The DeMarco Factor: Transforming Public Will into Political Power

2. The DeMarco Campaign Template

29 2 The DeMarco Campaign Template Policy advocacy campaigns usually follow a customary path: set a legislative objective; call upon known allies to activate an existing coalition, whose leadership signs petitions to the governor and legislators in session; organize from among coalition members supportive letters and e-mails; recruit impressive witnesses to testify before legislative committees; mobilize a few volunteers and one or two paid lobbyists to lobby the legislature; generate some press coverage—perhaps an editorial or two; and,limited funds permitting ,buy a few paid ads,all during the legislative session. The campaign plan DeMarco presented when he first met with the Smoke Free Maryland Board—essentially the plan he was ready to implement—did not just carry a shocking price tag for a public interest campaign.It was a radical departure from any legislative campaign Smoke Free Maryland had engaged in before. It would be more elaborately planned, its time frame longer, each element far more ambitious,and its thrust more aggressively political. This campaign,beginning in mid-1997 and ending with the legislative session , the Maryland General Assembly, in April 1999, would unfold through several overlapping stages. The number and precise nature of these stages would vary from campaign to campaign, but planned staging would be a central element of DeMarco’s strategic template in each campaign.Each stage has discrete objectives and strategies: Stage 1. Initial organizing of the campaign coalition (summer 1997) Stage 2. Opening the conversations with a resolution Stage 3. Legislative session trial run (January–April 1998) Stage 4. Primary elections and general election candidates pledge campaign (summer and fall 1998) Stage 5. Pressure on the legislature for action (January–April 1999) Stage 6. Accountability for opponents of tax increase (May 1999) 30 The DeMarco Factor Integral to each stage, and tailored to each stage, as we shall explore in Chapter 3,would be public education,or,more precisely,media advocacy. Len Lucchi boils the six stages down to DeMarco’s essential strategy,warning that this is “obviously a gross simplification”: “He takes a problem, defines the problem,gets those who have power to commit to collusion.He runs a campaign to educate the voting public about it. Then, hopefully, he elects some people in the process. Then, just as important, he holds the people who pledge in the campaign to do the right thing,to stay on board.” During the cigarette tax campaign, DeMarco would use some traditional tactics but, more central to his success, would introduce critical innovations that were not what almost any other experienced advocacy professional would have done. Given their always scarce funds, most public interest campaigners would have begun by reviewing the readily available public polls demonstrating that cigarette taxes were popular. Despite this ready-made ammunition, DeMarco would engage high-end national pollsters to conduct not just one but three expensive polls in the course of the campaign—and deploy their results in unique ways. DeMarco wouldn’t seek lead partners primarily from among health groups and their customary allies as other tobacco control coalitions had; instead, he would reach out to key allied groups that had never been in the forefront of a tobacco control campaign. He wouldn’t base the excise tax campaign within the Smoke Free Maryland Coalition and its members, the permanent coalition led by the voluntary cancer, lung, and heart associations and the Medical Society—the conventional center of every other state tobacco control campaign; instead, he would create a temporary advocacy organization dedicated solely to this single excise tax campaign, and recruit not individual members but hundreds of community groups and civic associations whose primary interests lay outside health policy advocacy. In this process, he would not shun public alliance with faith leaders and groups,as tobacco control advocates often had (their fear was that such alliances would cause opponents to view them as religious“temperance” zealots, not science-based public health advocates). DeMarco would recruit churches, synagogues, and other faith organizations as his primary political vanguard. He wouldn’t call the new organization something obvious, like the Maryland Cigarette Excise Tax Coalition; instead, he would name it the Maryland Children’s Initiative (MCI).He wouldn’t beg funding from skittish foundations and other philanthropic sources in return for a pledge to shun political advocacy —the dreaded third rail of tax-exempt foundations; instead, he would convince these foundations that they could fund aggressive public educa- The...