Primed
North Dakota Gov. Ed Schafer (R) 1993 - 2000
Nobody thought Ed Schafer could win.
Well, almost nobody.
He ran the company his father founded (Gold Seal, maker of Mr. Bubble) and one day found himself in a management training exercise.
"You had to do a goal setting thing, you know, 'whadya want to be?' And out of the total blue I wrote down, 'run for governor of North Dakota.' It was an eye opener because it just popped into my head."
Eventually he set his eye toward the 1992 election.
"I was chairman of the Candidate Recruitment Committee for the Republican Party and in 1989 we had nine-term incumbent Congressman Byron Dorgan, and nobody wanted to run against him, nor did I. It was a long shot deal, but I said, okay and I agreed to run against him," the Governor recalled.
He said it was a great learning experience and his opposition drew the would-be governor to examine his own weaknesses.
Two years later he turned to political consultants Paul Wilson and Steve Grand.
Wilson had tried to get the ear of the Party in the late 1980s but Republicans there believed they knew how to run campaigns without outside help.
Four years later Wilson pitched his idea again, this time to a new state chair, Kevin Cramer.
"Kevin Cramer was the consummate optimist," Wilson said, "our personalities instantly fit. He said, come up and I will introduce you to all the prospects. Schafer, he was Cramer's favorite, a pretty clear favorite."
Wilson said the Governor's earlier Congressional campaign was wrought with rookie mistakes.
"I was looking for a guy like Paul Wilson," the Governor recalled, "George Mickelson was a friend of mine and he was very helpful. He was a good mentor. He invited me down to his office and I spent a day with his cabinet. It was great."
Wilson had run South Dakota Gov. George Mickelson's campaign. He recalled the day he met Ed Schafer:
"The backdrop, North Dakota is in horrible, horrible shape. Young people are leaving and there is just a depressed climate over the state. Ed tells me the story of how he's starting this fish farm. He's going to get hot water runoff from the power plant, I think for free, build giant domes over the water and raise tilapia - and so he does it."
Wilson returns to D.C. unsure if he has a candidate in North Dakota.
"Schafer walks into my office one day and says 'I want you to work for me and here's this check for $3,000.' No contract, which I don't like, he gives me this $3,000 check and says, 'now let's get going.'"
Wilson travels the state to gauge the political climate - the news he brought back to Schafer's home in Fargo wasn't good.
"Paul had been telling me about the findings during their travels around state and saying that I should keep my powder dry, live to fight another day, all that kind of stuff. The other candidates were better positioned - I should seek a lesser spot - all the things why I shouldn’t run for Governor. I was buzzing around the kitchen preparing to fix us a meal. After he was done with his spiel, my only response was 'how would you like your steak?' No response from me about all the info and recommendations he had just dumped on my lap. He was pretty incredulous. I said that instead of agreeing or refuting their observations and conclusions. That is when I said I had hired them to win the nomination, not to tell me not to run!" the Governor recalled.
Ed Schafer means business - that became the campaign slogan.
"Everybody always wants to run for office because, they say, 'I gotta give back." Well, people vote for you because they want you to do something. You can't run government like a business. But the skills of a business manager, those are transferable. I wanted to shift private sector skills to the public sector."
Gubernatorial candidates are expected to speak at each of the 47 District Meetings held across the state, in the freezing cold of a North Dakota winter.
"And they all happen within two months," Wilson explained, "there isn't a primary in North Dakota and all candidates swear they will abide by the convention. So the convention is everything."
"Paul was concerned about the acoustics and the sound system in the sports arena where the state convention was being held," the Governor recalled, "we went to Minneapolis and rented a great sound system that was installed for our exclusive use. The contrast with our speeches, videos, music versus the other candidates was quite amazing. We had bunches of costumes for people to wear during our floor demonstration and we had the speakers blaring Gloria Estefan’s 'Get on Your Feet versus my opponents' oohm-pah band."
But the effort fell short on the first vote. As they had expected, the Schafer campaign had come in second to Senate President Gary Nelson. The third place vote getter was Gary Porter. The Schafer campaign made a mad dash to get Porter's votes on the second ballot.
"We had specifically run a second ballot program," the Governor said, "so I had gone to a lot of people and said, we understand you've got to vote for him but we want your vote the second time around. So we had a lot of people that had committed to us. Nelson was very capable, he just didn't have the dynamics to win. He had all of the legislators, of course he's their leader, he had the machine, but we had a lot of Porter people who said they'd give us their second vote."
The strategy had worked. On the second ballot Porter urged his candidates to vote for Schafer. Nelson too, had a big fall-off in votes.
