PUSHING THE ENVELOPE

Barack Obama’s election took place exactly one decade after Alan Gerber and Don Green had taken to the streets of New Haven to run their pioneering electioneering field experiments at Yale, and even forward-thinking Republican operatives found something to cheer in the way his ascendance represented a triumph for new-wave empiricism over the reactionary, clubby old campaign world. Finally an industry that had been chronically unreflective about its failures was obsessed with learning from Obama’s success. Naturally this swung all too quickly to its own thoughtless excess: any operative with the most fleeting connection to the Chicago operation was reborn as a political celebrity, and any tactic that could be marketed as “Obama-style” found immediate global demand. Meanwhile, the earliest revolutionaries—the social scientists and statisticians who had laid the intellectual foundation for Obama’s victory even as they stood apart from it—continued to work away at a fundamental question the field had not yet fully answered. By digging even deeper into psychology and the behavioral sciences, they hoped to finally crack the code of what can turn a person into a voter.

In the spring of 2007, as the Obama campaign was opening its first Iowa offices, Alan Gerber had written to Hal Malchow to let him know he was coming to Washington, and the two arranged to get dinner. The Yale political scientist arrived at the downtown steakhouse Morton’s accompanied by a surprise guest, a Harvard graduate student on whose dissertation committee he had just served. But the presence of Todd Rogers wasn’t the only evidence that Gerber’s attentions had recently swerved dramatically toward questions of voter psychology. Once they were seated and had specified the temperatures for their steaks, Gerber detailed an experiment he and his collaborator Don Green had just completed with Mark Grebner, the Michigan voter-file manager who had gleefully threatened to out nonvoters. Malchow’s eyes opened wide as Gerber described the four different versions of Grebner’s postcard, and the staggering result that the “neighbors” approach had delivered—three times better than any other technique in the bulging mental archive Malchow maintained of hundreds of voter contact experiments.

Malchow had been one of the first political consultants to fully embrace the use of randomized field experiments, but his relentless commitment to following their findings had not always been good for his business. Even if Gerber and Green’s experiments had shown mail could be effective, their preferred efficiency metric of dollars-per-additional-vote highlighted how costly it could be to get the desired results. (This was supposed to measure the price of mobilizing a marginal voter, calculated by dividing the return from a given get-out-the-vote technique over the cost of delivering it.) When the academics compiled dozens of varied mail experiments, they found that it took 333 pieces of mail to turn out one new vote. Malchow added design, printing, and postal fees and realized that the product his firm marketed to campaigns cost them eighty dollars per new vote. Instead of masking this unpleasant fact, Malchow loudly chastised employees who persisted in preparing get-out-the-vote mail, even though much of his firm’s revenue depended on it.

But the Michigan experiment showed it was possible to improve that math dramatically: you had to show only twenty citizens copies of their neighbors’ voting histories to convert a new vote. This arithmetic warmed Malchow, who saw in Grebner’s social-pressure breakthrough both redemption and opportunity. Here at last was get-out-the-vote mail that worked, and fabulously so.

“Alan,” Malchow said across an expanse of white tablecloth. “I will pay you a hundred thousand dollars if you won’t publish the results.”

Gerber turned away Malchow’s only half-joking proposal, but he agreed to show his dinner companion the experimental materials well before they would become public in the American Political Science Review. Malchow rushed to take advantage of the head start he had been given to master social pressure. The next election on his firm’s calendar was a Dallas municipal election, working with a gay and lesbian group doing independent advocacy on behalf of a candidate running to be the city’s first openly gay mayor. The group refused to embrace the approach of revealing neighbors’ vote histories, for fear of inflaming an already delicate contest; the best Malchow could do was persuade them to mimic Grebner’s “self” mailing, which includes only voting records for those within the receiving household. Even so, the group braced for an unfavorable response, creating a front group with an anodyne name and a decoy return address. They were right to fear a backlash; a local Fox television affiliate tracked the mysterious letters to a Mail Boxes Etc. location that Malchow’s clients had used as their address, and parked a camera crew outside on an ultimately fruitless stakeout. “I don’t think anyone went back there for two months,” Malchow says.

