Historically, the task of mobilizing voters was the responsibility of political parties, and the organized interests that supported a party contributed manpower and other expertise in marshaling the voters needed to secure an electoral victory. Changes in the financial landscape, wrought by campaign finance reform in the 1970s and afterward, and Supreme Court decisions about spending by outside independent advocacy groups, in addition to changes in the technological landscape (such as the advent of television advertising and the rise of computer-driven market research), have altered the traditional role of political parties in getting out the vote for their candidates. Political parties, buffeted by campaign finance loopholes in the 1980s and 1990s but seduced by the lure of television advertising, focused their resources on advertising as a means to attract voters, abandoning traditional door-to-door, face-to-face modes of contact. At the same time, elections overall became more candidate-centered and less party-centered, reducing partisan ties that tend to keep voters showing up to the polls from one election to the next. As court decisions permitted outside groups to rival, or even exceed, party spending at election time, new sources of influence came to rival those of political parties.
Yet some surprising changes have taken place in voter mobilization behaviors. For the first time since the mid-1960s, voter turnout has been on the rise. The Campaigns of 2004, 2008, and 2012 were all marked by substantially higher turnout than the norm, and they constituted a clear departure from the decades-long trend of declining voter turnout. The increase in voter turnout was no fluke; rather, it occurred as a result of deliberate, systematic efforts by political parties and their candidates to generate voter mobilization. With each subsequent election, parties and candidates have sought novel means for reaching out to voters, yet they have also reemphasized some of the more time-honored get-out-the-vote-techniques used by parties of earlier generations.
Particularly on the left, collaboration between academic researchers and political activists has led to the use of field experiments to study the effectiveness of various GOTV strategies, and the results of these experiments have often been used to craft subsequent campaign strategies. Among the most influential research has been that conducted by Donald Green and Alan Gerber, then political scientists at Yale, who conducted a series of controlled experiments in the 1990s on the effects of campaign contact and voting. Green and Gerber found that phone contact was no more effective than receiving no contact whatsoever, with mailers generating only a slight bump in turnout. Their major finding was that in-person contact yielded a sizable increase in an individual’s likelihood of turning out to vote. Green and Gerber and their students attracted the attention of candidates from both parties, as well as outside groups such as the AFL-CIO, and with the cooperation of various campaigns, candidates over the years experimented in altering the content of mailers, homing in on important media markets, changing the content of television ads to adapt to crucial audiences, using paid and volunteer callers for phone banks, and using various forms of personal contact. These experiments were an important factor in creating a more scientific approach to political campaigns. And, just as importantly, they led to the appearance of political and behavioral scientists in campaign management.
For example, the Analyst Institute, formed just prior to the 2008 election, conducts behavioral science experiments on elections around the country in order to generate strategies for Democratic campaigns. Its staff are involved in the planning of the Democratic Party’s national campaign efforts, as well as its House and Senate strategies. In the Campaigns of 2008 and 2012, Democrat Barack Obama’s campaign organization had a reputation for its devotion to a scientific, data-oriented approach to campaigning, and it developed a formidable in-house, data-oriented voter identification and mobilization effort. While the scope of Obama’s campaigns differed across the two elections (in 2008, he targeted a larger group of states and voters, including those who did not usually vote Democratic, but by 2012, his focus was on his Democratic base), in both instances, his campaign relied on getting voter turnout rates up in his must-win states. To accomplish this, the Obama campaign used a number of novel tactics, among them, asking people to make a plan about how they were going to vote on Election Day (with the campaign sending reminders about the date, polling hours in their state, and their polling location), and a subtle form of social pressure in which potential voters were provided with the names of their neighbors who had recently voted as part of a vote reminder (with the implication that their neighbors would also know whether they had voted).
The campaign of Republican John McCain was underfunded in the Campaign of 2008, having agreed to take public funds for the general election. It did not have the luxury of waging a battle in every state in which it was competitive, pulling out of states such as Michigan well before Election Day, and thus lacked the resources to invest in analytics. Republican Mitt Romney was far better financed in the Campaign of 2012, although much of his resources were controlled by super PACs and other outside groups, rather than by his campaign organization. This limited the campaign’s ability to directly engage in a sophisticated GOTV effort. Romney did not prioritize the ground game in the campaign, maintaining a fraction of the field offices that the Obama campaign had. Additionally, some GOP-controlled legislatures in states such as Florida had passed limitations on nonpartisan voter registration drives. This negatively affected the Romney campaign, which lacked the field presence in Florida that the Obama campaign had, forcing the GOP to spend valuable funds late in the race on a last-ditch effort to register potential supporters that the League of Women Voters used to register for free. However, the Romney campaign did attempt to emulate some of the Obama campaign’s tactics, crafting a strategy it termed “Orca” in order to combat “Narwhal,” Obama’s vaunted in-house GOTV operation. Orca was supposed to enable GOP volunteers manning the polls on Election Day to quickly input data on which voters had already showed up, letting Romney campaign staff at the Boston headquarters send out phone reminders to prospective Romney voters before the polls closed. But poor planning and an under-resourced system led Orca to malfunction, leaving volunteers frustrated and the Romney campaign adrift. It is unclear whether Romney’s inability to connect with voters on Election Day cost him the election; however, it was viewed as a symptom of other problems with the management of the campaign.
In the Campaign of 2015/2016, to this point, Republican candidate Senator Ted Cruz in particular has devoted considerable resources to the use of psychological data and analytics to stimulate support among likely voters.
See also Battleground State; Big Data; Early Voting; Ground War; Microtargeting; Voter Eligible Population (VEP) Turnout; Voting Reform Issue
Allen, Cathy. “Get Out Your Vote.” Campaigns and Elections 21, October 2000, p. 20.
CIRCLE: The Center for Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, Tufts University. http://www.civicyouth.org. Accessed September 29, 2015.
Green, Donald P., and Alan S. Gerber. Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 2008.
Hamburger, Tom. “Cruz Campaign Credits Psychological Data and Analytics for Rising Success.” The Washington Post, December 12, 2015.
Issenberg, Sasha. The Victory Lab. New York: Crown, 2012.
National Conference of State Legislatures. “Absentee and Early Voting.” http://www.ncsl.org/default.aspx?tabid=16604. Accessed September 29, 2015.
Rosenstone, Steven J., and John Mark Hansen. Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America. New York: Longman, 2002.