Our Hail Mary Pass

In the final week of the 2008 election, Sen. Elizabeth Dole’s campaign aired a television ad that would be one of the most controversial of the year. The ad criticized our opponent, Kay Hagan, for attending a fundraising event in her honor at the home of two well-known atheists. One was a founding member of the Godless Americans PAC.




Many in the media, especially on the liberal side, were quick to point to the ad and claim it backfired, costing Dole the election. Nothing could be further from the truth. When a football team is trailing by 7 points and throws a “Hail Mary” on the last play of the game, they don’t lose because they failed to complete the play, they lose because they were down 7 points and time was running out.

To get a full picture of the circumstances that led to the “Godless” ad, you have to go back a few months and look at how the race developed. After the primary in May, the Dole campaign realized just how much trouble it was in. That was when I was brought in to manage the campaign. We also asked Dan McLagan to run our communications shop—he had been through the fi re with Rick Lazio’s Senate campaign against Hillary Clinton, and Sonny Perdue’s 2002 Georgia gubernatorial race. We also hired a top-notch researcher in Andrew Shulman; he is probably the best researcher I have worked with.

We also had an all-star team that made the campaign’s final strategic decisions, including the airing of the “Godless” ad. The decision-makers included me, pollster Dave Sackett of the Tarrance Group; Fred Davis and Bill Kenyon of Strategic Perception; Mark Stephens, the former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee; Ron Butler of Creative Direct; and Brian Nick, Sen. Dole’s chief of staff. This was an extremely experienced team that collectively had worked hundreds of political campaigns.

By the time the staff changes were made, however, there were three big strikes against us. The Dole campaign had raised $10 million but only had $3 million on hand. Second, Kay Hagan had gotten a bump from her primary victory and was polling even with Dole. And third, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign decided to target North Carolina and focused on registering new Democrat voters. By Election Day the Democrats had added 250,000 more new voters than the Republicans. The make-up of the electorate on Election Day would be 46 percent Democrat and 32 percent Republican.

We decided to run a two-week summer media blitz. We thought that if we could bump up Dole’s numbers, maybe we could spark our fundraising—thereby encouraging the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to spend its money on better opportunities in other races. I didn’t like the idea, only because the campaign had burned through so much money already and the thought of another million going out the door in the summer horrified me.

The ads were very good and had the desired effect of pushing us out to a 10-point lead. But as we would soon learn, the DSCC had sufficient financial resources to essentially avoid targeting and spend heavily even in races that didn’t appear competitive. At the same time, the Obama campaign was opening 40 offices across the state for voter registration and turnout. It would be August before the RNC and John McCain’s campaign focused on North Carolina. I don’t fault them for that—they, too, had limited resources.

We knew we had three weaknesses. A report by Congress.org had ranked Dole 93rd out of 100 senators in effectiveness. She voted with President Bush more than 90 percent of the time. And during the two-year period when she was chairman of the NRSC, she only traveled to North Carolina a handful of times.

We were particularly concerned about the time spent in the state. In 2002 she was attacked as a carpetbagger, and accused of only returning to North Carolina to win a Senate seat. She overcame those attacks in her first run, but we knew that this was an issue we would be vulnerable on.

The DSCC went up with their first ad on Aug. 1. They hit two of our weak points in that ad, which featured two old men sitting on a porch talking about how Dole voted with Bush and where she ranked in effectiveness. Majority Action followed a week later, and other groups joined the attacks against us soon after. Over the next three months, outside groups spent more than $21 million in attacks against us. They continued to pound away on those same two issues: her voting record and effectiveness.

It would be another three weeks before we were able to air our first ad of the fall campaign. We simply did not have the resources to go up any sooner. By that time Hagan had closed the gap and we were polling even again. It would be another two weeks before the NRSC was able to run ads on our behalf.

In late August, Shulman discovered an invitation to attend a Sept. 15 fundraiser in Kay Hagan’s honor at the home of Wendy Kaminer and Woody Kaplan—both well-known atheists—posted on the liberal Act Blue website. McLagan attempted to interest media outlets in the potential story but was rebuffed. A press release exposing the fundraiser also failed to generate much interest among the state media.

