Washington – Maybe you didn’t know him, but Alexander “Pat” Gage knew who you were.
Gage, a data scientist who credited Sen. Mitt Romney and others with revolutionizing voter outreach, died Wednesday near his hometown of Grosse Pointe after a battle with dementia. He was 74.
By many accounts, Gage changed the course of American political history through his work.
“I remember 2004,” prominent Republican strategist Karl Rove said in a 2018 video tribute, referring to former President George W. Bush’s narrow reelection victory. “Without the innovations that Alex brought to us in polling and microtargeting, we never would have won states like Florida, Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico.”
Gage is known for pioneering a technique called microtargeting, which uses vast amounts of data to identify, segment and directly message specific segments of voters. In his personal life, he was known as a generous, encouraging, honest and humble man, with deep pride in being a Michigan native – a rare breed among Washington DC politicians.
“Alex has great political acumen and I was fortunate to benefit from his counsel and expertise. He was a very kind and generous man and I am grateful to have known him,” Romney, a former presidential candidate, said in an emailed statement.
“I know there have been skeptics and even opponents in the past,” Romney told Gage during his memorial speech in 2018. “But you stood out and made it very clear that[microtargeting]was going to change the Republican electoral process, and you proved successful.”
“He beat you with his incredible talent.”
In a conversation with The Detroit News, Ron Fournier, a former political reporter and editor at The Associated Press, recalled how Gage was able to capture the essence of a wide swath of the electorate based solely on data, without ever meeting any voters.
Fournier said he flew to Michigan to interview voters while researching his aptly titled book, “Applebee’s America,” which explores how microtargeting is used in politics, and one of the places he visited was an Applebee’s in Howell.
He recalled interviewing two middle-aged mothers who came from union families, voted for Clinton twice, were Catholic, supported Democratic candidate John Kerry but were likely to vote for Bush on terrorism grounds.
“I called Alex from the parking lot, told him their names but no background information, and I heard him tapping away on the keyboard for about five seconds,” Fournier said.
“‘They’re part of our ‘security moms’ group, Ron,'” Gage replied.
Gage and his sophisticated operation had already identified a cohort of several thousand Michigan women who met certain criteria, Fournier explained: based on consumer and political data, these women “would be motivated to abandon their Democratic roots and vote for Bush if terrorism was a concern for them on Election Day.”
“The Bush campaign made him do it,” Fournier added.
Republican political lawyer and commentator Bill Canfield said Gage had a gift for observing things that should be obvious to a top campaign strategist but weren’t.
“His view of life was that someone who reads an outdoor magazine is the same as someone who has a hunting license, drives a Ford Explorer, shops at L.L. Bean, buys a shotgun,” Canfield said. “He lumped all of this together and said, ‘They’re fundamentally Republicans, and I don’t understand why we’re not using these tools to tell them our problems.'”
Matthew Dowd, a political consultant who co-authored the book with Fournier, said Gage fundamentally changed the direction of America through his work on the Bush campaign and influenced every election campaign since, including President Barack Obama’s path to the 2008 presidential election.
Fournier said Obama’s campaign copied Bush’s and was a “2.0” version of Gage’s approach.
But Dowd stressed that Gage’s modesty may have obscured his impact. “He was the type of guy who would beat you with his talent, but he wasn’t the type to brag about it,” Dowd said in an interview. “He was a Michigander.”
“Always a storyteller”
After earning a degree in political science from the University of Michigan, he began working during President Gerald Ford’s 1976 reelection campaign for Detroit-based Market Opinion Research, a company headed by legendary Republican pollster Bob Teeter.
Longtime colleague and friend Will Feltus recalled the two studying under Teeter’s tutelage during what he called the golden age of polling, long before the modern era of Internet surveys and rapidly declining telephone response rates.
While Gage certainly had data acumen, Feltus said he wasn’t much of a quantitative analyst.
“He knew how to look at numbers and he was able to explain numbers to people who don’t normally look at numbers, and I think that’s a skill he learned from Teeter,” Feltus told the News.
“Alex has always been a storyteller,” says longtime colleague Michael Myers, and it was perhaps his greatest talent.
