22 minute read
Chapter 2
from Real and Right
A Campaign Flashback
How had we gotten here? Looking back, the campaign for governor almost felt surreal. Implausible in some ways at the outset, but eminently—and obviously—winnable.1
When I made the decision to run in March 1991, I had just turned forty. Family and friends comprised my base of support—my only support at that point. I had guided other candidates to victory before as a political consultant, but
had never run for office myself. There were more than a dozen better-known candidates making sounds about running. And when the first newspaper polls on the race came out, I was at the bottom of the candidate pack at one or two percent.
I was not thinking of running for public office until Senator Jake Garn called me just before Christmas in 1990 to say he would not be running for reelection. He urged me to run for his seat and promised to support me. A month earlier, on November 29, Governor Norm Bangerter had announced that he would not seek a third term. Two of Utah’s top political offices would be open seats in the 1992 election.
I seriously considered the Senate run, assessing it from all angles, before ruling it out. It just didn’t feel quite right. The governor’s race was nowhere in my equation—until one day, it was. A few weeks after the senate decision, I was talking with pollster Dan Jones, and he stunned me with a suggestion. “The person who really ought to run for governor is you,” he said.
The idea lingered in my mind and then took hold. It felt audacious and magnetic at the same time, and there was a deep sense of rightness about it. I felt a certainty to run and a rational belief that I could win. From that point on, I was essentially in.
We were victorious, of course. Eighteen months of hard work and worry, constant fundraising, impactful advertising and messaging, and a number of key decisions—some risky—combined to deliver the victory on November 3, 1992.
Into the Arena
Anyone running for office must first make an honest appraisal of whether they can win. Though I had never run before, there were several reasons I was viable.
First, I knew Utah’s political process and players from the inside out, having managed or chaired eight statewide campaigns in the previous fourteen years, including two major ballot initiatives. I was experienced with debates, speeches, public engagement, television interviews, town halls—and liked them. Being at one to two percent in the polls when I started did not worry me. Almost every successful candidate starts small and then becomes elevated through the process.
A second rationale was my appetite and aptitude for public policy. Through my service on the Utah Board of Regents and Southern Utah University’s Board of Trustees, as well as the Legislative Strategic Planning Committee for Public Education, I had developed serious ideas I wanted to see implemented. The voter initiative campaigns I led helped me develop a working knowledge of the state budget and the way the system worked. I had come to believe I was pretty good at solving significant problems. see implemented. The voter initiative campaigns I led helped me develop a working knowledge of the state budget and the way the system worked. I had come to believe I was pretty good at solving significant problems.
I also had noticed an interesting pattern regarding Utah’s gubernatorial races. None of the past four governors had ever held statewide office before. All of them came from the business community, had backgrounds outside Salt Lake City, and were not widely known when they started.
Starting out, one of my most significant deficiencies was that I did not have a political base, and in order to make it through the caucuses, conventions, and into the primary election, I needed one.
The business community, rural Utah, and educators were all possibilities, given my background and professional experience. But it was state legislators I targeted—and who ultimately became a solid base and formidable advantage.
Early on, I undertook an aggressive schedule of visiting House and Senate members, traveling the state to talk with them individually and help them get to know me. Month after month, and under the radar of other prospective candidates, I developed relationships, giving them the time to make up their minds. Initially, my goal was to gain the support of one-third of all GOP legislators. By the fall of 1991, I had pledges of support from all but two.
The person who really ought to run for governor is you.
Money was another key consideration in the early days—and an ongoing challenge for the duration of the campaign. Financing the campaign of any first-time candidate is not unlike raising money for a start-up business; most of the money is raised by personal appeal of the candidate or entrepreneur, and both look initially to friends and family.
I leaned heavily on our family businesses, borrowing $20,000 from the Leavitt Group to get started. I also turned to each of the Leavitt Group agencies, and to other insurance companies as well. Were it not for early money like that, starting a statewide campaign would have been extremely difficult.