Hagan’s response was to attack Dole for attending a fundraiser in Florida at the home of one of President Bush’s biggest fundraisers. You would never believe how many atheist blogs there are out there, but they all went rabid overnight attacking us. We dropped the issue at that point, because we didn’t want to drive Hagan to cancel the event. We all felt that she probably would; why go through that PR fiasco for a few bucks?

Act Blue soon took down the hosts’ names and address, but the event was still scheduled. We arranged for a camera crew to be outside the home in hopes of getting some footage of Hagan attending the event. It wasn’t the best footage in the world, because Hagan slipped in through a back door and avoided exposure. But she did attend, and we got enough footage to use in an ad, if we decided to go that route. The NRSC put up the video soon after that on its website. Again, there was little media interest.

About two weeks before the election, the DSCC began attacking us on our third weakness, time spent in the state. We knew at this point we needed to consider a game changer and began serious talks about fi ring the “Godless” bullet.

There were several scripts and drafts that were discussed. But we still hoped to avoid using it, because we knew the risk of backlash was very high. With about eight days left in the campaign, we were down 6 points and underperforming the Republican presidential nominee by 4 points. We were tracking nightly and when respondents were asked what they had seen or heard about the campaign it was all about our lack of effectiveness and the amount of time spent in the state.

We were on a losing trajectory and we had to change the topic of discussion. The only option we had that could accomplish that was an ad on the Godless Americans PAC issue.

We had polled the issue in mid-September and found that it tested very well among the key groups that we needed to win. We needed to raise intensity among Republican voters, as well as shift the focus of Independents and conservative Democrats from our negatives to Kay Hagan in an unfavorable way. We needed something that had some shock value and would also generate an earned media component—and that was the “Godless” issue.

The “Godless PAC” issue was all we had that could possibly achieve that in the short time remaining. We knew that Hagan would have to respond to the ad. We anticipated her response would be that we were attacking her faith; clearly she could not defend attending the event. So we prepared two ads. The first on the Godless issue, and the second—that would run when her response aired—that we were not attacking her faith, but her judgment.

The first draft of the “Godless” ad had a picture of Kay Hagan at the end with a graphic that read “What was she thinking?” and a voiceover that said “There is no God.” I objected to that because it looked like we were answering the question for her, and that she was thinking there is no God. The group agreed. The next version dropped the graphic, but still had the voice saying, “There is no God.” The voice in the ad is the executive director of the Godless American’s PAC on a TV appearance with Bill O’Reilly.

It was never an attempt to fake Kay Hagan’s voice, or imply that she thinks there is no God. The intention was to provide an exclamation to the ad, showing how radical this group is. In hindsight, that voiceover should not have been in the ad. It gave her another avenue of counter-attack to discredit it.

Hagan ran a response ad, as we anticipated, claiming that we were attacking her faith, along with the charge that we faked her voice. That second charge took some credibility away from our attack. There are those who have argued the impact of this ad on the outcome of the election. It was minimal, if any at all.

Our last tracking poll on the Thursday before the election had us down 8 points and virtually no one was mentioning the Godless issue. By Election Day 62 percent of the votes had already been cast through early and absentee voting. And 57 percent of those who voted for Hagan never punched her name, they voted a straight Democratic Party vote.

In other words, they were not persuadable voters for us, they came to the polls to vote for all Democrats, or against all Republicans and were most likely driven by the presidential race. Of those who cast a vote directly for one candidate or the other, Dole won 51 percent to 49 percent.

North Carolina saw the second highest increase in Democratic turnout of any state in the nation, with an increase of 8.3 percent from 2004. Also, for the first time in more than 30 years, a Democrat carried the state in the presidential contest.

So, in the end, the “Godless” ad had little impact on the election. The Obama campaign’s decision to target North Carolina and turn out the Democrat vote was far more damaging. Another key factor was the very effective ads run by the DSCC and the ton of money behind them. I would argue that had we run the ad sooner, and without the voice at the end, it would have been closer. However, that is all hindsight.

The risk was huge and not worth taking until it was evident we could not win without it, and that was not clear until about 10 days out. Had the ad run about 20 days out, it may have made it closer, but the data we had at that time did not warrant taking such a large gamble. However, in the end the ad had very little impact if any, in the defeat of Elizabeth Dole.

Marty Ryall was the campaign manager for Elizabeth Dole’s Senate reelection campaign.