This is the portion of the presidential campaign that tends to focus on the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort at the grassroots, or on the ground, in contrast with the “air war” that candidates wage on the airwaves. It is sometimes referred to as the “ground game” portion of a political campaign, in reference to its strategic element.
Get-out-the-vote activities were largely neglected by presidential candidates from the early 1960s through the 1990s. During this era, many campaign managers felt that television ads were a more effective means of generating voter turnout than more labor-intensive, traditional GOTV strategies. While political parties and interest groups still engaged in GOTV activities, these efforts too waned over time as Americans grew less inclined to engage in volunteerism more generally, and labor unions lost their pool of members on which the Democratic Party had long relied for such efforts.
Voter turnout stagnated and declined during this era, but political campaigns continued to view GOTV activities as too expensive and therefore not cost-effective in the long run. Instead, they sought out market research strategies that would enable them to more effectively target their potential supporters in the electorate as a means of generating turnout. In the aftermath of the hotly contested Campaign of 2000, political candidates and political parties came to realize that with an almost evenly divided electorate, every vote counted, and the candidate who could mobilize the most supporters would have an edge on Election Day. Republican incumbent George W. Bush’s campaign focused its efforts on mobilizing its evangelical Christian base in the Campaign of 2004, and in the end, Bush achieved a very narrow victory over Democratic nominee John Kerry.
The Campaign of 2008 marked a new era in GOTV activities. Democratic nominee Barack Obama amassed a substantial campaign war chest after forgoing the public financing system that would have limited his expenditures. Obama used these funds to campaign in states such as Virginia, Georgia, Indiana, and North Carolina, where Democratic candidates had not performed well for decades. His campaign also invested in GOTV activities that targeted younger voters and ethnic minorities, all of whom had historically low voter turnout rates. Republican nominee John McCain lacked the resources to engage in similar activities. Many political analysts believe that these differences helped Obama defeat his opponent, becoming the first African American president in U.S. history.
However, in the Campaign of 2012, Democratic incumbent Obama faced a challenger with more comparable financial resources. Sides and Vavreck argue that while Romney may have had strong fund-raising skills, he made very different choices about how to use those funds than Obama did, and those differences were most evident in the ground game. Nationwide, they counted 786 field offices associated with Obama’s campaign and only 284 associated with Romney’s campaign. While Romney invested some resources in states where Obama had few offices (Utah, Missouri), on balance, it was more often the case that the Obama campaign invested in field offices in states that the Romney campaign ignored (i.e., Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, California, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Connecticut). Sides and Vavreck tallied up candidate advantage by county and found 187 counties in the United States where there was an Obama field office but not a Romney field office.
How Romney and Obama used their field offices tended to differ as well. Sides and Vavreck noted that Obama’s field offices tended to be located in counties that leaned Democratic, such that they would help to benefit Obama’s reelection chances. Moreover, this appeared to be the primary or sole objective of those field offices. Romney’s field offices, on the other hand, were situated such that they benefited local candidates, and their operations seemed to be centered on that task. Sides and Vavreck conducted a statistical analysis that showed that having one field office (or more) tended to improve Obama’s vote share (controlling for other factors such as ads) but that having one Romney field office (or more) had no discernible effect on Romney’s vote share. However, they also note that even if Obama had had fewer field offices, he likely still would have won the election, albeit by a slightly smaller margin.
These studies suggest that in the Campaign of 2016, fund-raising alone won’t be the primary determinant of a candidate’s electoral success. Rather, how the candidates, their parties, and their outside supporters use their resources at the local level to mobilize voters will play a large role in determining who wins in November. At present the Trump campaign may prove to be an outlier.
Bailey, Eric. “Campaign 2000: Foot Soldiers Fight to Boost Turnout.” Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2000, p. A1.
Ball, Molly. “Obama’s Edge: The Ground Game That Could Put Him Over the Top.” The Atlantic, October 12, 2012.
Bergen, Daniel E., Alan S. Gerber, Donald P. Green, and Costas Panagopoulos. “Grassroots Mobilization and Voter Turnout in 2004.” Public Opinion Quarterly 69, no. 5 (2005): 760–77.
Darr, Joshua P., and Matthew S. Levendusky. “Relying on the Ground Game: The Placement and Effect of Campaign Field Offices.” American Politics Research 42 (May 2014): 529-48.
Sides, John, and Lynn Vavreck. The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.