"There was an underpinning, consciously changing the agenda in the minds of the electorate from who has the most experienced person to be Governor (that would be the senate president) to who has the most experience that can bring jobs to the state, it's called priming. So we teach the voters to make the decision on the basis of jobs and who can bring them in. We changed the scale by which the voter is evaluating the different candidates. And it's magical," Wilson explained.
Having won the convention they focused their attention, not on the democratic incumbent but on his challenger, Attorney General Nick Spaeth.
Spaeth had won his last election buoyed by largest number of votes in the history of the state. He was extremely popular, good looking, and experienced.
"No way you would think that this person should have problems winning the race," Wilson said, "but this priming, this agenda setting function allowed us to say, 'this Attorney General has nothing to do with jobs. In this depression, why would you put a lawyer in there when you need a business man who can bring jobs in?' We reframed the criteria."
In spite of all that, given the intricacies of internal skirmishes, the Democratic Party actually nominated the Senate Majority Leader to run for Governor at their convention. Spaeth challenged him in the Primary and won the vote and polls had him more thn 20 points ahead of his Republican challenger.
Meanwhile, a larger problem was brewing: residency.
Prior to his return to North Dakota, Schafer had been living between his homes in New York, Mexico and North Dakota.
"Somebody in the tax department, run by Democrats, had leaked his tax returns," Wilson explained, "there was this box checked, 'non-resident' and within the five years of running for office you need to be a resident. But it was not the full tax return. Upon a closer reading of the law you find out that he was a resident, but very tough to explain with the box checked."
They devised a plan to upstage the Democratic Central Committee meeting in Fargo, at High Noon.
"We had decided, we're gonna lead, we're not gonna respond to false charges," the Governor explained, "they started to say 'he's not an official resident.' Our original mission was to not respond, so we just let it be. It finally started getting some legs. So if we show them my taxes, well it's a choice of two losers. Either, 'he's a wealthy guy' or 'he's not paying enough taxes.' It got to be overwhelming, it was consuming, so we had to address it."
Schafer gave the Democratic leaders a heads-up, they were on their way and with their own camera crew in tow. The Democrats called the media and a spectacle ensued. The Governor marched down a hallway filled with media, and into the committee meeting where he slapped copies of his tax returns in front of the members. He included other evidence of his residency and proclaimed it proof. The Democrats were stunned.
"It was big," Governor Schafer recalled, "the most telling response was the Governor's Chief of Staff comes running out and said, 'he cheated, he cheated - he whited out all his tax information!' So we knew what they were looking for - my tax information, and it took all the wind out of their sails."
"This was a turning point," Wilson recalled, "As we get into October, the race is tightening. Nick Spaeth, he's so far ahead, thinks he should go on a hunting trip, a drinking party with his buddies. So we film the parade where Ed is shaking every hand, of course he's a runner so he would run the parade, go from person to person, and Nick Spaeth doesn't even show up. You start to get this sense of Spaeth thinks he's got it won, that he's feeling imperial."
For the finale, Wilson had an October surprise planned. The Republican Governors Association sent a researcher from Washington,
"He found that the state industrial commission, which is responsible for loaning money to companies coming into the state and setting the economic policies for the state. It is comprised of the Attorney General (Spaeth), the Governor and the Secretary of State. Well, our guy comes back and says, 'look what we found, Nick Spaeth has missed more than half these meetings.'
"We go and film this office in Fargo. We have three chairs sitting around this desk and it opens with the Century Code (the compendium of state laws) which says the Attorney General sits on this commission. But over the last six years Nick Spaeth has missed over half of these meetings. Then the dates of the meetings he missed scroll up and it's just endless.
"Boom! Schafer shoots nine points ahead and Nick Spaeth is trapped, he has nothing to say because of the priming, what good does it do to say you're the Attorney General?" Wilson reasoned.
When would-be public servants ask his advice, Governor Schafer offers this:
"The first thing I tell them is that you have to be able to answer the question 'why?' Giving back is not the point, if you can't articulate an answer to that question in a single statement then don't run. Have a campaign plan that is so complete that it is down to the duties of the driver. Focus on the possible negatives, what are the positives?
"Physical fitness is important in the campaign, which is difficult on the mind too. But in our campaign specifically, we were trying to shift the old day North Dakota to the new era North Dakota which is exciting and happy and fit. That fit with my energy and my running. I don't think you can ascertain public mood in the polls although sometimes you can gauge momentum, but my campaign was in the streets." Governor Schafer was a single man when he through his hat in the ring and upon reflection, said his toughest campaign was that for his wife's hand in marriage.
"She agreed to stay my girlfriend during that time because she didn't think I could win. Nobody thought I could win."