A campaign memo from October 1991 laid out my finance plan, which had three basic categories of fundraising: large donors, a finance committee, and direct mail. The large donor plan was straightforward—find 150 people capable of giving $1,000 or more, and I would call on each of those people personally. For the finance committee, we planned to recruit people in every county for the committee, asking them to nominate potential donors that the campaign would further cultivate with letters and mail. Our direct mail plan involved sending letters over a rolling period of time asking people interested in the campaign to donate.
Bring quality jobs and quality education to Utah.
The memo set our goal at $400,000 by February 1992, but we fell short. It took us until the June convention to raise the first $400,000. However, we raised more than our competitors and spent it wisely. I would estimate 65 percent of the $1.8 million raised during the entire campaign was raised by me personally. There is no other way unless a candidate self-funds their campaign.
Up to that point, I had a regular traveling aide-intern, but no staff. Nolan Karras, a good friend and former Utah House speaker, was chairing the campaign, and my friend and former consulting partner, Bud Scruggs, headed my strategy committee. Rob Glazier, one of Bud’s students at BYU, came on as manager, along with KayLin Loveland as scheduler and office manager. And in one of the most important decisions I made, I asked LaVarr Webb, former political editor and later managing editor of the Deseret News, to join the campaign. He agreed, bringing enormous talent, leadership, and intellectual power to the endeavor. As 1991 gave way to election year 1992, we were rolling.
Election Season
On January 7–8, 1992, we kicked off the campaign with a news conference at our house on Laird Avenue and a twenty-four-stop tour of the state. I announced my candidacy, promising to “bring quality jobs and quality education to Utah.”
By candidate filing day, April 15, 1992, the field was set: Democrats Pat Shea and Stewart Hanson Jr.; Independent Merrill Cook; and five Republicans—me, Richard Eyre, Mike Stewart, Dixie Minson, and Dub Richards.
Eyre, a well-known Utah consultant, public speaker, and author of several best-selling books on family life, was my greatest threat for the Republican nomination. Education issues became a key distinguisher between us through the party caucuses, county and state conventions, and into the primary election.
The Eyre campaign centered on a school voucher system, which played well among his more conservative constituency in the GOP. Under Rick’s plan, parents would be given a government-issued voucher for $1,000 to go toward the child’s education at a school of their choice—public or private. Rick believed it would encourage free-market competition among schools.
I believed wholeheartedly in markets and considered public education to be a monopoly in need of a challenge. However, my plan to inject market forces into public education centered on charter schools, which provided choice to parents without reallocating existing public-school funding and subsidizing wealthier families with children at high-priced private schools.
My education plan borrowed heavily from the state strategic plan I had worked on the previous four years and centered on competency-based education, local control of schools, and the use of new technologies in the classroom.
Competency-based advancement and technology enablement in education were introduced in the first campaign and remained primary themes throughout my time as governor.
In the campaign, my position on education and work on the education strategic plan were central to gaining the endorsement of the Utah Education Association, a step critical to getting me through the state convention. The UEA was never going to endorse Rick Eyre, but I had to head off an endorse ment of the next strongest candidate in the race, Mike Stewart. Stewart was a former history profes sor with a PhD in constitutional law who was will ing to say he would raise taxes for education—a key UEA goal. I would not make that pledge.
The endorsement came to me in the end, and it was a turning point. We achieved it after a stee ley-eyed conversation with UEA leadership, fol lowed by one-on-one meetings with all twenty members of the union’s political committee. I would not hedge on taxes; instead I urged UEA leaders to look beyond the pledge to the longer game. Mike Stewart couldn’t beat Rick Eyre, but I could. If they pledged their support to Stewart on the strength of his tax pledge, they would end up fighting Rick Eyre for the next eight years.
The endorsement gave me significant advantage. More than nine percent of the delegates at the state convention elected at the party caucuses were educators.
