Hal Machow Is Going to Die on Thursday. He Has One Last Message for Democrats.

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Hal Machow Is Going to Die on Thursday. He Has One Last Message for Democrats.

By Sasha Issenberg 03/16/2024 07:00 AM EDT Link Copied

23 - 29 minutes

POLITICO illustration by Jade Cuevas; Images by iStock

Sasha Issenberg is the author of five books, including The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Playbook for Defeating Disinformation and Winning Elections, which will be published in March by Columbia Global Reports.

On Thursday, March 21, one of the Democratic party’s most accomplished campaign consultants will die.

In a sense, Hal Malchow has been planning for this day ever since 1987, when a genetic marker test revealed he was likely to develop Alzheimer’s. At the time, he was barely 35 years old, a hustling political operative who had recently come off managing Al Gore’s first Senate campaign while overcome with worry about his mother’s early descent into dementia. (Around her 50th birthday, she was discovered wandering lost in a parking lot in the Mississippi town where she had lived her whole life.) After his mother’s untimely death, in 1990, Malchow was intent on never letting himself endure the same thing. If he showed symptoms for Alzheimer’s, Malchow resolved at the time, he would take his life before he became too diminished — and became a burden to those around him.

That vow hung over Malchow for decades as he helped to pioneer the specialty of direct mail in political campaigns, first with letters seeking donor contributions and then glossy flyers hunting for votes. Malchow oversaw mail programs for five Democratic presidential nominees and built one of the country’s largest voter-contact businesses. Along the way, he transformed his lo-fi field into an unlikely realm for high-tech innovation, including the emerging technique of microtargeting and the use of randomized field experiments in campaigns.

But in 2019, Malchow was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and last year began to show signs of real decline — his short-term memory would fail him, and he would get irritable or cranky where he had once been able to regulate his emotions. So around his 72nd birthday last year, Malchow began communicating with an assisted end-of-life organization in Switzerland to make plans for the end.

Before scheduling his death, Malchow made sure he had time to launch a final salvo at the way campaigns are run. Malchow built his career championing marginal improvements to existing tactics, like rewriting a leaflet’s wording to improve turnout among recipients by 1 or 2 percentage points. But now, as he faces his ultimate deadline, Malchow is taking aim at a much bigger piece of electoral strategy: winning minds via mass media.

“We’ve done a lot of good work figuring out the turnout piece of it, but it’s still very small,” Malchow says in his modern adobe home in the hills above Santa Fe, as a playlist mixing country-rock and classic jazz wafted through the airy space. “The persuasion is a big opportunity.”

That is the urgent message of his new book, Reinventing Political Advertising, where, using reams of empirical research and decades of personal experience, Malchow implores his peers to rethink their entire approach to paid communication, especially on television. It is time, he argues, not to reengineer the targeting of 30-second spots, direct-mail pieces and digital pre-roll ads but to rethink their basic purpose.

Political communicators are sticking to approaches developed for an era when ticket-splitters and swing voters composed a sizeable chunk of the electorate. But with a body politic that has sorted into two highly polarized parties — with just one-tenth of voters torn between them — the logic of persuading voters to support a candidate has grown obsolete. Ad campaigns should instead promote the Democratic Party itself, Malchow proposes, particularly at moments when news events might help it win new adherents, such as after a mass shooting, which thrusts gun-control policy back into the news and voters might be ready to reconsider their allegiances.

“Ninety percent of voters are choosing parties,” he writes. “Yet our approach to advertising has not changed at all. Almost 100 percent of our advertising dollars are spent on candidate choice. The decision driving 9 out of 10 votes is not being addressed at all.”

Malchow, who spent his partial retirement writing fantasy novels and political thrillers, jokes that he is happy to be certain he will never have to see Donald Trump sworn in again. He is optimistic that if Trump is convicted of a crime the dynamics of the presidential race will change. But he doubts the apex predators of his party’s consulting ecosystem have the proper mindset to seize the opportunity to change voters’ opinions.

