GOTV

BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT: Let's take time to think about how we can get ahead of the strategic curve in the long term while coming up with tactics to win in the short term.

Hat tip to Katie Harbath for tweeting this news item: "Three-Quarters of the World's Messages Sent By Mobile"

"According to TNS Global, 74% of the world’s digital messages were sent through a mobile device in January 2009, a 15% increase over the previous year.

"As for developed countries, the PC e-mail remains the most popular message method, but its use is waning.

"In Japan, 40 out of 100 e-mails sent are from a mobile device. In North America, 69% of those using e-mail on their mobile phone use it daily, high compared with 43% worldwide."

I've written previously about the Pew Internet & American Life Project's "Future of the Internet Report," which has two interesting observations: (1) the mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020, and (2) the divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations. The National Taxpayers Union put things to practice recently, launching a text messaging advocacy service, a creative tool to enhance that organization's grassroots operations.

Rebuilding our party doesn't only mean taking an inventory of every tool that's available and seeing how those tools fit campaigns and party organizations today; it also means seeing what the trends might be 5, 10 or 20 years from now and creating tools that can put us ahead of the curve. I do not have the proper fusing of sufficient technical skills with amazing creativity that many programmers and coders do ... which is why Code Red has been launched.

So despite my relative technical ignorance, I think a few observations need to be made about how campaigns might be affected, and where can campaigns might go, with increased use of mobile messaging. Yes, all parts of the campaign will be affected from communications on down. But increased use of mobile devices by voters to get most of their information will have a special impact on GOTV operations:

• Voter identification, persuasion and GOTV efforts will have to be more integrated. With personal and work time being merged as well as physical and virtual reality, campaigns and party organizations will have to embark on a long term, on-going voter identification efforts to see when and how often they receive messages and Internet content.
• With social networking sites and programs going mobile, GOTV messages will have to balance simplicity with engaging material. GOTV messages won't only come in the form of SMS and MMS. These alerts will come via Facebook and Twitter as well, where more and more this social networking activity takes place on iPhones and BlackBerries. Sending simple information on polling locations as well as early and mail-in ballot voting will have to become more easily searchable on any mobile device. Voters will also want a quick and easy way to engage with the campaign or party organization if they want to: a mobile version of an "action center" will have to be developed.
• As more and more messages are sent via mobile devices, the tools developed by campaigns and party organizations might need to expand horizontally to include different versions for different devices. The Obama app for the iPhone has somewhat started this thought. As the web will play a greater role in helping campaigns organically enhance their grassroots activism, those with different devices will need different versions of tools to suit their personal needs when receiving GOTV messages and spreading those messages to their neighbors, co-workers and family members.

Those are just some of my thoughts. I may be right. I may be way off base. How do you think campaigns will change with increased use of mobile devices?

In the meantime, RebuildTheParty.com reminds us all about the basics of GOTV ... Go Tedisco! 

Many of the tactical postmortems on the Obama campaign have been focused online. But it's worth remembering that that is only one piece of the puzzle. The fact is that Obama ran a better kind of offline campaign. A couple of parts really stand out from the Lloyd Grove interview of David Plouffe:

L.G.: How much money is allocated to the various units of the campaign? One always hears that paid advertising takes significantly more than 50 percent—putting commercials on the air, radio, and television. Can you break down the percentages?
 
D.P.: Well, we spent obviously a lot of money on TV, but as a ratio of our spending, it was much lower than historically is done, and that's because we spent a lot of money in the field and on the ground. And, in fact, when we did our baseline budget, the field was fully funded because we thought it was very, very important. If we were to raise excess funds, we bolstered the field a little bit, but it went in advertising. Our first priority was the ground operation because we thought that was essential to us winning. It's very much, I think, a unique approach. In a lot of campaigns, the media gets funded first, then if you have extra money that comes in, you bolster the field and things of that sort. And we kind of did it in reverse.
 
L.G.: Can you give me a rough breakdown of percentages?
 
D.P.: Well, no. I would say that it's lower.
 
L.G.: One always hears historically it's almost 70 percent that goes to media.
 