Malchow knew that the candidates, party committees, and major institutions that made up most of his clientele would not find similar glee in resorting to such stealthy tactics. The social-pressure technique needed refinement if he was going to put it into wider use, and so Malchow turned where he often did when he had an idea he wanted to test. The group Women’s Voices Women’s Vote had been established by Page Gardner in the wake of the 2000 election, when strategists in both parties began to prioritize turning out their known supporters instead of hunting for swing voters to win over. Gardner had been startled to see exit polls expose what she considered a “marriage gap,” a staggering split in voting behavior between married women and unmarried ones. The latter were among the most loyal Democratic blocs but among the least likely to actually vote. Commercial database vendors did not maintain reliable lists of who was married and who was not, and so Gardner hired Malchow to see if he could use statistics to predict whether an individual was single. Malchow liked the puzzles this challenge posed: if two people of similar ages live at the same address, how do you tell if they’re married and not roommates or siblings?

With the 2008 campaign looming, Gardner expanded the group’s mandate to focus on other parts of what she called the “Rising American Electorate,” including not only unmarried white women but Latinos, African-Americans, and young voters of both genders. Together they comprise 53 percent of the voting age population, but they are chronically underrepresented at the polls. The question wasn’t whether they would vote Democrat or Republican, but if they could be made to vote at all. (Even though the group was officially nonpartisan, for tax purposes, there was no secret that the goal of all its efforts was to generate new votes for Democrats.)

To placate the Women’s Voices donors who would have to back the new social-pressure technique, Malchow set out to find more delicate language that could maintain the implied threat without making the recipient feel like he or she was under investigation. He designed an experiment to take place in the Kentucky governor’s race that fall, replicating the original Michigan experiment. Malchow, however, added a new twist that went beyond the one-way communication of Grebner’s mail. One group would get phone calls asking if they were planning to vote in the November election. Those who said yes were sent a simple letter restating that commitment followed by a robocall just before election day reminding them that they had pledged to vote as part of a study that would check on their follow-through afterward. It ended up being a small group—only 30 percent of those initially contacted said that they intended to vote—and a complicated technique to execute. But while the sequence of calls and mail was expensive up front, the return was so good that it proved a relative bargain, producing new votes at eighteen dollars each.

Women’s Voices donors signed off on this new so-called Promise technique, and Gardner included it in the group’s plans for turnout operations in 2008. At the same time, Malchow giddily went to an Analyst Institute lunch with PowerPoint slides documenting the Kentucky test, hoping that his peers at other liberal groups would be as eager to put social pressure to work in their 2008 voter contact programs. The institute later promoted Promise as part of its best practices for improving turnout rates. But even the members who found the experiment fascinating also found it hard to imagine such manipulation finding a place in the political toolbox—they couldn’t visualize their name as the return address on a letter that told voters they were subjects in a study, even if it worked.

Malchow knew he had more work to do if he was to find a way of provoking anxiety in people for not voting without antagonizing them. “This is the frontier—thinking about ways to do this that are unoffensive,” says Malchow. What if instead of embarrassing people for not casting ballots, he just sent a list of their neighbors who voted all the time? He mentioned this idea to Green, who referred Malchow to Costas Panagopoulos, a former Yale postdoctoral researcher who had collaborated on research with Green at the time of his Michigan experiment with Grebner.

Panagopoulos had already been investigating other forms of social surveillance, such as the increasing affection that law enforcement officials had for publicizing the names and images of sex offenders, johns, and those delinquent on child support payments. Along the way, he learned about two newspapers that had applied a similar logic to citizenship. In 1994, the Dallas Examiner published local electoral rolls with an indication of who had voted in a recent election and who hadn’t. Before the 2006 elections, the Tennessee Tribune ran its own list of nonvoters in selected Nashville city council districts. The papers, both targeted at local African-American communities, claimed that they had boosted turnout when they introduced the disclosure program in their pages.

Panagopoulos decided to put the method to the test. He identified three small midwestern towns that would be conducting nonpartisan municipal elections in November 2007 and randomly selected households in each to receive pre-election postcards. In Monticello, Iowa, and Holland, Michigan, the cards told recipients that a list of those who voted would appear in the local newspaper after the election. “The names of voters who did not vote will not be published because only voters deserve special recognition,” the cards read. In Ely, Iowa, postcards made the opposite threat: the local paper would publish a roster of deadbeats only. “The names of those who took the time to vote will not appear on this list,” Ely voters were told.

