ANALYTICS, RELIGION AND PERSISTENCE: THE INSIDE STORY OF HOW REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE TED CRUZ OUTFOXED DONALD TRUMP IN IOWA
Team invested in data analytics, religious leaders
DES MOINES • It was on a hot July day in 2013, six months after he joined the U.S. Senate, that Ted Cruz began what would become his winning campaign in Iowa.
At a faith gathering at the Des Moines Marriott, the Texan bowed his head as pastors laid their hands on his shoulders to pray. Meanwhile, the senator’s aides collected their names and email addresses, starting a database of evangelical leaders that would swell over the following months and years. Cruz’s father, Rafael, himself a preacher, looked on, beaming.
Cruz’s years of work paid off Monday night, earning him the most Republican delegates in Iowa’s caucuses despite stern opposition.
Second-place Donald Trump, a novice to the Midwestern political circuit, had counted on the power of his charm and high-wattage personality to seduce the state’s veteran political operatives and voters.
Third-place Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida, had banked on rising late, believing Iowa could be won with an air war and a late burst of activity.
But in a state that has long rewarded conservatives who put religion at the fore, and in a political era dictated by data analytics, Cruz won on the strength of both. His message was perfectly tuned to Iowa conservatives, he used his web of relationships to try to unite evangelical leaders, and he invested deeply in data and turnout organization. By caucus day, Cruz had 11,986 volunteers in Iowa and trained captains at nearly all of the 1,681 precincts.
“We formed the philosophy that our campaign would be waged by neighbours telling their neighbours who to vote for, and we needed to set up every piece and shred of data to allow that to happen,” said Jeff Roe, Cruz’s campaign manager.
That approach was paying off by the beginning of the year. Cruz had a clear lead in the polls. His list of endorsements was growing by the day. Crowds were swelling, even when he stopped by gas stations near midnight.
From his first trip to Iowa three summers ago, Cruz was plotting his path to the caucuses.
To run his Iowa campaign, Cruz interviewed several seasoned consultants but settled on a former Baptist pastor named Bryan English who had deep ties to the evangelical networks led by Rep. Steve King and Bob Vander Plaats, head of the conservative group the Family Leader. English was an unusual hire, but the move underscored Cruz’s strategy.
“Do you set up your operation with a bunch of khakislacks, blue-blazer clowns?” Roe, Cruz’s campaign manager, asked. “Or do you set it up with an activist?”
Back at national headquarters in Houston, Roe and his team invested several million dollars in a data analytics operation. There were about 175,000 Republicans in Iowa who had participated in a presidential caucus, and Cruz’s statisticians and behavioural psychologists set out to learn everything they could about them.
The campaign conducted “psychological targeting” of likely caucus-goers, building its own version of a MyersBriggs personality test to categorize Republicans so it could send them personally tailored phone calls, mail and other messages.
“If anybody goes to caucus and says, ‘I haven’t seen Ted Cruz,’ I want it to be their fault, not ours,” English said.
For the first six months of the campaign, he was the lone Cruz staffer in Iowa, and he worked out of the basement of his home. By August, though, there was a headquarters in Urbandale, then more staffers. The team grew to 20, and Cruz rented out a dormitory building in Des Moines — “Camp Cruz” — to house volunteers from Texas and other places who came to help canvass.
By January, the Cruz campaign had so much information about Iowa Republicans that it believed it could pinpoint exactly which ones were certain to caucus for Cruz, which were undecided and which were leaning toward competitors.
Ten days before the caucuses, the internal data (based on a turnout of 150,000 people, which would set a new record) showed that 19,186 were certain to be with Cruz. About 1,400 had supported him at one point but had turned to another candidate; they got personal phone calls from Ted; his wife, Heidi; or Rafael Cruz in a push to win them back.
On the eve of the caucuses, Cruz returned to Des Moines for a Sunday evening rally at the state fairgrounds.
The crowd was deeply religious, with children wearing church youth-group T-shirts and two elderly couples up front holding hands in prayer. The videos that played on oversized screens before Cruz went on featured soaring guitar chords mixed with testimonials from conservative leaders. Rep. Steve King rallied the crowd with an introduction that assured people Cruz was spoon-fed the Constitution and the Bible as a child.
Cruz cast himself as the one true conservative in the race. “Stand with us. Caucus for us. If we stand together, we will win.”
The crowd roared. A day later, they stood with him.