“The data is threatening to the TV people, they don’t pay attention to it. They’re doing their targeting in exactly the wrong way,” he says. “If I ever go back to Washington,” he adds, before unleashing a familiar, mischievous cackle, “the media consultants will kill me.”

Harold Malchow was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1951, the son of a Republican economist and an environmental engineer too afraid to let his wife know he had voted for Lyndon B. Johnson.

Malchow’s ninth-grade class was among the first in the state to desegregate, to his mom’s anger. But Mississippi’s subsequent transformation into a multiracial democracy presented Malchow with his first entry into electoral politics. While a college student at Millsaps College, Malchow joined the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as it challenged a party establishment still holding onto Jim Crow and worked on the gubernatorial campaign of civil-rights activist Charles Evers, the brother of Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in 1963. After graduating, Malchow began running campaigns himself, none of them successful.

“Hal has strong core values and beliefs, but it was the love of the game that most enthralled him,” Hank Klibanoff, a journalist who shared a Jackson home with Malchow, once said. “Loving the game meant mastering the mechanics of the game.”

Malchow’s formative local experience came through volunteer work with Mississippi First, a progressive nonprofit founded in 1982 to back the agenda of Gov. William Winter after his reform-minded agenda stalled in the state Legislature. Malchow took charge of the group’s fundraising, convincing all of the state’s living governors to share their donor lists. He bought an Apple II computer and began manually keying in every one of the 30,000 names and addresses so they could be used for targeted solicitations. The fundraising effort ended up bringing in $100,000, which supported Winter’s successful effort to enact a compulsory-education law and bring state-funded kindergarten to Mississippi for the first time.

Ahead of the 1984 election, Malchow was summoned to a job interview with a Tennessee member of the House seeking a promotion to the Senate. Al Gore asked how he would explain to his donors that he had just hired a campaign manager who had lost three straight races. “You tell them you hired the hungriest guy in America,” Malchow responded. “And he laughed and hired me.”

After Gore’s victory, Malchow moved to Washington, hoping to avoid being pigeonholed professionally as a “Southern campaign manager.” He found himself frequently asked if he could help candidates raise small contributions through the postal service. Malchow drafted solicitations that could be mailed to subscribers of like-minded magazines and donors to liberal causes. “It had to be a four-page letter, and it had to go in an envelope,” Malchow recalls today, in a thick Southern treacle that gets whipped into a rapid-fire staccato whenever he gets excited. “If you deviated from any of these rules, the returns went down.”

In 1990, when the United Auto Workers hired Malchow to lure employees away from more traditional public-employee unions, he was inspired by the chance to work in full color, on 8-by-10-inch glossy postcards. “It was so much more fun,” he says. “You could think of some really clever headlines, just all sorts of things you couldn’t do in fundraising.”

Mixing fundraising, persuasion and voter-registration mailings, Malchow developed one of the country’s largest voter-contact firms, MSHC Partners. The firm handled political mail for more than 30 U.S. senators and 20 governors at various points, the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and John Kerry, and the Democratic National Committee. One out of every 10 dollars that the committee raised during Clinton’s reelection went to Malchow’s firm.

“It had been traditionally the sort of stepchild of the campaign,” says Doug Sosnik, who served as political director and senior adviser in Clinton’s White House. “You spend all this money on mail, and — other than proving to the client through postage receipts that the mail went through — no one has any idea what you did. No one has an idea if it worked.”

As much as Malchow chafed at the lack of creativity in fundraising mail, he found it epistemologically satisfying. Everyone could agree on which fundraising solicitation was best: the one that brought in the most money. The impact of persuasion and get-out-the-vote mail, however, was unmeasurable. You could like one brochure, or style of mailer, over another, but who could say which was actually more effective at changing a voter’s opinion or behavior?

