On election night 2000, Karl Rove, consultant to Gov. George W. Bush, was beside himself. The margins in his boss’s electoral battle with Vice President Al Gore were razor thin. Watching the results on multiple television screens and checking with his staff in Austin, he was still unsure of the outcome, so he telephoned John Alan Morgan, the elections expert he relied on above all others. After all, Morgan successfully urged that Rove target West Virginia and keep the pressure on to carry New Hampshire despite late worrisome polls there. Although Florida’s electoral votes would make news for several weeks, without the electoral votes from the states Morgan insisted be targeted, Bush would not have been elected. When Rove called on election night, Morgan, as always, reassured him. As the world now knows, Morgan was right.
Morgan, who advised leading political candidates since he worked for Bush’s father and later President Ronald Reagan, died in January at the age of 73.
I met John in 1963 when I arrived in Washington, D.C. I was the first in my family to graduate from high school, let alone attend university, especially one as far from my home in Cheyenne, Wyo., as George Washington University. From Chesterton (population 4,335) in northwestern Indiana, John was the grandson of farmers and son of the man who owned the all-important local hardware store. We — two conservative, religious (Methodist), small-town hicks amid the liberal, secular, East Coast kids in our all-male dormitory — hit it off immediately.
John may have also been the first of his family to seek a college degree, but he was worlds ahead of me politically. As I came to learn, he had been studying elections since 1958, when he was 13. His was no superficial knowledge, however.
The depth of John’s analysis was brought home to me one afternoon when I stepped into his dormitory room to find him kneeling on the floor over a massive map of the nation’s 3,141 counties (or equivalents), nine colored pencils splayed out in his fingers. As a roommate with a 1948 Gallup political almanac in hand called out the results of the presidential election, John quickly calculated the percentage of victory in his head and colored the county accordingly. Soon the state lines disappeared amid the colors, and in their places were voting blocs that reflected the demographics of county residents.
John, the most knowledgeable man I ever met (on a host of things sacred and secular, of antiquity or today, and far and near) knew those demographics by heart and in penetrating depth.
In 1967, he received his B.A. degree and returned to Chesterton; the love of his life, Rebecca Ameling, whom he married; and his father’s hardware store. Politics, however, was in his blood as it had been for more than a decade. He was elected to the county council, earned an M.A. degree from nearby Valparaiso University, and advised Indiana Republican politicians. “I told them how much they’d lose by,” he joked later. He dreamed of national politics, however, so in 1978, he came to Arlington, Va., with Becky, bunked in my home, and pursued his political ambitions. In 1980, he went to work for George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign, after the convention transitioned to the Reagan-Bush team, and then worked in the Reagan White House.
In 1983, he opened Applied Research Coordinates, a political consulting company, from which he advised candidates across the country. He became a close confidant of Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and helped engineer the Gingrich-led Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and Gingrich’s election as speaker. Soon he was the “head targeter” of likely winning national political seats for the Republican Party, a regular speaker at events such as those hosted by Delaware Governor Pete du Pont’s GOPAC, and a frequent guest on political panels and television and radio shows. He was the “go-to source” for many political writers including Michael Barone, John Fund, and Paul Gigot.
Jim McTague, in Barron’s, wrote that John correctly called “both the 2002 midterm election and the 2004 presidential race. Had we listened to him in 2006, we would have anticipated the Democratic takeover of Congress. Instead, our prediction that the GOP would narrowly retain control of Congress was embarrassingly wrong.”
John was later joined in his business by his son, John Bennett, whose wife Zoe blessed him with two granddaughters, Josephine and Holly. Together, they worked elections, big and small, across the country — John from the maps he began coloring in 1963, his son from digital sources he created from his father’s originals. When John retired, he had been advising Republican candidates for more than five decades.
In 1964, John and I oversaw our first presidential election together, watching Walter Cronkite on a tiny television screen and picking up radio signals from faraway stations. With Johnson’s landslide victory over Goldwater, our night ended early. Fifty-two years later, John went to bed well before most of the polls closed, but I telephoned and texted his son until dawn as we followed the surprising election of President Trump.
I will miss John, particularly in next year’s presidential election — but not as much as the Republicans who relied on his advice.
William Perry Pendley (@Sagebrush_Rebel) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an attorney and author of Sagebrush Rebel: Reagan’s Battle with Environmental Extremists and Why It Matters Today.
