The Republican Governors Association has spent about $8 million boosting Cuccinelli. Dem groups gang up on Cuccinelli

The vast left-wing conspiracy has come to Virginia.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe has drawn a huge collection of allies to his side here, by far overpowering the independent spenders that have lined up on the right for Republican Ken Cuccinelli. And even more impressive than the diverse list of organizations spending on McAuliffe’s behalf – greens, abortion-rights and gun control advocates, unions and more – is the military precision with which Democrats have organized their activities in the state.


Since the start of the race, McAuliffe’s campaign has relentlessly exploited Virginia’s loose election laws, which allow for direct coordination between campaigns and outside groups and have enabled McAuliffe to leverage the resources of staunchly progressive organizations to help him win in a genuine swing state.

It’s difficult to say exactly how much other Democrats can learn from the McAuliffe campaign’s tactical success, since most candidates won’t have the benefit of Virginia’s almost-anything-goes election rules. But Democrats involved in the effort say it will have a lasting effect in Virginia, since future Democratic candidates will benefit from the data and infrastructure McAuliffe’s coalition has built up. Within the community of McAuliffe-aligned interest groups, the 2013 election has helped cement a culture of cooperation that began during the 2012 presidential campaign or even earlier.

( PHOTOS: Ken Cuccinelli’s career)

The range of groups piling money and manpower into McAuliffe’s campaign is remarkable and unmatched on the Republican side. Among environmental groups, the Virginia League of Conservation Voters has spent about $1.7 million boosting McAuliffe – including nearly a million dollars in direct cash contributions – and the Sierra Club has put in $464,000, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. California billionaire Tom Steyer’s political committee, NextGen Climate Action, has spent well over $2 million on TV as well as untold additional sums on digital and field efforts.

The list goes on: Planned Parenthood’s political arm has put in over a million dollars on issues related to contraception and abortion rights, while Michael Bloomberg’s Independence USA PAC is on track to spend $2 million on ads hitting Republicans on gun control. Americans for Responsible Solutions, the group founded by former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, has also sent mailers on the gun issue. People for the American Way has run Spanish-language television ads and the SEIU has put boots on the ground in Northern Virginia.

Most importantly, campaign officials said, the Democratic Governors Association has transferred about $6 million directly into McAuliffe’s coffers through its federal super PAC. Several labor groups have done the same.

Indeed, if the likely defeat of Republican Ken Cuccinelli were a mystery novel, it would be a “Murder on the Orient Express”-style tale where the victim has literally dozens of killers.

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Managing this array of independent backers has been a challenge on its own. The McAuliffe operation made it an early priority to get outside groups on the same page, strategists said, in order to avoid a cacophony of uncoordinated messages and duplicative turnout programs at the height of the general election.

Now, McAuliffe campaign strategists and leaders in more than half a dozen outside groups described a close working relationship that coordinated activities down to the groups of voters field organizers would target and the exact dates mail pieces would drop, to avoid deluging any given household with too much campaign material.

“The campaign coordinated with different people in their areas of expertise. Ours is certainly in this area of getting out the Latino vote,” said PFAW president Michael Keegan. “The good thing about Virginia is, you can work on maximizing your influence as opposed to everybody working on everything.”

McAuliffe communications director Brennan Bilberry said the intense collaboration had “resulted in unprecedented efficiency and an ability to ensure that Virginia voters are hearing about the issues they care about the most – whether that’s valuing women’s health care access, scientific research or education.”

There were several points during the campaign when independent spenders were asked to “buy in” to the McAuliffe effort – when progressive interest groups were asked to ante up a contribution to the Virginia Democratic Party in exchange for proprietary data from the campaign, and the promise of contributing their own data in the future.

( Also on POLITICO: Virginia blame game begins)

The first of those checkpoints came in February, when McAuliffe conducted a large set of focus groups and a poll on voter turnout – a notorious challenge for Virginia Democrats in off-year elections. Campaign partners were given access to that information if they bought into the larger McAuliffe operation, as well as access to McAuliffe’s central database for housing voter information.

Early in the campaign, McAuliffe also built extensive models for the Virginia electorate, conducting an initial poll of 10,000 voters to build support and turnout scores. That poll was refreshed every two months until the fall and is now refreshed weekly. All that data has been accessible to partner groups from the start.

In August, on the cusp of the race’s final stretch, McAuliffe offered partner groups access to an experiment-informed program that would guide campaign mail after Labor Day. The so-called EIP involved a controlled test of different mail messages: the campaign sent mailers featuring three different messages to a universe of 25,000 households. After the mail was sent, the targeted households were polled and the data was fed into a central database.

The result was that both the McAuliffe campaign and the whole constellation of groups planning to send political mail had a sharp sense of which voters to target on the issues of abortion and contraception, which moved on the message that Cuccinelli had extreme views on taxes, and which were open to the argument that Cuccinelli was ethically compromised by his ties to an out-of-state fuel company.

