Free The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg

station for itinerant political operatives coming to work on Mississippi campaigns. “Loving the game meant mastering the mechanics of the game.”
    Even an understanding of the latest voter contact strategies failed to make Mississippi politics a friendly place for a reform-minded liberal. Malchow’s candidates always seemed to lose. After managing several such races, never winning more than 40 percent of the vote, Malchow grew dispirited and decided to become a lawyer, which he thought would at least help him earn enough money to stay involved in politics through other channels. He enrolled at the University of the Pacific, but was rarely engaged by his law-school studies. Then, in his third year, Malchow took a mandatory corporations class. The gamesmanship between the people who wrote the byzantine rules and regulations governing companies and the people who set out to elude them mesmerized Malchow in much the same way that Reese’s electioneering machinations had. “All of a sudden you have all these cases where people have these wild, creative financial schemes,” he says. “And I’m a creative person, so I’m looking at this thinking, ‘That’s fun! I can do that.’ ”
    Upon graduation, Malchow became a securities lawyer at one of the leading firms in Jackson, a job that consisted largely of writing the fine print for life insurance programs administered by local auto dealers. Malchow found this, and just about everything related to the practical application of the law, to be tediously unimaginative. He kept an eye on politics by faithfully reading the weekly edition of the
Washington Post
and distracted himself by drawing
Loophole
, a cartoon strip about the fictional Simon Legree School of Law, which was syndicated in forty student newspapers and had begun when Malchow had found himself similarly bored inlaw-school classes and started caricaturing his professors and their teaching styles.
    In early 1982, Malchow found a more socially productive distraction. Blocks from Malchow’s law office, the state’s governor, a progressive named William Winter, washard at work trying to modernize the country’s most backward education system through compulsory-attendance laws and the introduction of public kindergarten classes.When legislators blocked Winter’s reforms, Malchow—along with much of the state’s business community—was disgusted. “It was the rabble who was opposed to this,” he says. “But the rabble in Mississippi, especially at this time, was a healthy majority.” Malchow gathered a few friends with the goal of knocking off some of the old bulls in the state legislature.
    The group, which called itself Mississippi First, found office space in a Jackson house where it shared a phone line with what seemed like the entirety of the state’s liberal community, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mississippi Gay Alliance. Malchow and his volunteer allies approached each of the state’s living former governors, who had little in common politically other than an enduring hatred of the legislature, and convinced three of them to share the rosters of donors they had kept on index cards. It was the first time anyone had ever assembled a thirty-thousand-person political mailing list in Mississippi, and Malchow began plotting how to shake down its names for his new cause. He hired people to type up the names and addresses, and raised enough money to buy an Apple II computer, which ran on floppy disks with such little storage that it took 110 of the disks to keep track of donors spread across Mississippi’s eighty-two counties.
    Malchow had heard of Richard Viguerie, who had built a financial foundation for the Reagan Revolution in the late 1970s by collecting mailing lists of right-wing groups and conservative magazines and bombarding them with contribution requests. Malchow had also heard of Morris Dees, an Alabamian who played a similar role on the left, and probably even had