As soon as he arrived in Austin, Dave Carney went onto the Yale web site and searched for email addresses for Alan Gerber and Don Green. In their book, the political scientists lament that most of their field experiments to that time had been of the same sort: working with non-partisan institutions to test the effectiveness of mail, phones and canvassing. Gerber and Green considered their research non-ideological, but nearly all their collaborators had emerged from the left, groups like ACORN and the NAACP National Voter Fund, which worked to register and turn out new minority voters. The few times Gerber and Green had been invited into candidate campaigns had been for small-scale local races. The next campaign on Carney’sdocket would be a wholly different affair. Perry had spent $25 million in 2002, and Carney anticipated a much tougher reelection in 2006, when voters were likely to have tired of Republicans and be eager for alternatives. Carney had begun planning for a budget of $40 million, the bulk of which would naturally go to television and radio.
“Would you be interested in being in a real campaign?” Carney wrote to Gerber and Green.
It was an audacious offer, not least because the candidate seemed to happily embody an almost cartoonish cowboy anti-intellectualism. But it was another aspect of Perry’s personality — the fact that he was “a cheap bastard” — that made Carney think the governor would take to the idea of using academic researchers to effectively audit the campaign’s budget. “We spend a lot of money on politics. It’s probably the only industry in the world where there’s no market research,” says Carney. “The fact that they had done all these studies that show mail and phones don’t work — I thought, ‘We spend a lot of money on mail and phones.’ If it’s not working, let’s spend it on things that do work, or don’t spend it.”
—excerpted from "Rick Perry and His Eggheads: Inside the Brainiest Political Operation
in America"
