This Sums Up Everything I Believe About Political Campaigning

I'm over there in the corner.

In twelve years of campaigning I've been a part of electing a Governor, Senator, Congresswoman, a State House, a House Majority Leader, a Mayor, and I've beaten the sitting President. That's a lot, though to be fair, I've lost almost as many things.

I've always believed that the most important thing in any campaign is it's ground game. There are less and less persuadable voters out there, and the ones who are will not be as easily swayed by paid communications, because it's white noise. By no means are my saying that good candidates don't have paid communications, I'm saying that the personal touch of someone personally reaching out to them is crucial.

So yeah, I agree with this:

By far the most effective way to turn out voters is with high-quality, face-to-face conversations that urge them to vote. How do we know? Nearly two decades of rigorous randomized experiments have proven it.

Alan Gerber and Don Green ran the first of these "field experiments" in 1998. The professors randomly assigned voters to receive different inducements to vote: some received postcards, some received phone calls, some received a visit from a canvasser, and some received nothing.

The experiment found that voters called on the phone or sent postcards were not noticeably more likely to vote than those sent nothing. But canvassing was different. Just one in-person conversation had a profound effect on a voter’s likelihood to go to the polls, boosting turnout by a whopping 20 percent (or around 9 percentage points).

The nearly two decades since Gerber and Green’s first experiment have consistently borne out their finding that personal conversations have special political potency. Hundreds of academics and campaigns have tested the impacts of various campaign tactics with randomized field trials. High-quality canvassing operations emerge as consistent vote-winners. On the other hand, impersonal methods have consistently failed to produce cost-effective results, no matter how you slice the data or which populations researchers examine.

The best way to turn out voters is to personally talk to them. So why don't we?

First, managing a canvass operation is difficult and requires considerable recruitment, training, and supervision. It’s a lot easier to write a check to an ad agency or mail firm.

It’s also gotten harder to raise a field army. Decades ago, a rich network of civic organizations — think churches, Elk Lodges, and labor unions — could supply ample volunteers for field work. But, as these organizations’ memberships have flagged, professionally-managed, centralized, DC-based groups with weaker grassroots ties have tended to take their place. As a result, knocking on millions of doors now requires recruiting tens of thousands of temporary field staffers or new volunteers. When faced with a logistical challenge of that scale, it becomes mighty appealing to write a check to an ad firm instead.

There’s also a more cynical possibility — campaign consultants urge campaigns to spend more on ineffective tactics because it boosts their bottom line. Candidates and campaigns rely on consultants’ expertise when allocating precious campaign resources. But many consultants take a cut of ad fees, making a healthy commission when campaigns squander their resources on TV. On the other hand, waging field campaigns tends to be a low margin business and thus prove less financially appealing for consultants to recommend to clients.

In a day and age where turnout is all that matters to final results, we sure don't put enough energy into it.