleveland and Warrensville Heights. And, this year, the Democrats didn't entirely abandon that strategy--sending about 400 canvassers into those areas to go door-to-door on Election Day.
But the Democrats also implemented a more tailored program, consisting of about 100 canvassers like Jones and Seay, called the "African American Kerry Walkers" (aakw). Led by a charismatic black turnout guru from Los Angeles named Greg Akili, the aakw targeted 58,000 black registered voters who, according to election records, hadn't voted in the past four years. Three weeks before the election, the aakw canvassers began knocking on those people's doors. By Election Day, they had come up with a list of about 18,000 black voters in Cleveland who hadn't voted in the past four years but who said they would go to the polls this time around. On November 2, it was the aakw canvassers' jobs to make sure these 18,000 voted.
In many ways, the aakw canvassers seemed uniquely suited to their task. Because of Cleveland's 12.5 percent unemployment rate--more than double Ohio's average--the pool of people willing to work for the $500 per week that Democrats were offering was unusually large and highly skilled. "These are a higher caliber of canvassers," explains Larry Parks, one of the out-of-state consultants working on the aakw program. "They have good work ethics, they're smart. In a better economy, they'd have work." And the conditions for accomplishing their goal seemed uniquely propitious. News of the Ohio Republican Party's attempts to challenge 23,000 new voter registrations--many of them in predominately black precincts--and to place challengers in the polling places inflamed Cleveland's black voters who, if they weren't initially inclined to vote because of lukewarm feelings about Kerry, were now eager to go to the polls as an exercise of their civil rights. "African American folks have withstood slavery, withstood Jim Crow, and we can withstand any challenger," Cleveland's African American Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones declared the day before the election.
But Election Day brought its own set of challenges. First, there was the weather--a drenching rain and a howling wind battered Cleveland from the moment the polls opened at 6:30 Tuesday morning until the moment they closed at 7:30 that night. The aakw canvassers tried to compensate, handing out cheap plastic ponchos to voters, but Democratic aides fretted that the inclement conditions kept some voters at home. Then there were the lines at the polls, caused primarily by poorly trained poll workers and broken ballot machines. At some polling places in Cleveland, especially in the morning, people had to wait up to two hours to vote. The Democrats dispatched Jesse Jackson, who was in town, to convince people to stick it out in line; Cam Kerry and Larry David, who briefly stopped in Cleveland before heading to Boston, performed similar duties. But, Democrats conceded, some people on those lines inevitably went home without voting.
Finally, the biggest challenge facing the aakw canvassers was the poll workers' refusal, in a number of instances, to keep track of and reveal which individuals had voted. The whole point of the aakw program was to pinpoint specific voters and therefore achieve a higher yield. "Instead of visiting ten houses, [a canvasser] could check the list and see that six of those ten houses had already voted," Akili explains. "He could then visit the other four who hadn't and then keep going and keep going and only hit people who hadn't voted. ... This whole system is designed to knock on the right door and talk to the right person." But, without an accurate tally of who actually voted, aakw canvassers frequently wasted their efforts on people who had already been to the polls. While one member of the aakw team had predicted close to a 100 percent yield, in the end, the program turned out between 8,000 and 10,000 of its 18,000 targeted voters, according to early estimates.
Of course, those numbers are nothing to scoff at, nor are the results from the overall Democratic gotv effort in the Cleveland area--where turnout was up 8 percent and 65,000 votes from 2000--and where Kerry beat Bush by more than 215,000 votes. Indeed, some Democrats in Cleveland maintain (somewhat unfairly, it must be said) that, if their colleagues' efforts had yielded similar results with the party's base in the white, blue-collar areas of Ohio, Kerry might have been able to win the state.
That obviously didn't happen. Instead, thanks to a highly successful Republican turnout drive in rural areas, such as Clark County--which Bush lost to Gore by 324 votes in 2000 but carried this time by over 1,600 votes--Bush increased his vote totals statewide by nearly 445,000 over 2000 and beat Kerry's ground game. So, on the day after the election, Democrats here are engaging in a more personal, introspective kind of Monday morning quarterbacking. "We did everything we set out to do, and we exceeded all of our goals," Akili says, sitting on a bench outside a glum Kerry headquarters as he prepares to head to the airport with some colleagues. "But our goals might not have been high enough. I just don't know if Cleveland had much more to give."