“He would say, ‘Data isn’t a story, but data helps you find a story,'” Fournier said. “The numbers themselves weren’t as powerful as what the numbers said about people.”
Gage eventually left Market Opinion Research to help found Market Strategies in 1989 and TargetPoint Consulting in 2003. By the time he left Market Strategies, it had “emerged as a leading market research firm,” growing from six partners to a team of more than 170 senior consultants and researchers and more than 400 staff, according to Gage’s profile on TargetPoint’s website. Gage later co-founded G2 Analytics with his son Calder in 2015.
Gage has worked on countless political campaigns throughout his career, including serving on the last nine Republican presidential campaigns in various capacities, according to the G2 website.
Though he operated behind the scenes throughout his career, Mr. Gage was highly sought after in Washington, and while it’s rare for a behind-the-scenes operative to be tasked with writing a lengthy profile in The Washington Post, Mr. Gage did.
Matt Rose, Mitt Romney’s former communications director and later campaign manager, pointed to a July 5, 2007 article by Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post that detailed just how innovative and influential Gage’s work was.
“There’s no such thing as a bad day”
Before he was a pioneering political strategist, Gage (known as Pat by those who knew him outside of work) was a hockey-loving kid from Grosse Pointe, and Canfield recalled that as a child, Gage had the bright idea to fill his basement with water and build an indoor skating rink, presaging his professional creativity and ingenuity.
It didn’t work, blame the boiler.
Celebrated for his brilliant mind, Gage was beloved for his generosity, fun-loving nature and compassion by family, friends and colleagues, who shared fond memories with The Detroit News.
Many highlighted Gage’s generosity, recalling how he paid countless bar and restaurant bills and never asked for anything in return. Target Point colleague Alex Landry said generosity was also a constant presence in the workplace. He recalled that Gage was always sharing his knowledge with younger colleagues, encouraging them and taking their contributions seriously.
Brent Seaborn, a colleague at Target Point, praised Gage as a fun and quirky guy, but said he would often schedule meetings but then miss them later, giving others opportunities for customer recognition and career advancement.
“He was like, ‘I’m in Florida, I’m going to go watch the space shuttle launch, you guys are OK, you guys know more about this than I do,'” Seaborn said.
Whitney, the older of Gage’s two children, laughed as she recalled her father often saying her parents were legendary Detroit Red Wings star Gordie Howe and famed U.S. figure skater JoJo Starbuck. Hockey has always connected her and her brother Calder to their father, she said.
Her father was a youth team coach for many years and always wore a suit and tie to games as if it were a National Hockey League game.
Calder, who looks just like his father, said his father was a caring parent who always said, “There’s no such thing as a bad day.” Calder recalled one time his father got a fish hook in his foot during a fishing trip in the Florida Keys.
Instead of panicking or rushing to the hospital, Calder said, they went to lunch. “People were like, ‘Oh my goodness, do you know you’ve got a fish hook in your leg?'”
Gage was similarly calm and in good spirits after a 2009 boat trip gone awry. According to longtime friend Feltus and former Romney staffer Rose, the three men took Gage’s boat from the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., to a bay in Annapolis, Maryland. They made it safely, but the boat, anchored at anchor, burned to the surface a few days later. Both remember Gage laughing when he called to break the news.
Friends and family said Gage lived a rich life and loved many things, including photography, hockey, University of Michigan football, gardening, fishing, barbecuing and buttery stone crabs and lobsters, among other things spending time at Auger Hole, his vacation home near Reading, Vermont.
By all accounts, Alexander Patton Gage never forgot his Michigan roots and his deep compassion for those around him, even as he had a storied, perhaps world-changing, career at the center of American politics awash with big egos and sharp elbows.
He was preceded in death by his parents, Henry Thurston Gage and Frances Napier Gage. He is survived by his children, Alexander Calder Gage and Whitney Gage Harman, daughters-in-law Abigail Gage and Ryan Harman, grandchildren Harlow Jane Harman, Eddie Kirk Harman and Otto Gage Harman, and siblings Henry Montgomery Gage and Gertrude Candler Gage.
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