Two days before the caucuses, we received more positive news. The Deseret News reported on April 25, 1992, that I had pulled ahead of Eyre in the polls, leading 34 percent to 24 percent among all respondents, regardless of party. Among Republicans, I had a two-point lead over Eyre. I never again trailed in public opinion polls throughout the primary and general election.
The state convention, three months later in June, brought a stumble, but not a setback. It also required two more strategic campaign decisions that made a substantive difference in the successful outcome of the campaign.
One was the selection of Olene Walker as my running mate. Olene had served for eight years in the legislature, including time as the Utah House majority whip. She grew up in Ogden and had earned a bachelor’s degree in political science
from Brigham Young University, a master’s degree in political theory from Stanford, and a PhD from the University of Utah. After the legislature, she directed the state Division of Community Development and was vice president of Country Crisp Foods. She was a terrific pick and a valued partner who worked side by side with me for the next eleven-and-a-half years.
The other critical decision was whether to draw on personal savings to buy advertising, which would boost my momentum and standing in the polls in the immediate post-convention period heading into the primary.
Jackie and I ended up loaning $20,000 to the campaign—money we had saved up to buy a new car. In addition, $20,000 was borrowed from the Leavitt Group. The campaign spent all of it on billboards and radio advertising. It was enough to sustain a noticeable showing for three weeks of advertising at a level we believed could break through. It was a big bet, and had I not survived the convention, it would have been a total loss.
Indeed, I survived the convention, although it was not my campaign’s finest hour. The convention was a two-day event on June 27–28. On the first night, an ultra-right group circulated a nasty, negative tabloid about me containing groundless assertions about my ideology. My campaign protested to the party chairman, who declined to do anything about it.
The next day, my candidate presentation was lackluster. We had a group of student performers from Southern Utah State College, whose act was a bit amateurish. Then I mixed up my speech pages on the podium and had to awkwardly lapse into my stump speech.
By the time voting started, I felt deflated and disappointed, sensing a letdown in our momentum and, conceivably, diminished chances of coming out of the convention. It was one of the hardest moments of the entire process. Eyre took first place, and we were second. We had lost our lead by thirty-eight delegate votes—enough to propel us into the primary, but still a bitter disappointment.
The Primary
We had to project the look, feel, and trajectory of a winner. And we did it with a shakeup in our advertising strategy; a creative genius named Chuck Sellier; and our most memorable television ad.
Based on a gut reaction—and a proposal and compelling vision laid out by Chuck on how to reach voters at the level of their values through storytelling—I brought Chuck on board to create our television spots. It cost us our relationship with our existing advertising agency, R&R Partners, but Chuck Sellier became one of the most important people involved in my political success.
His first ad for us became the “Real and Right” tractor ad, based on my grandfather’s story about a farmer down the road who had more land than he could afford. It was a remarkably beautiful piece of work, and a brilliant way of introducing me. Without stating it blatantly, the ad spoke of my values, my family, and what was important to me.
Other ads followed. To counter Rick Eyre’s charge that I was captive to the UEA, we produced an ad about rewarding good teachers and firing
bad ones. The public loved it; teachers hated it. We also did an ad that emphasized the need to provide quality jobs so that our children wouldn’t have to look outside the state for work.
Real and right; reward good teachers, fire bad ones; and quality jobs—those were the three messages we used for the primary election.
I had already decided coming out of the state convention not to attack Eyre or Cook, despite the risk involved in not negatively defining them before they attempted to define me. We remained positive in tone and messaging, even when opponents lashed out or made themselves look bad by their behavior or tactics. As the frontrunner heading into the primary, I increasingly came under fire.
Rick Eyre regularly leveled condescending barbs that I was young and lacked substance on issues, while Merrill Cook attempted to make a big deal of the whirling disease outbreak found in fish at the family’s hatchery business in Loa. I maintained composure in the face of attacks, and the personality differences on display only bolstered my momentum.
Just before the primary election, Governor Bangerter endorsed me. Senator Jake Garn had publicly announced his support of me earlier in the summer, and the two endorsements were impactful, since sitting officeholders rarely take sides in their party’s primary. Bangerter’s endorsement particularly antagonized the Eyre camp, which then tried to capitalize by claiming I was the establishment candidate and Norm’s handpicked successor.
