Retail Politics

Are all Whole Foods shoppers ultraliberal, blue-state, wine-sipping, touchy-feely tree huggers? Are all Cabela’s customers right- wing, red-state, beer-guzzling, flag-waving Bambi killers? Of course not, but that hasn’t stopped campaign consultants from using what we buy—and where we buy it—to predict how we’ll vote. Let the war between Camembert and camo begin.

by S. C. Gwynne

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Like Cabela’s, the inventory is remarkable for its range and variety. Here the food is arrayed in lush, geometric rows and stacks, and it all looks as if it belongs on a magazine cover: There are cornucopia-like wicker baskets overflowing with organic d’Anjou pears, papayas, organic squashes, and peppers in brilliant yellow, red, and green. There are acrylic hampers of green beans in shades of such perfect, implausibly deep green they look almost unnatural. There is a thirty-foot bin of nothing but mushrooms, some of which cost $39.99 a pound. And then there are the dining areas. The store has five of them, making it, in effect, one of the city’s largest restaurants. At lunch one day at the seafood bar, my companions and I had yellowfin tuna encrusted with sesame seeds and ginger and fresh wild salmon with wasabi butter. It was as good as anything you would get in a downtown Austin restaurant and illustrates another reason for the store’s allure: It sells a lot of fancy, high-end food.

The place is in fact stuffed to the rafters with pricey produce and prepared food: boneless Muscovy duck breast for $14.99 a pound, top-round veal scallopine at $19.99 a pound, grouper for $16.99 a pound, prepared Dungeness-crab cakes for $18.99 a pound, and lots of organic produce at two to three times the cost of conventional produce. (Whole Foods does carry products—notably its “365” line—that are competitive with supermarkets.) In this sense, Whole Foods marks a milestone in belief-driven marketing: the ability to sell such food at what Forbes magazine termed “prices so obscenely high they prompt gasps of disbelief” and somehow convince people that they are getting a good deal. But there is a clear cause-and-effect relationship between the store’s militant environmentalism and pure-food standards and its ability to charge $19.99 per pound for curry tuna satay or twice the average price for regular uncooked chicken.

The beliefs that drive such purchases are, of course, ultimately political, and anyone who still doubts that people who drive Volvos are Democrats or that Buick owners are Republicans need only look at the staggeringly successful Republican get-out-the-vote campaign in the last presidential election. I had heard that the Bush campaign had used “consumer preference” data to figure out who its voters were, so I decided to call the man behind that effort, Bush’s chief strategist Matthew Dowd, a friendly, articulate Austinite who was a key member of the president’s 2004 campaign team. When I told him I was writing a somewhat unorthodox story about Whole Foods and Cabela’s as political ideas and asked if that was something he would be interested in talking about, he replied, “That is exactly the kind of thing we have been looking at. We have spent a lot of time looking at what people buy.”

At lunch at Las Manitas, in Austin, which had been the Bush campaign’s company cafeteria during his first presidential run despite the fact that it is also a haven for every left-winger in town, he explained what he meant. “Traditional political science says that you can predict who a person is going to vote for based on his income or whether he is pro-choice or pro-life, for taxes or against,” Dowd said. “Well, that does not work. Lifestyle is what determines political choice. I would rather know where they shop, what they buy, what kind of car they drive, what sports they watch, where the kids go to school. Income is no predictor: It can tell you how fifty-three or fifty-four out of one hundred people will vote. But the problem is that you need to get to at least seventy-five percent for it to be of any use in a campaign.”

The problem was getting enough information on what people actually bought. Such knowledge is coveted in politics these days. In our polarized political culture, sending pro-Bush propaganda to Democratic voters not only does not change their minds but also annoys and motivates them to vote against Bush. But if a candidate knows who is likely to vote for him, he can tell his organizers and precinct captains exactly whose doors to knock on, whose numbers to call. From primary-voting records, it is relatively easy for a candidate to see who the active Democrats and Republicans are. But the key in this election was to identify—and to turn out in large numbers—historically “passive” Republicans.