In 2000, two Yale political scientists began publishing journal articles that characterized get-out-the-vote mailers as a waste of money. Most of his fellow consultants who learned about these scholarly publications dismissed them as an affront to their livelihoods by two eggheads trying to assess street-level politics from the ivory tower. Malchow was both intrigued by their research method, a randomized experiment akin to a drug trial, and ashamed. “Why should an industry as large as ours have to be prodded by the academic community?” he says. He invited the professors, Don Green and Alan Gerber, to Washington for meetings with his clients and proposed they begin withholding control groups from existing mail programs so he could measure the impact. In 2007, Malchow helped to launch the Analyst Institute, a consortium of Democratic campaigners committed to promoting experimental research and disseminating its lessons.

“There was some conflict around that,” says Trish Hoppey, Malchow’s business partner at MSHC for a decade. “From a business perspective, why are you telling these secrets? It gives us a competitive advantage! But he never thought of it that way. He thought part of his responsibility was to pull the industry forward, pull the party forward, think about things from a very holistic perspective.”

Malchow was relentless in publicizing research breakthroughs that other firms would have guarded as trade secrets. In the mid-1990s, he recognized that consumer databases represented an untapped trove of material that could be used for politics, and developed primitive statistical models that could use the data to profile and group voters. He became the leading Democratic promoter of what became known as “microtargeting,” the practice of classifying voters by a combination of individual characteristics, such as whether they are likely to be gun owners or have school-age children, rather than just as part of demographic groups or geographic zones. He detailed his techniques in a 2003 textbook, The New Political Targeting; its insights now undergird nearly every decision campaigns today make about which voters to target — and which to ignore.

“He transformed how political campaigns are waged and how candidates communicate with voters, and he did so with equal parts art and science,” says Michael Bassik, who helped Malchow form one of the first internet departments at a Washington political consultancy, which became the digital agency of record for Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004.

“He believed in the power of data to inform messaging and content and creative,” adds Bassik, who served as MSHC’s vice president of interactive marketing. “These are tactics that are now used universally, and they never would have been if he didn’t get out there and talk about them and evangelize them and share them.”

Malchow abruptly shut down MSHC Partners after the 2010 election, stunning his colleagues, employees and clients. “Why would I leave a profession that has treated me so well?” Malchow wrote them in an email. “Advertising has become not just more negative but more vicious and personal. The campaign dialog has become increasingly disconnected from the real problems people face. Frankly, what we say in our ads has often become more distant from the truth. I don’t say all this to criticize anyone. I am glad that talented people will still man the barricades. I just no longer want to do this work.

Still, he did continue to work with the Analyst Institute and Voter Participation Center, a nonprofit whose work registering and mobilizing female and minority voters provided a donor-funded laboratory for Malchow to test his latest hypotheses informed by behavioral-science research. Otherwise he spent his quasi-retirement drafting novels, the first of which, a fantasy called The Sword of Darrow, he had begun in partnership with his then 8-year-old son, Alex. (It took six years to find a publisher, by which time Alex was a teenage football player and, it appeared, somewhat embarrassed by the entire project. Malchow ended up writing his next fantasy novel alone.)

In time, Malchow would trade his Arlington home abutting the Potomac for one in New Mexico, which he knew only from having worked on campaigns there.

Throughout it all, Malchow knew how it was likely to end. His mother’s struggles with dementia remained front of mind, so much so that he sought out his first genetic screening for Alzheimer’s around his 36th birthday. The young doctor informed Malchow that the test uncovered two genetic markers which meant it was likely he, too, would at some point contract the disease. She followed up with some advice: I think you should retire. Every few years, Malchow would return to a doctor to see if he was suffering any diminishment, and always was assured he did not appear to be cognitively impaired. (Some of that may have had to do with the limited diagnostic value of putting the standard test query — How many cities can you name in two minutes? — to someone who spent his life thinking about ZIP codes.)

In 2019, the inevitable became evident when a scan of Malchow’s brain-wave activity pointed to encroaching dementia. He adopted a treatment protocol centered on diet and exercise, despite the fact that he could find no credible experimental evidence attesting to its effectiveness. But after a year it no longer took scanning technology to recognize that Malchow’s brain no longer worked as it once had. He began to struggle with simple tasks, like remembering computer passwords, and would find he could no longer recall which Netflix movie he had watched the previous night.