D.P.: Right, the playbook is 70 to 75 percent, and we did much less than that. Under 50 percent.
 
L.G.: What gave you the chutzpah to think you should break the model, and spend more than 50 percent on non-media?
 
D.P.: First of all, we knew that we had to get really good turnout, and that we thought a human being talking to a human being in a state is the most effective in communication. So we needed an organization that was able to facilitate that. Secondly, a presidential campaign is a very well-covered enterprise, people are talking about it all the time, they see it on the newscast, they're reading about it online. In many respects, advertising in a senate race or governor's or congressional race can have more impact because those races aren't front and center for people. I always believed that advertising was very, very important. I think we went right in and it was very helpful—makes it meaningful because people have 100 percent knowledge of the candidate and are following pretty closely. So I thought we could afford to trim a little bit. Now we ended up raising a lot of money, so our point levels were very big in September, October, but we could've won without that. Then the McCain campaign likes to say, "we were outspent, that's why we lost on TV"—and I think that's complete malarkey.

Paid advertising can have a dramatic impact on high valence issues that are getting short shrift in the media. I've seen this enough to not be a hater on paid advertising. That said, even Senators and Governors races have enough of an earned media component these days to dilute the value of TV ads even in downballot races.

When you're spending 70% or more of your budget on any one thing, be that advertising, field, salaries, online, etc., that does not make for a very well balanced campaign. At some level, a certain laziness about how to spend money kicks in. Since the basics of a campaign -- staff on the ground, websites, office space -- come relatively cheap compared to points on TV, there is a much greater tolerance for waste on the airwaves than there is in any other area of the campaign. A lot of this, particularly at the local level where candidates are even more reliant on consultants, is driven by consultants preferring commissionable advertising over non-commissionable field efforts. Morton Blackwell has been preaching this gospel for years.

So Obama decided to something radical in the context of traditional campaigns. They decided to construct their entire budget around field. This proved to be a wise investment, as it was the nose-to-the-grindstone focus on caucus states that won them the primary and their massive investment in field in the general that shifted the electorate 3-4 points in their direction. That turnout wasn't dramatically up from 2004 misses the point. Every serious person who's looked at this agrees that their turnout was way, way up, and ours was down. So: a relative wash in overall vote count but a sea change beneath the surface.

Should TV people have something to fear? Ultimately, David Axelrod was not lacking for funds. If given a choice between a bigger piece of a smaller pie and a smaller piece of a much bigger pie, TV consultants would be stupid not to take the latter. But that will require a fundamental shift in how we look at Republican campaigns: from staid, establishment-only affairs towards a more freewheeling, participatory, and bottom-up culture consistent with our capitalist philosophy. And it will require different types of candidates, not just a change in tactics.

The Freedom Coalition is scrambling. Bipartisan bailouts and a profligate Republican Party seem not only to have conjured up the specter of Keynes but the American Left in force. The left has outsmarted the center-right Freedom Coalition in all the ways that count. That is, our democratic republic is, and always has been, about getting that 50 percent plus one. The left has figured this out and put the bulk of its investments behind this fact. And while we may like to tell ourselves that 'politics goes in cycles,' no one may credibly doubt the effort and organization of Democrats and progressives and the failure of the Freedom Coalition to adapt.

Meanwhile, as libertarians smugly explained the irrationality of voting – you know, clustering problems, paradoxes and the improbability of the tie-breaking vote – leftwing activists have spent a fortune in time and money getting people to do something irrational. And it worked. Aging right-wingers have been content to jockey their wingback chairs and will their estates to AEI, Cato or Heritage, so these goliath think tanks can print up yet more high-quality policy reports 250 people will read. This is a problem.