In the final days before the primary, the candidates’ respective positions on issues had been clearly formulated. My belief in federalism became prominent as I spoke of Utah needing greater flexibility from the federal government in providing welfare and other services. I also spoke of wanting to lead the nation’s governors in a crusade to restore the proper balance between state and federal governments. My five campaign themes—quality jobs, quality education, quality of life, fostering self-reliance, and limited government—had been regularly conveyed and would continue through the general election.
On the ideological spectrum, there were obvious delineations as well. I was center-right, Eyre was to my right and favored by a more conservative element, and Cook cast himself as a populist anti-establishment type in the Libertarian mold.
On Tuesday, September 8, primary day, my name appeared for the first time on a statewide election ballot. We had maintained a substantial lead in tracking polls for weeks on end, and by 10:00 p.m. that night the outcome was clearly established. More than 46 percent of registered voters had cast a ballot. Olene and I won 56 percent of the vote, compared to 44 percent for Eyre and his running mate Steve Densley.
The biggest surprise of the night was on the Democratic side. The more liberal Stewart Hanson Jr. beat moderate, pro-life attorney Pat Shea for the Democrat nomination. Though Hanson was behind in the polls, the pro-choice community had turned out in massive numbers to push him over the finish line.
With the primary election over, I would face off with Merrill Cook and Stewart Hanson in the general election.
General Election
Pat Shea likely would have appealed to middleof-the-road voters in the general election, drawing some of that support from me, but now he was out of the race. With a more left-leaning Stewart Hanson as the Democrats’ nominee, I began to view Merrill Cook as my main opponent. A Deseret News poll taken before the primary, but released five days afterward, indicated as much. That first general election snapshot had me at 44 percent; Cook at 26 percent; and Hanson at 17 percent.
Utah is a Republican state, and people intuitively presumed that I would win. However, with just fifty-three days to go, and my opponents behind and running out of time, it was clear that both would train the focus of their attacks on me.
Our strategy had four imperatives: First, we needed to consolidate the Republican party and bring Eyre and his supporters over to my side. If they moved toward Cook, victory was not automatic. The second imperative was to raise the money required to fuel a solid campaign. Third, because our opponents had every reason to gang up on me, we had to control the agenda by raising new issues and ideas. Finally, we had to avoid mistakes. Bad decisions on how we responded to attacks could hurt us; likewise, becoming too aggressive could backfire as well.
National politics also were a significant variable; Utah’s governor’s race was directly impacted by the presidential race. Ross Perot, a wealthy businessman from Texas, had formed an Independent Party, qualifying on the ballot in all fifty states. His politics bridged the gap between Republican and Democrat ideologies, appealing to the conservatives and moderates who were skeptical of the establishment. Merrill Cook was running within this surge of independent zeitgeist, and Perot’s race gave him a template. Perot had started out nearly even with Republican President George H.W. Bush and Democrat Governor Bill Clinton in early polling conducted in February 1992. By June, he was the frontrunner, with 39 percent to Bush’s 31 percent and Clinton’s 25 percent. The existence of Perot’s campaign allowed Cook to harness the energy of the national effort, using many of the same volunteers. It was the perfect atmosphere for a third-party effort.
Merrill Cook saw an opportunity to attack when health care reform surfaced as an issue in the presidential election and trickled down to state campaigns. I had not spent much time thinking about it, but Cook pounced at one of the debates, blasting me for being part of the insurance industry—therefore part of the problem—and for having no solution or plan. He proposed using the state’s worker compensation fund as a pooling mechanism for health insurance for the state’s uninsured, which was not a bad idea. But then he also proposed a payor-play system where small businesses could either buy private health insurance for employees or pay up to five percent of payroll into the state fund for employee insurance. I knew this part of Cook’s solution was problematic, but because I didn’t have a solution of my own, I couldn’t counter it.
