Losing
Welcome to the world of political organizing, where a single day's vote can leave you out in the cold.

By Ellen Alperstein

It was May of 2007, and fueled by the dream of a John Edwards presidency, Kyle Warneck ’05 and company turned the key in the lock of a newly rented office in Sioux City, Iowa. The trio of field organizers—soon to be joined by a growing corps—had eight months to muster victory in the country’s first caucuses on Jan. 3.

What they didn’t have was a pencil. A chair. A desk.

“We got a box in the mail,” recalls Warneck ’05, “and it contained a printer, some paper and six telephones. The cheapest kind. That’s it.”

He called campaign supervisors to inquire about furnishings, suggesting that it might be difficult to work in such Spartan conditions. They said: “Try.”

Welcome to the ad-hoc world of political organizing in which Warneck had become a committed denizen since joining a campaign e-mail list the first time Edwards ran for president in 2004. Then, Warneck was contacted by Kristy Young, an Edwards campaign field organizer for Southern California. She asked him to help set up a phone bank, distribute fliers and with—say what?—three days’ notice, help organize the candidate’s appearance on campus that February. Warneck’s interest in a politician’s commitment to the underclass became a crash course in American studies for which he got extra credit for persuading Athletic Director Charlie Katsiaficas to close down the track so that Edwards could go for a run after giving his speech in Edmunds Ballroom.

Edwards’ first presidential campaign ended a week later, but not Warneck’s passion. “I had the bug,” he says, “I was a true believer.” From the day Edwards lost as John Kerry’s running mate, Warneck was “waiting until he ran again.”

Campaign organizers compose a tight, discrete professional network; if you’ve got the chops, you’ve got the work. When the 2004 school year ended, Warneck contacted a colleague of Young’s at the national Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee about a job in South Dakota’s special election. Some students spend the summer as a Wall Street intern, a talent agency mail clerk, a national park trail builder; Warneck’s 10-hour days that summer were spent riding in a van, knocking on doors in towns so small each house was a landmark, and crashing each night with three other people in a Best Western motel room. Their candidate, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, beat the odds in a chronically Republican district, and today serves as South Dakota’s sole Congressional representative.

With his degree in sociology, Warneck went to work as a salesman in his father’s electronics business in Brooklyn. Two years later Kristy Young called and sold him on the idea of moving to Iowa as one of the Edwards campaign’s first field organizers.

Because Iowa is the first electoral test of a candidate’s viability, it is, Warneck says, “the Super Bowl of politics.” It’s also the graduate school of grass-roots organizing.

With their astonishingly high number of political subdivisions run by elected officials, Iowans get exercise exercising their franchise. Iowa (pop. 3 million) has 99 counties to California’s (pop. 36.5 million) 58; Iowa has 950 incorporated cities; California has 478. “There’s no such thing as ‘unincorporated,’” Warneck explains. “You must be in a township. A huge percentage of the population is involved in government.”

Responsible for two counties, Warneck collected and analyzed voter data, wrote reports and contacted prospective voters. Incessantly, for eight months, he called, he wrote, he dropped by. He got to know these people better than his college roommates. If a Democrat in Mapleton sneezed, Warneck called a neighbor in Danbury to deliver chicken soup. By December, he was working 18 hours a day.

Despite Iowans’ expressed opinion that the campaign was too early, too invasive, too … much, Warneck says, the heartland still had heart. “I would go to a farmhouse, be told ‘I don’t want to talk politics,’ then asked if I want a cup of coffee.”

On Edwards’ behalf, Warneck won the battle in one of his counties, and fought hard in the other. But statewide, they lost the war. Edwards finished second to Barack Obama with 30 percent of the vote.

What happened? “We got the denominator wrong,” Warneck says plainly. Based on turnout from 2004, the campaign expected 900 voters in one county, but 1,600 showed up. “We needed 18 votes from this town, … I had my 18 people out of the 40 I thought would show up. But 80 people showed up. We got our numbers, but more people tuned out than we expected, and that’s the real story of Iowa.”

“After we lost, I didn’t read a newspaper for two days, didn’t want to know anything,” he says. “I was exhausted and depressed.” After months working extremely long hours in an emotionally charged sprint, “On Jan. 4 you wake up, and it’s over. You think, ‘What am I gonna do today?’ It’s a weird letdown.”

Asked if he would have felt different if Edwards had won Iowa, Warneck is philosophic. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. … At some point every campaign ends, win or lose. Then there’s an eerie calm …”

Before the month was out, having won no primary or caucus states, Edwards dropped out of the presidential race. A few days later, Warneck dropped out of America, heading to France for several months to recuperate and visit his girlfriend, Anne Paprocki ’05, a teacher near Toulon. From there, he reflects on his now-dormant career as a campaign operative, and what it’s like to lose something to which you gave so much. Political organizing is a career, but it’s not for him. He was in it for John Edwards, not to become the next James Carville.

Maybe that’s why “I don’t feel like a loser,” he says. “I don’t have any regrets.” John Edwards ran a strong, policy-driven campaign, he says, and it prompted other candidates “to set an agenda. … That’s positive, to push issues of inequality, health care, onto the radar. I feel good about that. … Going to Iowa was like joining the Peace Corps—it meant leaving a cushy sales job, my girlfriend … to go to the middle of nowhere to knock on doors. (Iowa) is the best job in politics. You survived, you get it. … It’s a badge of accomplishment, and I didn’t expect that.”