Local election officials traced the letters back to Panagopoulos before he could run the post-election ads, and persuaded him not to follow through on his vow to do so. But citizens who received the letters would have had no way of knowing that, and when he was able to look back at the voter file after November he saw, as he expected, that the threat of shaming was far more potent than the promise of praise. Ely residents who received the postcard were nearly 7 points more likely to vote than those in the control group; turnout in Monticello and Holland increased by 4.7 points and 0.9 point, respectively. The impact in Monticello was only half as robust as the strongest of Grebner’s Michigan letters but still nearly six times better than the traditional-style GOTV mail that had wanly reminded prospective voters of their civic duty.

Panagopoulos started reading from the expanding portfolio of research being assembled by behaviorally minded economists who had found that expressions of gratitude helped to stimulate what they described as prosocial behavior. (In one field experiment, two psychologists found that restaurant servers whom they directed to write “thank you” on their bills received larger tips from customers.) Panagopoulos, then teaching at Fordham University, set up an experiment to take place in a New York City Council special election scheduled for February 2009. He identified single-voter households who had participated in the city’s last municipal election just over three years earlier, and sent around two thousand of them a postcard thanking them for having done so, and included a reminder about the upcoming special election. Those who received it ended up voting at a rate 2.4 percentage points higher than a control group receiving no contact. (Another group got just a postcard with an election reminder but no expression of gratitude; it had barely any impact on turnout.)

But most amazing to Panagopoulos was the silence. His surveillance hadn’t triggered any response—no disgruntled local election officials or righteous local television crews or death threats. When news of this trickled back to East Lansing, Grebner’s satisfaction at the influence of his approach was tempered by disappointment that decorum seemed to be winning the day. “We’ve now found forms that are nearly as effective that don’t turn people ballistic,” he says. “Although it still turns out that making them ballistic—boy, is that powerful!”

Malchow had had the idea of generating an “honor roll,” a roster of voters who never missed an election, and which would be sent to their neighbors. After Malchow learned about Panagopoulos’s work, the two partnered to compare their approaches in an experiment in New Jersey before voting there in 2009. Working with a labor-backed group defending Governor Jon Corzine against a challenge from Republican prosecutor Chris Christie, they sent out twenty-three thousand letters. Half contained Malchow’s honor roll, and half Panagopoulos’s declaration to recipients that “we hope to be able to thank you in the future for being the kind of citizen who makes our democracy work.” Both proved effective, with the “Thank You” letter increasing turnout by 2.5 points among recipients, and the Honor Roll by 2 points—the first costing just more than eleven dollars per additional vote. Since it was upbeat and congratulatory and threatened no future surveillance, there seemed to be no downside at all. When Malchow presented the New Jersey experiment at the Analyst Institute, he finally saw his excitement reflected in his audience. “People lit up about that,” he says. “Because anyone can send a letter that says ‘thank you for voting.’ ”

Lighting up an Analyst Institute luncheon no longer amounted to impressing a small group of Malchow’s geek peers, but was now a method of directly inserting a new idea into the campaign plans of leading national Democrats. Obama’s inauguration had ushered in a new Democratic establishment in Washington, its rise bringing the data-driven crowd in from the outside. Hundreds of people were now cycling through the lunches and weekend retreats, an expanded audience that perhaps counterintuitively made participants even more eager to share their private research. Where better to show off? Many of the young staffers who had learned analytics on the Obama campaign had moved into top party jobs and reviewed the Analyst Institute presentations with commensurate authority and budgets.

When Malchow delivered the New Jersey results, it caught the attention of an operative from the Democratic National Committee, the same organization that Malchow had vainly tried to convince of the value of testing pre-election mail since Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign. In the spring of 2010, before a special election for a Pennsylvania U.S. House seat, the Analyst Institute advised the DNC on its own version of the thank-you test. The experiment found that having the state’s popular senator Bob Casey tell voters on his letterhead that “our records indicate that you voted in the 2008 election”—and thank them for their “good citizenship”—helped nudge them to the polls this time. Analyst Institute members who had scoffed at harder-edged versions of social pressure were now eager to use it in the field. The approach may have been psychologically manipulative, but it no longer felt that way. “Volunteers were excited to deliver a thank-you message,” says Regina Schwartz, the institute’s outreach director.

