AMY GOODMAN: And they’re not going to vote on immigration before the election.

PETER WALLSTEN: That's right.

AMY GOODMAN: They see they’re in big trouble on this issue.

PETER WALLSTEN: That's right. And again, that keeps all bases covered for now.

AMY GOODMAN: Tom.

TOM HAMBURGER: Your question, Amy, gets to this: one of the big threats to the Rove-Bush plan for building this majority is expanding entree into the Latino community, and this split on immigration within the party, Sensenbrenner’s bill versus the White House position, is a threat to that plan.

AMY GOODMAN: The issue of big business, the Republicans almost completing their strategy to incorporate it as -- what do you call it? -- an arm of the party.

TOM HAMBURGER: Yeah. Amy, one of the dreams of conservative strategists for decades actually has been to mobilize business, making business and the corporate community an arm of the Republican Party, in the same way that labor has been to the Democrats. That's the analogy that's been used. And we argue in the book that they have become, in the last six years particularly, remarkably successful in mobilizing business and in mobilizing business in new ways that weren't imagined previously.

You know, for decades, business executives have written checks to the Republican parties, inordinately to Republicans, 60% to 70% GOP, as opposed to 40%, 30% to the Democrats. But what's happened over the last six years, as Republicans have grabbed on and there's been a general understanding of the importance of reaching out in a campaign to individuals through niche person-to-person marketing, is that business has been engaged in this effort in a way we've never seen before. So it's no longer just writing checks, but it’s actually using the email systems of large corporations, mobilizing the workforce on the factory floor and, in some cases, actually having employers urging their employees to vote or to recommend voting for a specific candidate. This is new, and we argue in the book that it's had a powerful effect, and we expect to see more of it in 2006, even a year in which some business executives, always very practical, are at least publicly trying to hedge their bets.

AMY GOODMAN: How significant was Karl Rove being under the cloud of indictment?

TOM HAMBURGER: Well, that's -- Karl Rove played an enormous role in everything we've been talking about so far, both the sort of master strategist, a guy who has what some Republicans call bifocal vision, meaning he focuses on both short-term games the next election and also the long-term prospects, the long-term need to build what he likes to call the dominant majority of Republicans. But Karl, we think, was significantly sidelined and hampered by the Fitzgerald investigation and the threat of being indicted in the Valerie Plame investigation. It took a toll on him and on the plan. We were going to the Norquist Wednesday meetings and observing all of this. In fact, when the White House made a serious misstep nominating Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court -- they had to, as you know, take back that nomination -- that occurred really at the time when Karl Rove was under the most pressure from the Fitzgerald investigation. He was being brought back to the Grand Jury, and so on.

So I think he was enormously distracted and is now, as a result of knowing that he's been cleared, enormously relieved and, in a sense, back in the saddle again. We think he's playing an enormous role, contrary to some of the news stories that appeared of late suggesting that his influence isn't as great. He’ll be, we believe, once again the field marshal for these midterm elections, even if not quite as visible as he’s been in the past.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Wallsten, Voter Vault.

PETER WALLSTEN: Another important tenet of the one party strategy, Amy. Voter Vault is a massive database of millions of names, not just names of voters, but their tastes, their opinions on issues, what brand car they drive, what kind of alcoholic beverage they might prefer, whether they have -- what kind of features they have on their home telephone. And this is a database that’s kept here in Washington at the Republican National Committee headquarters, but that is accessible on a web-based program to Republican operatives around the country. If you’re a Republican strategist running a state senate campaign in Florida or a congressional campaign in Arizona, you can have access to this database and within minutes have a list of names of people in a particular neighborhood, where you want to send a volunteer to go knock on doors, based on whether they’re -- based on what level of conservative they are, if they’re very conservative, moderately conservative, not conservative at all.

It's a way that the Republicans can go into, you know -- they can focus their attention not only on well-known conservative areas in an exurb or a suburb, but they can go into the middle of Cleveland or the middle of Philadelphia, and in a neighborhood of liberal Democrats, they could find a person to vote Republican. And it's part of a key to winning close elections. There's a lot of closely competitive House races this year. We believe that Voter Vault gives the Republicans an advantage in those close House races, because they have more of an ability than the Democrats. The Democrats do not -- they have a database, but it’s not nearly as sophisticated as this.

AMY GOODMAN: Where do they get the information?

PETER WALLSTEN: They buy it from retailers. It's marketing data that's available. It's not unique to the Republican Party, but --

TOM HAMBURGER: Drug chains, supermarkets keep an enormous amount of information, Amy, about your buying habits and mine. And what marketers have learned is that this can be an enormous advantage if you want to design a specific narrowly tailored campaign.

Can we give you an example? We came across in a suburb in Ohio an African American woman called Felicia Hill. She’s a nurse married to a UAW auto worker. Traditionally, this would not be a household in which Republicans would target or spend a lot of time, African American UAW union household. But what Voter Vault told Republican field operatives was that the Hills not only were traditionally registered as Democrats, but that they also sent their children to private schools. They knew also that Mrs. Hill subscribed to golfing magazines, because she's an avid golfer. They knew that they were members of a conservative church that was opposed to gay marriage initiatives and to abortion.

And this allowed the party to make a series of entreaties to the family, and particularly to Felicia Hill, like which they had never seen before, to woo her to Republican events and to convince her that the Republican Party, based on her interest in supporting private schools and school vouchers, for example, might be a home for her. So for the Republican Party, getting Ms. Hill to attend Republican events and to be open to Republican argument was an enormous victory. It was an example of how you can use a database or data on individuals to reach out to new voters who might not traditionally be in your corner.