Politics/Policy Texas would let him do a wide-scale release of the pinhead-size creatures. The wasps have another built-in advantage over other measures, says Reilly, the Border Patrol consultant: “Next year, if they decide they’re broke in Texas or their priorities change, the bugs will keep on working.” —Lauren Etter The bottom line After failed efforts to kill invasive cane along the U.S.-Mexico border, officials hope imported wasps will just eat it.
Elections
Republicans Buy Into the Science of Campaigns A small Washington club is testing ways of mobilizing conservatives “Presidential-year-only voters have been trouble for us”
A few weeks ago, Blaise Hazelwood, a Republican strategist, met Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus for lunch at the Capitol Hill Club. Hazelwood, whose specialty is increasing voter turnout, handed over the results of an experimental study Priebus had commissioned. In nine counties across Colorado, Iowa, and
Arkansas, Hazelwood’s team last year deployed some of the most potent psychological tricks known to nudge a citizen into the act of voting. With a set pattern of visits at home, phone calls, and postcards, local Republican precinct captains spent weeks reaching out to people who had voted in no more than one of the last four national elections. The strategy increased Republican turnout by 2 to 3 percentage points in the midterm. The findings excited Priebus, whose chief task right now is to get a Republican elected to the White House. “For some reason, presidential-yearonly voters have been trouble for us,” he says. “If we put people out in the field—and we have a limited amount of people and a limited amount of time— what’s the combination of things we can do that have the best effect of turning out people who vote only in presidential years?” As the RNC’s national political director, Hazelwood helped elect George W. Bush in 2000. Her Grassroots Consulting now advises Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. In 2013, after Mitt Romney lost to President Obama, Hazelwood made the case to Sally Bradshaw, a longtime adviser to Jeb Bush who led the party’s postmortem analysis, that Republicans had to invest in data analytics to keep up with the machinery built by the Democrats in
Texas officials participate in a USDA release of Arundo wasps in Starr County on June 9
VICTOR J. BLUE/BLOOMBERG
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back with a vengeance. They sent in crews armed with machetes and weed whackers tricked out with saw blades, but the manual approach proved too laborious. In 2009, the USDA imported some Arundo wasps from Montpellier, a coastal city west of Marseilles, to test their efficacy on the Texas cane. It worked: The wasps ate through the carrizo, stunting its growth. Yet Goolsby worked to find support for expanding his wasp program. Biological control hasn’t always worked smoothly. In 1883, mongooses were brought to Hawaii to kill rats that were chewing through sugar cane. They now feast on chickens, endangered sea turtles, and the eggs of the Nene goose, Hawaii’s state bird. Goolsby, who’s spent years letting small groups of wasps go free at test sites along the Rio Grande, says he’s confident the French wasps will have appetites only for carrizo. “The plant has met its worst enemy,” he says. In early June, Goolsby took a group of professors, conservationists, and state officials on a tour of the muddy Rio Grande banks, handing out plastic jars of black Arundos. “Take the top off and find some cane where those little female wasps can start laying some eggs,” he instructed. Wasps flew out and disappeared into the cane. Goolsby says the $10 million from