By election day 2010, tens of millions of social-pressure mailers, in slightly different versions, were sent out by campaigns in both parties. Many had no ties to Gerber and Green or the Analyst Institute world, but merely took their core finding that social pressure worked and improvised. In one case, Utah Republican Mike Lee’s Senate campaign e-mailed supporters with a list of other voters in the same precinct who had a record of turning out in presidential elections but not in off years. “These voters do not understand the importance of mid-term elections and the direct impact their vote can have on our state,” the e-mail from the Lee campaign read. “We need to inform these voters!”

Suddenly, the use of social pressure as a turnout trick was so widespread that Gardner was describing it as “the hula hoop of American politics.” Even though the right did not have anything like the Analyst Institute to distribute such research in the form of simple recommendations, new techniques and tactics still moved from one operative to the next, or outward through the influence of officials at the party campaign committees. Whoever drafted the letter for Mike Lee’s campaign would probably pass it on to dozens of other Republicans by 2012, when they could use it to rouse their voters. Any competitive advantage the left had gained would likely fade, and as voters became aware of the letters the psychological impact of receiving one would weaken. The pressure was on Malchow to find something new.

SIX MONTHS LATER, Malchow eased his new Chevy Volt out of the garage of his suburban Virginia home, whose backyard tumbled down onto the banks of the Potomac River, and drove to the Service Employees International Union headquarters near Dupont Circle in Washington. Malchow had purchased the electric car for all the usual lefty reasons, but it was not a sense of social responsibility that most tickled him about being a Volt driver. When the Chevy dealership offered Malchow a chance to participate in a Department of Energy program that would install an advanced recharging station in his home at no cost in exchange for being able to analyze the data it collected about his driving habits, he said yes without hesitation. Malchow has a guileless disinterest in privacy concerns when a trove of new data hangs in the balance, and he was plainly pleased to have stumbled into an experiment, even as a subject.

These days, Malchow’s focus was on promoting a young-adult fantasy novel he had coauthored with his dyslexic teenaged son and beginning work on another. The challenge of selling a youth genre book fascinated Malchow, and he gave the impression of being more satisfied by drafting the marketing plan than he had been by the narrative itself, which grew out of the bedtime stories he began concocting with his son, Alex, when the boy was eight. Alex was now a high school football player, and at book readings he evinced a visible discomfort at being continually implicated in this vestigial preadolescent project, wincing as his father volubly declared his plans to pursue a sequel.

It was a Wednesday morning, and Malchow was in the unusual position of not having an office to go to. The previous November, on the eve of the midterm elections, he announced he was disbanding MSHC Partners, which had been one of Washington’s most successful consulting operations for two decades and a preferred mail vendor for four consecutive Democratic presidential nominees. (He had worked for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries.) Malchow was accustomed to the rough-and-tumble of the business, but for him it had finally gone too far. He decided he would get out of the day-to-day of campaigns, disturbed that they often consisted of little more than strategizing how “to smear some poor guy with different beliefs.”

Many who received Malchow’s e-mailed announcement were shocked by it, but they rolled their eyes when they got to the part where he declared that “politics is not what it was when I started 25 years ago.” His claims of a conversion were disingenuous, some said, rumoring instead that he was easing out of the business for commercial reasons and grasping for a noble rationale to cloak his desperation. Even as Malchow insisted that 2010 had given the firm among its biggest revenues ever, there were signs that his business model had grown unsustainable. A major problem was the way Malchow’s instincts for entrepreneurship and self-promotion could frequently be at odds with each other. He would eagerly run experiments and research projects to develop new techniques, often at significant cost, but then instead of guarding the findings for competitive advantage would rush to present them at Analyst Institute meetings. “The repercussions were that other people copied and sold it,” says Joel Rivlin, the director of analytics at Malchow’s firm. “Hal made his money. He always wants to push the envelope and bring everyone else with him because he thinks we can always do this stuff better.” Meanwhile, the firm’s corporate infrastructure grew so large (a five-person HR department, for example) that the roster of clients had to grow every year just to cover the overhead, a demand that employees described as “feeding the beast.”

