Free The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg Page A

some of Dees’s handiwork filed away in his office. Malchow had kept thefund-raising letters he received—one sent for Sargent Shriver’s 1976 presidential campaign, another for Jimmy Carter’s reelection—all of which he assumed had come to him because his name was on the
Washington Post
’s national subscriber list.
    After watching his candidates fail to raise the funds they needed to run their campaigns, Malchow was enthralled by the letters. “I thought it was fascinating: you could send letters out and get money back,” he says. “This seemed like a pretty cool concept to me.” He took the letters and tried to ape their style—language so excitable that recipients would be moved to immediately open their checkbooks in response—as he raised the alarm about Mississippi’s perpetually obstinate legislature. “It’s time to fight back,” Malchow wrote. One night, he invited twenty volunteers to help stuff his new four-page letter and a return mailer into envelopes, before affixing labels that emerged from a dot-matrix printer tethered to the computer where Malchow kept his list of names. By the end of the evening, only 1,200 envelopes had been stuffed. It took Malchow a month to complete all 30,000, and only then because someone informed him that professional mail shops had machines to fold and stuff envelopes. The first day that Malchow checked the post office box that Mississippi First had rented, he found ten letters. Nine could be described as hate mail, with copious use of “communist” and “nigger-lover.”
    Ultimately, though, the group got six hundred contributions from the letter, a 2 percent response rate that Malchow later realized was considered a solid return in the direct-mail world. The group cashed the checks and began dispersing the money to legislative challengers it supported. One day, the group’s president, Brad Pigott, entered a meeting waving a copy of
The New Kingmakers
, a just-published book profiling the era’s influential political consultants, including Viguerie and Dees. “Look at this,” Pigott said. “Viguerie says you’re supposed to mail them again!” The book described Viguerie’s practice of alternating between tapping a prospecting list—a collection of new names with typically a low response rate—and his house list of previous donors who usually constituted a movement’s true believers.
    Now, following Viguerie’s example, Malchow wrote to his six hundred again, this time with an even more dire appeal for money. The house list responded as Viguerie believed it would: Malchow got a 15 percent response rate. In the end, Mississippi First collected $100,000, about half of its total budget, through Malchow’s letters, and helped to defeat six committee chairmen each with more than two decades in the legislature.Even before the election in 1982, the legislature acquiesced to Governor Winter’s progressive agenda, approving his education bill as well as political reforms that had not even been on the Mississippi First agenda. “No one in the world had ever sent thirty thousand people a piece of mail talking about what a bunch of ignorant degenerates the legislature was, and it freaked them out so much they passed everything in the next session,” Malchow says. More than that, the victory convinced Malchow of the unique power of political mail to galvanize activists behind a cause.
    The next year, Malchow traveled to Nashville to meet with a young congressman named Al Gore, who was looking to follow his father into the Senate. Gore liked Malchow but wondered how he would justify to his donors the decision to hire a campaign manager who had lost all three of his races. “Al, you tell ’em that everybody in the state says you think you have this campaign wrapped up and in the bag,” Malchow said, “and that you hired the best and hungriest son of a bitch in America.”
    After Gore’s win, Malchow moved to Washington in search of his next client. He was