Nobody thought Ed Schafer could win.
Well, almost nobody.
He ran the company his father founded (Gold Seal, maker of Mr. Bubble) and one day found himself in a management training exercise.
"You had to do a goal setting thing, you know, 'whadya want to be?' And out of the total blue I wrote down, 'run for governor of North Dakota.' It was an eye opener because it just popped into my head."
Eventually he set his eye toward the 1992 election.
"I was chairman of the Candidate Recruitment Committee for the Republican Party and in 1989 we had nine-term incumbent Congressman Byron Dorgan, and nobody wanted to run against him, nor did I. It was a long shot deal, but I said, okay and I agreed to run against him," the Governor recalled.
He said it was a great learning experience and his opposition drew the would-be governor to examine his own weaknesses.
Two years later he turned to political consultants Paul Wilson and Steve Grand.
Wilson had tried to get the ear of the Party in the late 1980s but Republicans there believed they knew how to run campaigns without outside help.
Four years later Wilson pitched his idea again, this time to a new state chair, Kevin Cramer.
"Kevin Cramer was the consummate optimist," Wilson said, "our personalities instantly fit. He said, come up and I will introduce you to all the prospects. Schafer, he was Cramer's favorite, a pretty clear favorite."
Wilson said the Governor's earlier Congressional campaign was wrought with rookie mistakes.
"I was looking for a guy like Paul Wilson," the Governor recalled, "George Mickelson was a friend of mine and he was very helpful. He was a good mentor. He invited me down to his office and I spent a day with his cabinet. It was great."
Wilson had run South Dakota Gov. George Mickelson's campaign. He recalled the day he met Ed Schafer:
"The backdrop, North Dakota is in horrible, horrible shape. Young people are leaving and there is just a depressed climate over the state. Ed tells me the story of how he's starting this fish farm. He's going to get hot water runoff from the power plant, I think for free, build giant domes over the water and raise tilapia - and so he does it."
Wilson returns to D.C. unsure if he has a candidate in North Dakota.
"Schafer walks into my office one day and says 'I want you to work for me and here's this check for $3,000.' No contract, which I don't like, he gives me this $3,000 check and says, 'now let's get going.'"
Wilson travels the state to gauge the political climate - the news he brought back to Schafer's home in Fargo wasn't good.
"Paul had been telling me about the findings during their travels around state and saying that I should keep my powder dry, live to fight another day, all that kind of stuff. The other candidates were better positioned - I should seek a lesser spot - all the things why I shouldn’t run for Governor. I was buzzing around the kitchen preparing to fix us a meal. After he was done with his spiel, my only response was 'how would you like your steak?' No response from me about all the info and recommendations he had just dumped on my lap. He was pretty incredulous. I said that instead of agreeing or refuting their observations and conclusions. That is when I said I had hired them to win the nomination, not to tell me not to run!" the Governor recalled.
Ed Schafer means business - that became the campaign slogan.
"Everybody always wants to run for office because, they say, 'I gotta give back." Well, people vote for you because they want you to do something. You can't run government like a business. But the skills of a business manager, those are transferable. I wanted to shift private sector skills to the public sector."
Gubernatorial candidates are expected to speak at each of the 47 District Meetings held across the state, in the freezing cold of a North Dakota winter.
"And they all happen within two months," Wilson explained, "there isn't a primary in North Dakota and all candidates swear they will abide by the convention. So the convention is everything."
"Paul was concerned about the acoustics and the sound system in the sports arena where the state convention was being held," the Governor recalled, "we went to Minneapolis and rented a great sound system that was installed for our exclusive use. The contrast with our speeches, videos, music versus the other candidates was quite amazing. We had bunches of costumes for people to wear during our floor demonstration and we had the speakers blaring Gloria Estefan’s 'Get on Your Feet versus my opponents' oohm-pah band."
But the effort fell short on the first vote. As they had expected, the Schafer campaign had come in second to Senate President Gary Nelson. The third place vote getter was Gary Porter. The Schafer campaign made a mad dash to get Porter's votes on the second ballot.
"We had specifically run a second ballot program," the Governor said, "so I had gone to a lot of people and said, we understand you've got to vote for him but we want your vote the second time around. So we had a lot of people that had committed to us. Nelson was very capable, he just didn't have the dynamics to win. He had all of the legislators, of course he's their leader, he had the machine, but we had a lot of Porter people who said they'd give us their second vote."
The strategy had worked. On the second ballot Porter urged his candidates to vote for Schafer. Nelson too, had a big fall-off in votes.