Malchow noted in his announcement that he did intend to maintain one political client “I especially admire.” Everyone who knew the contours of Malchow’s enthusiasms understood he was referring to Women’s Voices Women Vote. The group’s limited focus on increasing participation and not persuasion meant it was always working on the easiest thing in politics to cleanly measure—the electoral rolls keep good track of who’s registered and who turns out—and so nearly from its outset Gardner decided that Women’s Voices would impose a sense of metric accountability on its operations. “We’re not big on exhortation,” she says. “We’re big on proving.” The group’s annual summits, a parade of academics and consultants showing off their latest research breakthrough on a series of PowerPoint slides, were part of the identity Gardner had worked to build as she fought to engage donors who had many other liberal organizations angling for their dollars. “Some of it is just Page showing off, for the community: here’s what we’re up to,” Malchow said. “Bring people in so they’ll do more stuff with you.”

But it was that “stuff”—including running more than one hundred field experiments since the group’s founding—that won Malchow’s heart: Women’s Voices had impressed him as perhaps the most empirically minded of all the institutions and candidates for whom he had worked in twenty-five years. “They have the best agenda of everybody out there,” said Malchow. When he shut down his firm, Malchow saw no reason to cut his ties to Women’s Voices. In fact, its research agenda seemed the best way for Malchow to relieve himself of the corporate hassle while keeping his hand in the one part of politics where he believed he could still make a difference: the semisecret cabal of social science experimenters that he considered the only hope for imposing accountability on the multibillion-dollar industry that helps Americans choose their leaders.

Yet when Malchow arrived at Gardner’s 2011 summit, he was quickly bored by what felt like another PowerPoint-intensive reminder of how poorly Democrats had fared in the prior year’s midterm elections. Pollster Celinda Lake navigated slides showing that, while the Rising American Electorate represented 46.6 percent of the electorate when Obama was elected in 2008, the share had fallen to 41.9 percent two years later. Women’s Voices registered one million people in 2008, but two years later few of them bothered to cast a ballot; only 3 percent of the people Women’s Voices contacted during the 2010 elections had ended up turning out. Everyone in the room knew the implication of those numbers: unless Democrats could figure out by 2012 how to reanimate this core part of their coalition, Barack Obama would have a very difficult time winning a second term. “The key fight,” says Gardner, “is: who’s in the electorate?”

The presentations dragged on, and Malchow perked up only when he heard an old friend describe a novel tool for getting registered voters to turn out to cast ballots. In his presentation, Alan Gerber told of stumbling upon a question in a 2005 Michigan survey in which nearly one-fifth of voters said they believed that their vote choice was not secret. Other national polls showed as many as 27 percent of people shared that view. When they were asked, “How difficult do you think it would be for politicians, union officials, or the people you work for to find out who you voted for, even if you told no one?” only 12 percent said it would be impossible. The finding was consistent across three surveys, and it floored Gerber, who had begun his career by studying the introduction of the secret ballot to American politics in the late nineteenth century. The end of public voting coincided with a dramatic, and not fully understood, drop in turnout rates. (The share of the population voting dropped from nearly 80 percent in 1896 to 65 percent eight years later, and never recovered.) Gerber wondered if nonvoters simply didn’t trust, or understand, the idea of confidentiality at the heart of the process. Gerber commissioned his own survey. Among adults who had never voted, 20 percent expected their ballot to be marked so it could be identified as their own, and 12 percent thought that upon arrival at a polling place someone would ask for whom they were voting.

Gerber went on to tell his audience how he had then set up an experiment to measure whether he could bring those skeptics to the polls. Just before election day, he had randomly divided a set of Connecticut voters into five groups. Three of them were sent slightly different letters from the Connecticut secretary of state, each describing how the voting process keeps individual votes secret. A fourth group got a placebo election reminder, and the last control sample got no mail at all. After the election, Gerber saw that his letters had no impact on those who had been to the polls before. But when they reached people who were registered but had never voted, participation spiked: the letters emphasizing ballot secrecy created 2 or 3 new voters for every 100 people who received them.