But how to find this out? Dowd’s solution was to combine consumer data with voter files. He was able to amass 182 unique pieces of data on each voter (yes, that sort of information is readily available on all of us). “The idea was to come up with a model, based on consumer preference, that would allow us to determine, with eighty-five to ninety percent accuracy, if the person is a Republican or a Democrat,” said Dowd. “Nobody had ever done that before. We did this sort of microtargeting in sixteen states, and we spent millions on the data.” And it worked. In Dowd’s model, Whole Foods or Cabela’s becomes one input among many. “The stores become a strong link to other data,” he said. “Combine that with the knowledge that the person drives a certain kind of car or buys certain magazines, and you start to get a strong profile.”

Dowd also promoted the idea of having both Bush and Cheney campaign at Cabela’s stores in 2004. Of Bush’s visit to the store in Wheeling, West Virginia, Dowd said: “Cabela’s gave us a way to reach the middle-class white Republican, exactly the crowd that the Democrats have lost. You would think that the male vote, working class, with low income, would be a Democrat. But they are hunters and fishermen and believe in property rights. That is a Cabela’s crowd.” John Kerry, meanwhile, wouldn’t have been caught dead in Whole Foods, a store that might have reinforced all the limp-wristed, nonfat-decaf-mocha-latte-sipping stereotypes of Democratic politicians. Though he did not visit Cabela’s, he actively courted the readers of Field & Stream magazine, which amounts to the same thing.

Matching consumer preferences with voting profiles yields all sorts of interesting information. Republicans buy domestic SUVs and minivans; Democrats buy foreign ones. R’s drive Audis and GMCs and watch Fox News, and D’s drive Subarus and Volvos and watch CBS and CNN. The History and Learning channels skew heavily R, while the Food Network is overwhelmingly D. Republicans drink dark alcoholic beverages such as scotch and bourbon and red wine; Democrats drink white ones like gin and vodka, and they prefer white wine. Dr Pepper is a Republican drink; Fanta is Democratic. Camping equipment and hiking gear—which Dowd points out are “noninvasive” outdoor products—tilt Democratic. Some of the data is wonderfully unpredictable: The TV show Will & Grace, for example, which centers on the lives of a gay man and a straight woman, leans heavily Republican. It’s the Republican women who are watching it.

Of course, for all the theorizing about the political meaning of Cabela’s and Whole Foods, at some point the stereotypes begin to fall apart. American politics, like Americans themselves, does not always fall into convenient categories. Whole Foods may reek of blue-state attitudes, but its downtown Austin store clearly does not run entirely on purchases made by inner-city liberals, many of whom cannot afford this stuff. The store needs wealthy west-side conservatives to survive, and I know a number of Republicans who do their shopping at Whole Foods. They do not seem to be bothered by the store’s politics, which they find amusing.

And the company itself does not follow strict liberal stereotypes: It is a non-union company that has fiercely resisted unionization. Whole Foods’ chairman and co-founder, John Mackey, is a vegan but no Democrat. He is a multimillionaire who admires Ronald Reagan and reads the Wall Street Journal . Meanwhile, Cabela’s, the vaunted red-state giant, is opening a store next year in John Kerry country: Hartford, Connecticut.

Both stores are reaching well beyond their old, politically predictable customer bases. With vegetarians holding at around 5 percent of the population and hunters at 6 percent and dropping, they really have no choice. Flannel-shirted hunting zealots and pale, macrobiotic sylphs do not a Fortune 1000 company sustain. And so Whole Foods offers clothing, books, and expensive food for wealthy foodies, processed food for the business crowd, and racks of non-organic and non-vegetarian products. Cabela’s now devotes a large section of its store to selling furniture and another section to regular clothing, including high-end footgear under pricey brands like Merrell that are favored by blue-staters. All of which suggests that, as Cabela’s and Whole Foods grab ever-larger shares of the retail pie, more and more political impurity is likely to creep in at both stores. There is something both hilarious, and downright American, in the idea of an archconservative hitting the checkout line at Whole Foods with a copy of Buddhadharma, bottles of organic mandarin-orange patchouli deodorant and Dr. Hauschka’s Rhythmic Night Conditioner, and the children’s book Heather Has Two Mommies. Stranger things have happened.

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