There was evidence that the attention to detail that had marked Malchow’s career was beginning to elude him, too. In the summer of 2020, he released a thriller novel about voting-machine manipulation. As part of his research, Malchow collected exit polls for more than three hundred elections and compared them to the final results. He found Republicans had overperformed by 6 percentage points and calculated that the odds that such a variation could be attributed to random chance was one in eighty million. He used this figure in the book’s title, 80 Million to One: A Political Thriller Inspired by Real Events, before realizing an error in his math led him to way overestimate the probability around which the novel’s plot revolved. He had to issue an embarrassing correction to the title, which he revised to 42 Million to One.

Malchow returned to the vow he had made half a life earlier about what he would do when Alzheimer’s arrived: “I knew that if it happened, I was not going to let all this play out to the end.” He had seen how responsibility for his mother had fallen on those around her, and he believed it would be unfair to his wife, Anne Marsh, who already suffered from multiple sclerosis. Several American states, including New Mexico, permit euthanasia under so-called death-with-dignity laws, but all require a candidate to have a fatal condition with only months left to live. Malchow did not qualify and had no interest in living until he did. “What’s the point? You know, why sit around the house and watch a little piece of your brain disappear every day?” he says. “And the ordeal for the caretaker is terrible.”

Malchow looked to Switzerland, where in 2005 the country’s high court ruled there was a constitutional right for people with “incurable, permanent, severe psychological disorders” to choose death. In 2011, despite criticism that it drew “suicide tourism,” Zurich voters decided overwhelmingly to keep the practice legal in their canton. The law sets a somewhat paradoxical standard: Any candidate for lawful euthanasia has to demonstrate that he or she had a serious mental illness but was also of sound mind in making the decision.

Last September, Malchow contacted Dignitas, a nonprofit advocacy group that facilitates assisted death, to begin making arrangements. He had to submit a two-page autobiography — a task, he imagined, to ensure he’d deliberated on his options and was not acting impulsively — alongside medical records that a Swiss psychiatrist reviewed to grant a “provisional green light” to proceed with planning.

“He thought it through in his own way to get the analysis and make the decision,” says Sen. Mark Warner, who has been a close friend of Malchow’s since the mid-1980s as well as a client during his runs for statewide office in Virginia. “Hal always had a ferocious, independent streak — a resilient stubbornness once he makes up his mind.”

It was still up to Malchow to set the date, and as he and Marsh looked at the calendar they considered bucket-list travel — hiking in New Zealand, a few days along Lake Louise, one more trip to Green Bay to see his beloved Packers at home. (It is a fanhood passed down from a grandfather who was a congressman from Wisconsin.) But Anne proposed a different factor to consider in scheduling. “How long will it take for you to get your book out?” she asked him. And so Malchow got to work.

Reinventing Political Advertising is best read as a dying man’s last research agenda, a collection of hypotheses that Malchow will never have the opportunity to test. On the page, it can make for an ungainly volume, lurching to grand reconsiderations of strategy and proposals for small technical adjustments, commingled with potted history of the political trade and occasional examples from his own career. “I want to get some things off my chest,” Malchow concedes.

If there is a central theme to the book, it is that those who design broadcast advertising should adopt lessons from the direct-mail world, where the relative ease of randomized experimentation has generated a rich yet undervalued body of knowledge about voter behavior. One central insight from years of Malchow’s research, conducted primarily through the Voter Participation Center, is that voters respond better to dispassionate appeals from official-looking sources than glossy, colorful materials that evoke advertising.

Malchow includes a draft of a potential script that shows competing Democratic and Republican congressional candidates and their positions on straightforward policy questions like “Do you support raising taxes on people making more than $400,000 per year?” The script ends with “Now it’s your turn to choose. Vote.” There’s no judgment about the candidate’s views, no recommendation on which one is better. If appropriately targeted to voters who do not know much about the candidates or parties but are more likely to agree with the Democrat, Malchow argues, such an ad should help generate votes

Both implicitly and explicitly, much of the book takes aim at the stranglehold media consultants have over campaign decision-making, and what Malchow sees as the few ways they have updated their tactics since he began working on campaigns a half-century ago.