It was only the latest example of someone using twenty-first-century tools to assimilate lessons from nineteenth-century politics. More and more, those who looked anew at the act of voting were beginning to think of it in altogether different terms. Maybe what stopped people from voting wasn’t a lack of information about the candidates or a feeling that the outcomes of races didn’t matter or a sense that a trip to the polls was inconvenient. What if voting wasn’t only a political act, but a social one that took place in a liminal space between the public and private that had never been well-defined to citizens? What if toying with those expectations was key to turning a person into a voter? What if elections were simply less about shaping people’s opinions than changing their behaviors?

MALCHOW HAD SPENT a quarter century living off the mail, but not until his revelatory steakhouse dinner with Gerber did he give much thought to envelopes. After he had overcome his initial awe at the power of the social-pressure tool used in Michigan, Malchow looked closely at the mailers themselves. They were simple copy paper, laser-printed and crudely folded, the result of Grebner scrambling to produce them cheaply in his own office rather than hiring a professional copy shop for the job. They looked appropriately amateurish, unlike anything Malchow had put out in his years of sending political mail to raise money, persuade voters, or turn them out. By the traditional standards articulated by direct-mail vendors, valuing high-impact visuals that “cut through the clutter” of the mailbox, Grebner’s bland letters should have been a dud. But, of course, they hadn’t been, and now Malchow began to wonder whether their success owed something not only to psychological tricks but to their humble packaging as well.

One of Grebner’s letters didn’t even try to exercise social pressure, instructing a voter merely, “Remember your rights and responsibilities as a citizen. Remember to vote.” Such generic “civic duty” messages rarely made any impact on turnout, starting with the first Gerber-Green experiment in New Haven. In fact, the only reason they had included it in the Michigan test was as a baseline against which they could measure the various social-pressure effects. Yet in Grebner’s hands the civic-duty message increased turnout by nearly two points over the control group, and the only reason Malchow could find to explain it was the primitive format. He thought about the other pieces of paper that shared those aesthetics: a jury-duty summons, a letter from the taxman, the homeowner’s association announcing a policy change. What if, Malchow wondered, an unstylized simplicity had become a signal at the mailbox that something was to be taken seriously?

So he started testing. He ran experiments pitting letters against glossy brochures, black-and-white against full color, slick against clunky. The evidence piled up, all pointing in the same direction: toward plain, official-looking communications. Others at the Analyst Institute reported experimental findings that seemed to confirm the virtues of simplicity. A group called Our Oregon, which runs state ballot initiative campaigns for progressive causes, found that it could increase its vote tally in select precincts by five points by replacing its glossy mail with a bland, text-heavy voter guide devoid of endorsements from politicians but instead featuring the validating logos of groups like the PTA and the League of Women Voters. Rock the Vote found that e-mail and text messages arriving from unexciting senders like “Election Center” often do better than those with livelier “from” lines, like the names of celebrities. “If you believe this, it says we’re doing everything wrong,” says Malchow. “There’s a principle underneath this. When people see the fingerprint of Madison Avenue, it becomes advertising—and advertising is not important to them.”

Throughout 2011, Malchow was eager to press these concepts further, and to deploy new modeling tools that combined microtargeting and experimental methods to predict which individual voters would best respond to a given appeal. He and Page Gardner, along with others at Women’s Voices, assembled a list of twenty experiments they wanted to run that year. Malchow conjured a single layered design that would mix and match treatments in different combinations and test their compatibility with proven techniques, such as social pressure. He wanted to tweak Gerber’s ballot secrecy reminder the way he had the social-pressure menace, changing the language or the presentation to see if he could squeeze more new votes out of the electorate. He and Gardner planned to administer the experiments in Kentucky, which would be selecting a governor in the last scheduled election before the 2012 election cycle began, affording enough time to analyze the results and deploy the best new tactics nationwide to boost Obama’s reelection.

