GOTV - Part 7 - Need for a Continuing Organization

by: Grebner

Sun Dec 19, 2010 at 02:24:51 AM EST

Every second year, around late July, the Democratic Party starts thinking about how to organize GOTV for the fall election.  It's always a mix of equal parts tried-and-true, and "we won't make the same mistakes this time".  We use some left over office supplies, print more or less the same handouts, and employ almost identical contact scripts.  In the end, each cycle's campaign almost indistinguishable from its predecessors.

Breaking with the past would open the way to dramatically greater impact: more Democratic voters turned out, more Democrats elected to office.  One necessary step will be to create and maintain a continuing, permanent operation, which can preserve valuable information gained during one cycle for use in the next.  Instead of shutting down for 20 months out of 24, we need to spend the downtime getting ready.

At the national levels, these lessons have been recognized and are being put into operation by the Analyst Institute, which is dedicated to bringing the scientific method to bear on GOTV problems.  But they haven't made any impression yet here in Michigan.

Immediately after the election, we need to collect data showing exactly who voted, so we can see how well our tactics worked, and how well each of our volunteers performed.  By comparing our a priori estimates of turnout to who actually showed up at the polls to cast a ballot, we can see with great precision that "whoever canvassed precinct one was useless", or "Mary Jones successfully got both her elderly mother and her ne'er-do-well son to cast ballots!  Who'da thunk?".  Everybody, every program, every effort ought to be evaluated after every election.  What didn't work needs to be fixed or discarded.  What did work should be praised, noted, rewarded.  These ideas are commonplace in business, but they're entirely foreign to the way we've always run GOTV.

We shouldn't provide feedback only to our volunteers, but to the voters themselves.  There's no more powerful time for intervention than immediately AFTER the election, when the experience is still fresh in their minds.  For 20 cents each, we can send a nice signed postcard that says "Thanks for voting!"  or "We're sorry to see from the election records that you didn't vote - is something wrong?".  That postcard will scare the crap out of some of them, but it will make a powerful impression - they'll realize their vote is important to us, and that we're paying attention.  Even if they never receive another GOTV contact, it will raise their turnout rate by 5% in the succeeding election.

Our volunteer base will similarly be impressed by such feedback.  If some of them are paid - which is a good use of money under appropriate conditions - part of their pay should be a bonus for performance.  Knowing that somebody is monitoring them, depending on them, appreciating them, can be a powerful force for improving their future follow-through.  More importantly, some of them will turn out to have slacked off or been entirely ineffective, and they should be either re-trained or discarded for future activities.

Taking a larger view, we need to evaluate which programs worked and which did not:  mail, phoning, robo-calls, door-to-door, absentee ballots, and so on.  Instead of blindly re-enacting "what we've always done", our next GOTV effort should be a combination of what actually worked previously added to new ideas from elsewhere selected for trying out.  For the purpose of facilitating evaluation, we should automatically set aside a "control group" of voters randomly excluded from our contacts, so we can rigorously determine whether and how much our programs work.  These comparisons would be best conducted by someone NOT involved directly in GOTV, to avoid the temptation to fudge things.  Academic researchers, or possibly just Poli Sci grad students, are generally available for little or no cost.

Next, we ought to be sure we salvage and clean up various information that would be valuable to the next GOTV drive some 20 months hence.  One example is the detailed list of "micro-volunteers" and exactly who they agreed to shepherd to the polls for us.  There will be a great deal of turnover by the next election, but knowing who did what (or at least, agreed to do what) will be a good place to start.

We ought to assemble (as I will explain in a subsequent post) lists of specific locations such as mobile home parks, apartments, dorms, adult foster care homes, and so on.  Not just the addresses, but their size, information about ownership or management of the facility, contact names, and information about anybody sympathetic who can help us gain access.  Altogether, I guess there are about 5000 such locations in Michigan - about which we have no systematic collection of data presently.

Finally, we ought to maintain a database for each college and university in the state, with updated information about students' names, addresses, voter status, partisan leanings, and turnout.  As we've shown at MSU, it is tremendously more effective to work a college campus on a continuing basis, than to try to run a soup-to-nuts campaign between Labor Day and election day.  When we try to collect IDs, register favorable voters, and then campaign among them for support - all in 60 days - our efforts suffer from chaos and disorganization.  When we work each year's freshman class in its turn - regardless whether it's an election year - we can focus our efforts on the specific interventions that have the greatest payoff in votes.  Central to this effort is maintaining an accurate list of students, matching it to voter lists (including registrations at their parents' address), and conducting low-key party ID outreach.  Maintaining this data for ten or fifteen campuses would require a full-time employee.