February 23, 2009

Money, Manipulation, and Mormons: How Schubert and Flint Passed Proposition 8

Straight from the double-headed demon that lied its way to stripping us of our fundamental constitutional right to marry (which they even admit was our fundamental constitutional right), this is a long must-read. Here are just a few salient points our failed “leaders” (and, we hope, a new generation of more successful leadership) must heed:

Passing Prop 8

. . .

Schubert Flint Public Affairs signed onto the Yes on Prop 8 campaign right before the first of what would eventually total 18,000 gay weddings took place after the California Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. We immediately faced our first important strategic challenge: How to respond to the marriages? We decided to withhold criticism of the same-sex couples who were getting married (after all, they were simply taking advantage of the rights the Court had granted them)…

Over the next three months, sympathetic news articles and television reports appeared daily across the state. Traditional marriage supporters were routinely portrayed as right-wingers holding onto outdated, bigoted ideas. …

We needed to convince voters that gay marriage was not simply “live and let live”—that there would be consequences if gay marriage were to be permanently legalized. … We made one of the key strategic decisions in the campaign, to apply the principles of running a “No” campaign—raising doubts and pointing to potential problems—in seeking a “Yes” vote. As far as we know, this strategic approach has never before been used by a Yes campaign. …

We probed long and hard in countless focus groups and surveys to explore reactions to a variety of consequences our issue experts identifed. The California Supreme Court ruling put gay couples in a protected legal class on the basis of sexual orientation, and then found that gay couples had a fundamental constitutional right to marriage. This decision signifcantly changed the legal landscape. …

We settled on three broad areas where this conflict of rights was most likely to occur: in the area of religious freedom, in the area of individual freedom of expression, and in how this new “fundamental right” would be inculcated in young children through the public schools. …

Our ability to organize a massive volunteer effort through religious denominations gave us a huge advantage…

We built a campaign volunteer structure around both time-honored campaign grassroots tactics of organizing in churches, with a ground-up structure of church captains, precinct captains, zip code supervisors and area directors; and the latest Internet and web-based grassroots tools. …

We held the campaign’s first statewide precinct walk the weekend of Aug. 16. … This intense commitment to distributing materials throughout the state was the result of another key strategic decision. Supporting traditional marriage is not considered to be “politically correct.” We wanted voters who supported our position to know that they were not alone and so we made sure they saw our signs in their neighborhoods and our campaign materials at their church. And if they were part of an ethnic minority, all these were in their native language.

The final phase of the volunteer campaign, GOTV, was really a month-long operation. California allows early voting, starting 29 days ahead of Election Day. From Day 1 of this period, we tracked voters who either appeared on the permanent absentee voter list, or had applied for a vote-by-mail ballot. Those who were identified as persuadable received additional volunteer and direct mail contacts. Definite Yes on 8 voters were reminded to return their ballots as early as possible. The effort paid off…

By this time, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints had endorsed Prop 8 and joined the campaign executive committee. Even though the LDS were the last major denomination to join the campaign, their members were immensely helpful in early fundraising, providing much-needed contributions while we were busy organizing Catholic and Evangelical fundraising efforts.

Ultimately, we raised $22 million from July through September with upwards of 40 percent coming from members of the LDS Church. … Our initial television ad began airing on Sept. 29, a week after the other side began its campaign ads… We knew that this initial ad needed to be a home run—and boy was it!

Our campaign’s general counsel had alerted us to a press conference San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom held following the Supreme Court’s marriage decision in May. Like Howard Dean once did, Newsom got increasingly excited the longer he addressed the crowd until, with a smirk on his face and his arms fully extended, he exclaimed, “This door’s wide open now. It’s gonna happen—whether you like it or not.” …

We then segued into potential consequences by featuring a prominent law school professor warning about implications for religious freedom and freedom of expression, and letting voters know that as a result of the court’s decision, gay marriage would be taught in the public schools. The “Whether You Like It or Not” television ad immediately solidified (and excited) our base and captured the attention of voters across the state. We invested heavily in airing this television ad and a companion radio spot. …

The gay community sounded the alarm… This emergency cry for contributions was incredibly effective. Whereas they had raised $15 million in the previous nine months, they raised another $25 million in the ensuing seven weeks of the campaign. But their failure to respond to the “consequences” messages (especially the education message) in a timely fashion ultimately led to their downfall. After blanketing the state with “Whether You Like It or Not,” we focused our message on education. …

The response to our ads from the No on 8 campaign was slow and ineffectual. They enlisted their allies in the education system to claim that we were lying. They held press conferences with education leaders to dismiss our claims. They got newspaper editorial boards to condemn the ads as false. What they never did do, because they couldn’t do, was contest the accuracy of what had happened in Massachusetts.

Finally, three weeks after the Yes on 8 campaign had introduced education as a message, the No on 8 campaign responded with what would be their best ad of the campaign. It featured State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell claiming that Prop 8 had nothing to do with education and that our use of children in our ads was “shameful.” This in-your-face response, much delayed but very effective, foretold the final period of the campaign—it would be largely about education. …

Our strategy had anticipated that the No on 8 campaign would label as “shameful lies” any claim that gay marriage had anything to do with schools, so we went to great lengths to document our ads. … But then we got the break of the election. In what may prove to be the most ill-considered publicity stunt ever mounted in an initiative campaign, a public school in San Francisco took a class of first graders to City Hall to witness the wedding of their lesbian teacher. And they brought along the media.

Now we not only had an example of something that had happened in California (as opposed to might happen), we had video footage to prove it. Within 24 hours of the No side airing their best ad, the one featuring O’Connell claiming that Prop 8 had nothing to do with schools, we were on statewide TV showing bewildered six-year-olds at a lesbian wedding courtesy of their local public school.

There were multiple skirmishes in the press over the education issue during the final days of the campaign. The other side claimed the wedding episode wasn’t really as we described it, while we defended the ad as accurate…

It wasn’t as these liemongers described it. Read our post from October, “Yes on Proposition 8: First Lies, Then Blackmail, Now Child Exploitation.”

After several days of dueling ads featuring Jack O’Connell and kids at the lesbian wedding, the No side effectively conceded they had lost the education debate. They pulled the O’Connell ad and went in a new direction in the final few days—attempting to equate a Yes vote with racial discrimination. …

We decided to not respond to this line of attack, confident that it would backfire. The basic message that supporters of traditional marriage are bigots, guilty of discrimination, had never worked in focus groups. …

As the campaign headed into the final days, we launched a “Google surge.” We spent more than a half-million dollars to place ads on every single website that had advertising controlled by Google. Whenever anyone in California went online, they saw one of our ads in the final two days of the election. …

Try to ignore Schubert and Flint’s typically nasty smugness as you read the rest — but do read the rest.

Posted by: Sapphocrat

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