Kerry Spreadsheet Campaign Key to Victory

A precinct captain's reliable count of Kerry supporters is only the numerator. Campaigns also need a good estimate of the other half of the equation; that is, the denominator, or total number of people expected to turn out in each precinct.

Enter Kerry consultant Ken Strasma, a statistical wizard who runs a firm called Strategic Telemetry. Using the 1988 Iowa turnout data, Strasma estimated precinct-level turnout projections by updating the 16-year-old numbers to account for population shifts and registration rates.

With those two pieces of information, Strasma identified where Kerry needed a bit more support to pick up another delegate or two, and places where he already had enough or excess support. After all, turning out voters where it won't translate into additional delegates is a waste of scarce resources (phone calls, mail pieces, volunteer door knockers) better spent where the projected "vote goal" will win another delegate.

"The math is important," reminds Strasma. Indeed, because it had such confidence in its identified support for the other campaigns, the Kerry team began estimating its opponents' strength in key precincts to, as Strasma puts it, "get a sense of where they were in terms of reaching viability thresholds" -- and countered accordingly.

"Every night we'd crunch the numbers in spreadsheets and print them out for all 1,993 precincts," recalls Strasma. "We had a daily graph. Then, in the last few days, we started figuring out where to best spend our resources." The scheduling staff was told where to organize events for Kerry or his surrogates.

"It was fun watching those charts darken up," admits a gleeful Norris.

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