"There was an underpinning, consciously changing the agenda in the minds of the electorate from who has the most experienced person to be Governor (that would be the senate president) to who has the most experience that can bring jobs to the state, it's called priming. So we teach the voters to make the decision on the basis of jobs and who can bring them in. We changed the scale by which the voter is evaluating the different candidates. And it's magical," Wilson explained.
Having won the convention they focused their attention, not on the democratic incumbent but on his challenger, Attorney General Nick Spaeth.
Spaeth had won his last election buoyed by largest number of votes in the history of the state. He was extremely popular, good looking, and experienced.
"No way you would think that this person should have problems winning the race," Wilson said, "but this priming, this agenda setting function allowed us to say, 'this Attorney General has nothing to do with jobs. In this depression, why would you put a lawyer in there when you need a business man who can bring jobs in?' We reframed the criteria."
In spite of all that, given the intricacies of internal skirmishes, the Democratic Party actually nominated the Senate Majority Leader to run for Governor at their convention. Spaeth challenged him in the Primary and won the vote and polls had him more thn 20 points ahead of his Republican challenger.
Meanwhile, a larger problem was brewing: residency.
Prior to his return to North Dakota, Schafer had been living between his homes in New York, Mexico and North Dakota.
"Somebody in the tax department, run by Democrats, had leaked his tax returns," Wilson explained, "there was this box checked, 'non-resident' and within the five years of running for office you need to be a resident. But it was not the full tax return. Upon a closer reading of the law you find out that he was a resident, but very tough to explain with the box checked."
They devised a plan to upstage the Democratic Central Committee meeting in Fargo, at High Noon.
"We had decided, we're gonna lead, we're not gonna respond to false charges," the Governor explained, "they started to say 'he's not an official resident.' Our original mission was to not respond, so we just let it be. It finally started getting some legs. So if we show them my taxes, well it's a choice of two losers. Either, 'he's a wealthy guy' or 'he's not paying enough taxes.' It got to be overwhelming, it was consuming, so we had to address it."
Schafer gave the Democratic leaders a heads-up, they were on their way and with their own camera crew in tow. The Democrats called the media and a spectacle ensued. The Governor marched down a hallway filled with media, and into the committee meeting where he slapped copies of his tax returns in front of the members. He included other evidence of his residency and proclaimed it proof. The Democrats were stunned.
"It was big," Governor Schafer recalled, "the most telling response was the Governor's Chief of Staff comes running out and said, 'he cheated, he cheated - he whited out all his tax information!' So we knew what they were looking for - my tax information, and it took all the wind out of their sails."
"This was a turning point," Wilson recalled, "As we get into October, the race is tightening. Nick Spaeth, he's so far ahead, thinks he should go on a hunting trip, a drinking party with his buddies. So we film the parade where Ed is shaking every hand, of course he's a runner so he would run the parade, go from person to person, and Nick Spaeth doesn't even show up. You start to get this sense of Spaeth thinks he's got it won, that he's feeling imperial."
For the finale, Wilson had an October surprise planned. The Republican Governors Association sent a researcher from Washington,
"He found that the state industrial commission, which is responsible for loaning money to companies coming into the state and setting the economic policies for the state. It is comprised of the Attorney General (Spaeth), the Governor and the Secretary of State. Well, our guy comes back and says, 'look what we found, Nick Spaeth has missed more than half these meetings.'
"We go and film this office in Fargo. We have three chairs sitting around this desk and it opens with the Century Code (the compendium of state laws) which says the Attorney General sits on this commission. But over the last six years Nick Spaeth has missed over half of these meetings. Then the dates of the meetings he missed scroll up and it's just endless.
"Boom! Schafer shoots nine points ahead and Nick Spaeth is trapped, he has nothing to say because of the priming, what good does it do to say you're the Attorney General?" Wilson reasoned.
When would-be public servants ask his advice, Governor Schafer offers this:
"The first thing I tell them is that you have to be able to answer the question 'why?' Giving back is not the point, if you can't articulate an answer to that question in a single statement then don't run. Have a campaign plan that is so complete that it is down to the duties of the driver. Focus on the possible negatives, what are the positives?
"Physical fitness is important in the campaign, which is difficult on the mind too. But in our campaign specifically, we were trying to shift the old day North Dakota to the new era North Dakota which is exciting and happy and fit. That fit with my energy and my running. I don't think you can ascertain public mood in the polls although sometimes you can gauge momentum, but my campaign was in the streets." Governor Schafer was a single man when he through his hat in the ring and upon reflection, said his toughest campaign was that for his wife's hand in marriage.
"She agreed to stay my girlfriend during that time because she didn't think I could win. Nobody thought I could win."