Just as importantly, they learned which voters not to target with those messages: which Virginians would react with hostility to a message about contraception, for example, or to a mailer carrying the label of a national environmental group.

Even now, in the final days of the race, the McAuliffe camp and its outside-group backers are working hand in glove on a sophisticated field program: each participating group feeds its voter contact information into the same database every day, along with the campaign, and a daily report goes out documenting everything that’s been accomplished in the field.

Throughout the year, McAuliffe’s campaign has given monthly briefings to its independent allies featuring extensive and unvarnished data presentations from campaign pollster Geoff Garin. Those meetings have all of the groups within the McAuliffe umbrella, including NARAL, the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, the National Education Association, the International Association of Firefighters, the Laborers International Union of North America and the Steelworkers union.

And every Friday, McAuliffe’s key allies in pushing message through earned media would hop on a conference call to coordinate messaging between the campaign, the state party, the DGA, the Democratic National Committee, Planned Parenthood, American Bridge and Steyer’s group, once it launched in August.

The cumulative effect has been a tight, centralized bond between the campaign and the interest groups spending heavily to support it – with high expectations for transparency and accountability in both directions. Sharing so much information with such a large group of partners might seem like a recipe for damaging leaks. No significant information breaches ever made it into the press.

In the end, McAuliffe’s outside-group backers will likely be able to go back to their constituencies not only with a victory in a governor’s race to show for it; they’ll also be able to claim, accurately, that they campaigned on issues of importance to their members and made a difference in the election as a result.

“Ken Cuccinelli’s one of the highest-profile climate deniers in the country and I think the role that the environmental community has played sends a real signal that being in our sights is a risky place to be,” said Navin Nayak, vice president of the national League of Conservation Voters, whose group is the second-largest cash donor to McAuliffe after DGA.

American Bridge president Rodell Mollineau called the race an important moment for his group, which has largely focused on federal elections, as it moves into state races for 2014.

“We were able to reduce duplication, increase efficiency and better amplify our common message. We plan on using this same strategy in races around the country where coordination laws allow,” he said.

Republican and conservative strategists operating in Virginia freely concede that they’ve been outgunned there by a vast, liberal coalition. The Republican Governors Association has spent about $8 million boosting Cuccinelli, about half through direct contributions and half through its own TV ads. But other than that, the only significant outside spenders have been the National Rifle Association and the Susan B. Anthony List, a national anti-abortion group.

Even if Cuccinelli wanted to marshal independent resources in a highly focused and efficient way, it’s not clear that the necessary partners exist – much to the dismay of Republicans operating in Virginia. “The thing we don’t have – it’s very obvious – we don’t have the money that they do,” said SBA List president Marjorie Dannenfelser.

Republican strategist Curt Anderson, whose media firm works closely with both the RGA and the NRA, said Cuccinelli has suffered from a dearth of outside partners willing to step up in the race. The organization America Rising has contributed research, while the conservative groups Citizens United and Fight for Tomorrow PAC have run intermittent ads, but nothing like the sustained, coordinated media efforts on the Democratic side.

“With the exception of one wealthy guy in California, the exact same was true of the special election for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts earlier this year,” Anderson said, alluding to one lonely independent expenditure effort for Republican special election candidate Gabriel Gomez. “Talk is cheap. The most important election to win is the one right in front of you. Planning for the future is for losers. Winning now is for winners.”

The closing weeks of the race have been an especially stark illustration of the disparity in resources and outside-group relationships between the two campaigns. While Cuccinelli’s campaign runs on fumes, triaging its activities to make do with limited financial resources, McAuliffe continues to benefit from a flood of money that now includes TV and radio ads – from Bloomberg’s group and Planned Parenthood – trashing the whole statewide Republican ticket.

In the TV spending wars, the close coordination between groups on the left is on vivid display. Thanks to Virginia’s porous election rules, campaigns and independent groups can borrow commercials from each other and run them wherever they want, provided that ads carry the disclaimer that they’re authorized by Terry McAuliffe. (Some groups, such as Planned Parenthood and the NEA, have coordinated TV buys less closely in order to avoid the “authorized” label.)

When NextGen recently ran an ad, titled “Questioned,” that assailed Cuccinelli’s ethics on stations in the D.C. media market, McAuliffe’s team liked the spot so much that they pulled the video and upped the buy to saturation levels in both Washington and the Tri-Cities market in southwest Virginia. Earlier in the race, when Planned Parenthood starting buying TV time in the Norfolk and Richmond markets, McAuliffe quickly jumped to put his own ads on the air in Washington – focused on the same message Planned Parenthood could be relied upon to deliver, on contraception.

The result, on the Republican side, is a record level of exasperation in a party unaccustomed to being so heavily outmaneuvered and outspent.

“Ken Cuccinelli is virtually fighting this war on his own versus the Democratic Party, the McAuliffe campaign and what seems to be an endless number of well-funded liberal groups,” said one Republican strategist. “Their side has come to the table with money. Ours has not. At a certain point, you can have endless conversations but unless somebody’s writing a check, what’s the point?”