But when Gardner went out to pitch donors on these tests, she couldn’t find any willing to sponsor them. This had to do in part with the changing dynamics of the Kentucky race, which for largely local reasons had lost the interest of liberal donors nationally, but more with a changing set of priorities for Democratic strategists. The question of how to most efficiently get large numbers of new voters on the rolls had moved to the top of their list of concerns. “We want to do some research as we go into 2012,” says Gardner. “What is the most appealing way to make the process of registration easiest for people most underrepresented in our democracy?”

So Malchow shifted his own focus, too. Through weekly Tuesday strategy calls with Women’s Voices staff, Malchow arrived at fourteen variations to the group’s standard voter registration package to test. In some cases he and Gardner decided to fiddle with the format (adding a fake Post-it note to direct a recipient to the fields she needed to complete) and in others made more substantive adjustments (would putting an NAACP return address on the envelope make black Mississippians more likely to register to vote?). Malchow produced each of the test mailings, assigned treatment and control universes across twenty states, and in mid-September, a little more than a year before Obama would reappear on a ballot, postmarked just under a half-million registration forms. “What seems to be a very small difference in response rates … becomes a difference in cost per net vote,” says Gardner. “All these nitty-bitty things have magnified effects.”

Registration was the first step in the process of winning a vote, but it rarely earned sustained attention from campaign operatives. The tax code treated it as a civic function rather than a political one, something that was unquestionably good for democracy rather than a tactic to back one candidate. Because outside groups would take on this work, especially on the left, campaigns rarely did it themselves. To the extent there was expertise in the art of registration, it had belonged to groups like ACORN and its many satellites, who specialized in overwhelming minority neighborhoods with unskilled workers who were typically paid for each form they returned. The workers knew their turf, and would often do little but set up a card table outside a well-trafficked grocery store, with a stack of forms handed out indiscriminately to passersby who said they were unregistered. The going rate for each new registrant was about fifteen dollars, covering labor and administrative costs. Often there wasn’t a computer in sight, or any way of matching the names to the voluminous databases that could help predict what party that voter was likely to join, or—if it was not a first-time voter but merely someone registering in a new location—document his or her history of political behaviors with great specificity. Groups, parties, or campaigns that had learned to rigorously target their mail and phone communications to maximize votes and lower costs would often mindlessly use their registration programs to put new supporters of their opposition on the electoral rolls at great expense to themselves.

Gardner had long yearned for a more refined approach. Her experience with Women’s Voices had taught her that the group could not just adopt a card table strategy, since unmarried women did not segregate in particular neighborhoods. She also fixated on the obvious inefficiencies in the standard process; lowering the cost per registration meant expanding her program’s reach. So years ago she and Malchow had turned to new commercial databases that covered the entire adult population, pulled out unregistered women who appeared to be unmarried, and started sending out registration packages by mail. Through those tests, he had found he was able to bring the cost down to around eleven dollars per registration.

In part because of this success, Women’s Voices’ contributors pushed Gardner to start hunting for other targets, such as African-Americans and Latinos (regardless of gender or marital status). Malchow built a model to predict which members of this expanded target universe would be most likely to register through a mailed appeal. He refined the statistical models each time, increasing the response rate and bringing down the costs. (Malchow even paid the post office for the mailers it returned as undeliverable, and used their common attributes to develop a model that could predict which addresses were likely to be bad so they could be preemptively removed from future lists.) In 2008, Women’s Voices had sent out nearly 20 million applications, and registered just under 1 million of them in time for Obama’s election. Thanks to Malchow’s modeling and experimentation, they had cost around seven dollars each.

Most of this activity took place quietly and deliberately, receiving little attention outside a small circle of liberal foundations and activist groups that shared its objectives. The one time that the group did earn wide notice had come in the spring of 2008, when North Carolina election officials condemned its robocalls targeting black voters with a request to return a forthcoming voter registration packet. The calls had arrived after the deadline for the primary, and many (particularly Obama supporters) accused the group of trying to mislead voters who were already registered into thinking they were not, as part of a scheme to depress the black vote on behalf of Hillary Clinton, to whom Gardner and Malchow both had ties. For bloggers who covered the controversy, Gardner’s statement that “these calls were our sincere attempt to encourage voter registration for those not registered for the general election this fall” was treated as a bit of obfuscation. In fact, the whole process grew out of experimental research that showed that, for nonvoters with available phone numbers, an advance alert by robocall increased response rates to a mailed registration form. (The fact that some registered voters were targets marked a modest, if predictable, failure of the data Malchow had run through his statistical models.) Hackles were raised largely because of the tradition of race-based voter suppression, but for a more banal reason, as well. Women’s Voices’ approach to the largely unscientized process of registering voters was so unusually methodical (The Economist called it “Rube Goldberg–ish”) that the group regularly garnered suspicion from opponents and local authorities who suspected that its only purpose could be fraud or manipulation.