“Perhaps most significant is that Hal not only knows his stuff, but he also understands the insiders’ game and isn’t afraid to shine a light on the slothful, ossified practices of the political consulting trade,” wrote pioneering fundraising consultant Roger Craver on his blog The Agitator. “In fact, so many of their unproductive practices are exposed in his new book many will want to run him out of Washington, D.C., on a rail.”

As he began work on the book, he let his plans for March spread through the political grapevine, each new branch a reminder of Malchow’s reach within the consulting profession. “When you look at almost every other mail firm in the country, with a few exceptions, someone at the lead in the leadership at that firm has been an employee of MSHC at some point or worked with Hal at some point,” Hoppey says.

The big ideas in the book, Malchow says, came easily to him but specificity required by footnotes “almost gave me a nervous breakdown.” Even after he completed the writing, just getting it out was a struggle for Malchow. One idea he had — to sell the book only via Barnes & Noble, so that Republican operatives who wanted to find a copy wouldn’t be able to locate it on Amazon — was flummoxed by the mechanics of online distribution. When it came time to submit the finished work to Amazon’s self-publishing site, Malchow uploaded the wrong digital file, only to learn after printed copies shipped that they were pockmarked with typos and other errors from an earlier version of the text. But he has been relentless in promoting the book, accepting every invitation he gets to lead a webinar on its ideas and trying to court lefty bloggers to take an interest in it. Malchow has even plotted a schedule of blast emails to maximize his days left on earth.

“The way he is approaching Alzheimer’s and his death — and in a sense that way he’s promoting his book — is completely consistent with his principled life,” says Rob McDuff, a Mississippi civil-rights attorney who first encountered Malchow as a teenager attending a youth social-service organization.

“He decided he wants to die on his own terms and not have Alzheimer’s take over his last years. It doesn’t surprise me.”

After Malchow locked in the March date, his son, Alex quit his marketing job in London and temporarily left his girlfriend to spend months with his father. Now 29, Alex relocated to Santa Fe, with the son arranging studio sessions to record testimonial videos and the father passing down favorite recipes.

“It’s been a marvelous time,” Malchow says at his dining room table one February midday, between mouthfuls of a bouillabaisse he and Alex had cooked the previous evening. “I tell people I’ve had so much fun in the last three months. I should exit more often.”

Malchow has been treated to a rolling goodbye, gathering old friends from his early days in Mississippi and later days in Washington politics for weekend get-togethers. A large group accompanied him to Green Bay for this year’s game; many were told, obliquely, just that it would be Hal’s last Packers trip, and learned only when Malchow gave a toast following a group dinner what exactly that meant.

“When we were on the trip, I said to Hal, ‘Why don’t we wait another year, we’ll get another game, and then you can go to Switzerland 14 months from now?’” recalls Sosnik. “He said, like it’s all second nature, ‘I’m done.’ He has been thinking about this for a long time. His life is entirely in order, and he is not looking back.”

This weekend, Malchow arrives in Zurich with Alex, Anne and her two sons from a previous marriage, all wearing long-sleeved yellow shirts that she had printed with Δ U = Q + W — the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. On two separate days, Malchow has appointments with a local psychiatrist, consultations necessary before a lethal prescription can be written. Then on the morning of March 21, Hal and Anne will go to an apartment secured by Dignitas where he will be greeted by the nurse who will administer the fatal dose. (After reading that the medication is very bitter, Malchow picked out the Franco mint chocolates that will accompany it and is currently contemplating whether to pair the candy with champagne or cognac.)

Between the medical appointments, there are two empty days on the calendar available for sightseeing, hearty food and drink — and trying to convince the world that campaigns need not be stuck in the past.

“To the last minute,” Alex Malchow observes, “he’ll be doing a webinar from Zurich, I bet.”