|
Targeting
Voters Wins
Easy Ways to Build Your Base and Turnout Your Voters
By Joseph Mercurio December 21, 2005
j.mercurio@nationalpolitical.com
Targeting voters is a way to use resources most efficiently, it will help
you bring your voters to the polls, better deal with communicating to
voters with a message that will persuade them and leave turning out the
opponents base vote to them. Done properly, targeting can make the
difference in heavily contested races.
You start out having to know who is going to vote in your election and
which of those voters make up your base vote and your opponent’s base. The
first thing you notice when you look at elections is that presidential
years have higher turnout, local races lower turnout, open seats (no
incumbent holding the office) have higher turnout, up ballot races usually
have higher turnout than down ballot races and genuinely contested races
have higher turnout than normal. It is also true that often race,
ethnicity, religion and geography effect turnout.
If you look back at past elections, there will be elections like yours,
where there will be a minimum that a candidate will get—this is the base
vote. Both sides will have a base vote in each ED (election district, the
smallest political district). Once you know the base, you can find out
what they look like demographically to help find like voters. This can
work as easily for black urban voters as it would for rural dairy farmers.
Outside of EDs, groups like environmentalists, labor union members and
other groups can also be targeted to add to the base vote.
After you figure out who the base is and build on it, you have to get your
voters to show up. Voters have three ways to vote: for one candidate or
the other or not showing up. Historically, when most races in a given
election were not really contested, low turnout in a contested race could
be a reflection that one party’s candidate is not good enough to come out
for and the opponent is not bad enough to vote against. So in your
contested race, you have to get every favorable vote to show up.
First, who makes up the actual pool of potential voters in your race? In a
district that has had few genuinely contested local year races, turnout
can double in a hot race, so simply using voters who have a history of
voting in local races might have you communicating to far few voters than
your opponent. Age, length of residence, type of election and frequency of
voting in elections all predict future voting. The best way to develop a
list of potential voters is to use a computer to score each voter
individually grading them, using their own history, as 75%, 50% and 25%
likely to vote. Then based on budget and targeting, you can communicate to
each group differently.
Secondly, you can annotate the voter file with personal information you
have. There are donors, supporters and volunteers on either side who can
be marked as favorable or hostile. (Some things like signing a nominating
petition often does not indicate support; voters tend to favor ballot
access. Also, a voter sending in a postcard on an issue often only means
you can use the information as a way to persuade them; it is not an
automatic favorable.) After you have added all this information, you can
ID (identify voters in systematic calls) the remaining voters
professionally.
All voters can be called in a hard (where the voter does not know who made
the call) ID call with questions like who are you voting for, strength of
vote, issues that will decide their vote, and the voter file is
automatically updated accordingly. Voters will be broken down into
favorable, lightly favorable, undecided, lightly hostile and hostile. You
can drop hostiles from your program, while you add hits (contacts in the
mail or persuadable phone calls) to the undecided, lightly favorable and
even lightly hostile voters using the specific issue information. Later in
the campaign, undecideds and select light voters might be reIDed.
In the last days of the campaign, all the favorables should receive a GOTV
(get out the vote) call and a mailing that reminds them to vote, gives
them the final endorsements, and even tells them where their poling place
is located with a sample ballot. You have now streamlined your campaign
efforts to the largest practical potential audience and concentrated your
resources on building on your base vote and getting only your voters to
the polls.
Next time talk about consultants. More later.
Joseph Mercurio
National Political Services, Inc.
2 South End Avenue 9J
New York NY 10280-1089
212 945-4330
www.nationalpolitical.com
|