In November 2011, as Malchow sat in his home in Virginia monitoring his latest round of experiments, those registrations were no longer a sideshow to the project of picking a president. With a year to go until his reelection, Obama’s popularity had fallen so precipitously, especially among swing voters, that questions about persuasion no longer seemed as urgent. Turnout would, as ever, remain crucial, but economic disillusionment from some core constituencies made it imprudent to rely on mobilization efforts alone. Indeed, the first maps to line the wall in Obama’s new Chicago headquarters reflected how much Democratic plans for holding on to the White House depended on changing the composition of the electorate. Demographic shifts, particularly Latino-population spikes away from the Mexican border, made it conceivable that nontraditional Democratic states like North Carolina and Arizona would be friendlier turf than old battlegrounds like Ohio. Nevada and New Mexico could be moved from battlegrounds to safely Democratic states, giving Obama the ability to devote his time and resources elsewhere. But Democrats and their allies would have to successfully register those potential new voters, certainly hundreds of thousands of them, if not millions. They would also have to do it early enough in the process not only to meet legal deadlines, but so that they could be identified, canvassed, and modeled in such a way that Obama’s campaign was able to meaningfully communicate with them throughout the election year.

Malchow tracked the experiments’ progress on what were known as PLANET Code reports. They were named for a service that the U.S. Postal Service had introduced years earlier permitting a mailer to place a unique bar code on a piece of mail and record when it entered the postal system. The PLANET codes allowed a person to return a registration form directly to election officials on his or her own terms without denying the original sender the ability to track the response in real time. The codes were a small innovation, unknown to most political consultants and practically useless to all but a sliver of those who work with direct mail. But as with so many other developments Malchow had latched onto during his career, their introduction had taken a discrete campaign activity with latent impact and made it instantly measurable. It was thanks to the codes that Women’s Voices and Malchow were able to run the experiments and modeling programs that, in just four years, had cut in half the cost of registering a new voter.

Now Malchow was hunting through the code reports to see whether any of his tests could help bring that cost down even further. He had auditioned one letter that tried to replicate the social pressure Grebner had aimed at nonvoters for use as psychological leverage on nonregistrants, and it seemed to be working, with a response rate about 25 percent above Women’s Voices’ standard mailer. But an effort to do the same with Gerber’s privacy message—by including a reminder that an individual’s registration could not legally be used for commercial purposes—looked like a flop, drawing barely half the standard response. Maybe, he assumed, some of those unwilling to register were so detached from political institutions that nothing could win their trust, or perhaps just raising the issue of privacy reinforced their paranoia.

The best performer, to Malchow’s surprise, wasn’t one of the packages that played devious mind games with its recipient but the type of straightforward, even earnest, entreaty that had fallen out of favor in the Analyst Institute world. This winning package was targeted at African-Americans on their eighteenth birthdays, framing their first election—and their chance to be part of it—as a monumental occasion. Women’s Voices already had a robust “birthday” program, which mailed forms to teenagers as they turned eighteen, and it was one of the most effective mechanisms the group had. But emphasizing the historic moment of Obama’s presidency brought in even more voters.

There was an unusual sweetness to that finding, especially since Malchow was at a complete loss to explain it. He was comfortable with the honest cynicism about human decision making that informed much of the behavioralist revolution in voter contact, but he couldn’t understand why this appeal to civic duty would be succeeding where so many others had failed. Malchow grasped briefly at a few possible causes, but gave up on each quickly. He fell uncharacteristically silent, alone for a minute with the pleasing thought that there might still be a place in political life for innocent uplift.