Cook continued his aggressive posture, running attack ads contending that I couldn’t fund my education reform package without raising taxes, that I was beholden to the health insurance industry because of campaign donations, and that I was a political crony who had been selected by the Republican Party to stop Cook’s tax-cutting initiative in 1988. We responded with an ad saying that despite the attacks, we would not go negative but would continue highlighting our “real and right” initiatives.
A little more than three weeks from the election, however, we had a major scare when our daily tracking polls, conducted by Dan Jones, began showing downward movement for me and an upward trend for Cook. The trend persisted over successive days, and within a week or so, our lead had shrunk from more than a dozen percentage points down to five or six. The numbers were deeply unsettling. Emergency meetings were held, and our strategy team was divided over whether the surveys were an unexplainable anomaly or a true measure of an upswing for Merrill, for which we would need to counterattack. The campaign team of Senate candidate Bob Bennett, who were also conducting tracking surveys, shared their results with us, showing I was still ahead. But we were uncertain of the poll’s reliability. My spirits sunk. It felt as if the atmosphere of discontent Cook had tried to foster with his Independent candidacy was taking root in the final weeks of the campaign, and we were slipping uncontrollably toward a loss. For me, it was the lowest point of the campaign.
a friend of mine, Todd Remington, who had a polling company in California. Within days we had his results. They were consistent with the Bennett poll, so we were indeed ahead. Dan Jones never determined what happened, but our campaign’s restraint in holding back a counterattack or making brash decisions served us well.
Two days away from the election, a Deseret News/KSL-TV poll showed me nine percentage points ahead of Cook.
Money was flowing easier by this stage in the game. Many people waited to see how the race developed before they committed their contributions. We had seen a boost just after the primary, then a leveling. In the final week before the election, a wave of “smart money” came rolling into the campaign.
In all, we had raised $1.8 million over the eighteen months of the campaign. The final pre-election finance report on October 28 indicated that we had spent $1.3 million on the race. Of that amount, I loaned $60,000 to my campaign. Merrill Cook had spent nearly $700,000. Eighty-two percent of that, or $574,000, came from Cook himself. The rest was made up of smaller donations ranging from $5 to $100. Stewart Hanson had spent nearly $400,000, with the bulk of his financial support coming from labor unions. I had received donations from nearly every interest group except unions.
I continued to collect endorsements as election day neared, including Richard Eyre on October 22, and sixteen prominent Democrats who announced their endorsement on November 1. The weekend before the election, my campaign distributed literature to 400,000 households. We had the phone lines running hot with calls encouraging people to vote. And we had increased our media buy in the final two weeks.
On election day, I looked back on the past year and a half. It had been long and difficult, but also empowering. The experience of listening to, and really hearing, all manner of Utahns in thousands of visits and meetings in cities and towns across the state had refined me. I felt like a different person from the one that had started down the path eighteen months before.
As voting continued throughout the day, I stayed away from campaign headquarters, spending time calling key supporters and inviting people to the election night gathering at the Little America Hotel in Salt Lake City. Jackie and I assembled the kids and headed down to the hotel about 7:00 p.m. Within two hours of the polls closing, it was clear that I would be the fourteenth governor of Utah. The results were Leavitt, 42 percent; Cook, 34 percent; and Hanson, 23 percent.
The scene was exuberant in the hotel ballroom. Family, friends, and supporters shared the jubilation. Everyone who was a part of the Leavitt campaign celebrated, and the first indicator of change became evident when a security detail from the Utah Highway Patrol formed up around me as soon as the outcome appeared certain.
I barely slept that night, but it didn’t matter. The next morning could not come soon enough; everything felt new and incredibly exciting. The adrenaline rush car ried over into daylight, along with a sense of purpose and a bit of impatience. I had a meeting with the cam paign staff first thing that morning to start moving forward with the transition and to prepare for the inauguration, which was exactly two months away. We had won the day and were eager to get on with the term.