The Think Tank Bubble

F.A. Hayek is known among freedom lovers as describing the structure of production. The idea is often rendered as a triangle cut into thirds, like a simple hierarchy: At the top are the raw materials (say, silicon). The second slice is the capital goods (assembly line). Then come the consumer goods (iPod, marketing). The idea is of a production process whereby resources pass through each stage before finally satisfying human wants and needs.  Likewise, we can imagine socio-political change going through a similar process. First, you have some abstract academic theory, which filters down to the think tanks and policy shops, finally to be run through the legislative sausage grinder or presented to voters as talking points. That's the 30,000 foot view. From ideas to policy to implementation (or from academia to think tanks to ordinary politics). Obviously, the structure of social change is much more complicated than this simplified model reveals. But it's largely correct. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

Now, if we look at the average "freedom portfolio" we're going to see something that will go very far in explaining the Freedom Coalition's most recent voting booth humiliations—an investment bubble. Too many resources are going to think tanks—that is, that second slice of the structure. (The left has put most of its resources into implementation, never mind academia, which it has always owned.) Any renaissance of the Freedom Coalition will require freedom-lovers to divest themselves of legacy think tanks and start putting their freedom investments into something else. But where?

First, the Freedom Coalition is going to have to play catch-up on the one hand and tit-for-tat on the other. To figure out how to compete, it will have to look at the competition for benchmarks. What are they doing right? If the Freedom Coalition does its due diligence, it will find a second-mover advantage. Then, the right is going to have innovatively to reconfigure itself around what it has learned: new media; mass media, branding and marketing and get out the vote (GOTV)—and any other unseemly aspect of deadweight activism. Individualist-types may find this unsavory. We prefer ideas and analysis to groupish activism. We relish the holistic logic of market solutions and believe the world must kneel to rational argument. Tough. That's not the world in which we find ourselves. So unless we're prepared to argue with the machine or take up arms and rebel, we've got to play the implementation game and play it better. (Part Two here - Max Borders, Free to Choose Network)

In response to the points raised earlier about Get out the vote:

I mean, I understand the importance of GOTV. But is it really necesary to make an effort as large as 2004?

In 2000/2004, GOTV was important for Bush because (pre-inconvenient truth) Gore and Kerry, while disliked, wern't seen as a urgent threat. Most of the voting was for Bush rather than against his opponents.

This year is fundamentally different than 2004. Pretty much all conservatives are extremely worried about an Obama administration. If Obama's unrestricted far-left agenda pronounced day after day in the news and advertisements doesn't motivate conservatives to the polls, I don't know what would.

In the end, the most important thing about this election is where the soft/undecided vote goes, as opposed to 2004 where it was all about maximizing the partisan base.  If a last minute ad-barrage is what it's going to take to persuade them then it should be done. It could "fall flat" in the end but the unusual circumstance of an unqualified Democratic nominee may demand it.

UPDATE: The McCain campaign pushes back, starting at around 8:30 of today's conference call...

This has to be incredibly disappointing to anyone who's worked their hearts out for John McCain the last two years out in the field:

The vaunted, 72-hour plan that President Bush used to mobilize voters in 2000 and 2004 has been scaled back for McCain. He has spent half as much as Obama on staffing and has opened far fewer field offices. This week, a number of veteran GOP operatives who orchestrate door-to-door efforts to get voters to the polls were told they should not expect to receive plane tickets, rental cars or hotel rooms from the campaign.

"The desire for parity on television comes at the expense of investment in paid boots on the ground," said one top Republican strategist who has been privy to McCain's plans. "The folks who will oversee the volunteer operation have been told to get out into the field on their own nickel."

The strategy has the full backing of no less an authority on these matters than Bob Dole's 1996 campaign manager:

Scott Reed, an informal McCain adviser who in 1996 ran then-Sen. Robert J. Dole's presidential bid, said the campaign made the right call by dedicating more money to its media effort. Ads are the most efficient way to persuade undecided voters, and possibly convince some who are only tepidly backing Obama, he said.

The strategy is a Hail Mary ripped right from an old-school playbook. A good field operation counts for 2-3 points, and this is not a 2-3 point race. But the notion that TV counts for 6 points in the modern era is crackpipe. If you have a 3-to-1 advertising lead, it counts for maybe a point. And we are not talking about outspending Obama, but matching him.

Nor do we have a decent "closing argument" spot, if this is any indication. This was Bush's final ad in 2004:

And thought this was not his close, this Bush 2000 ad aired in the last month had the feel of a closing argument, and made the argument against government far more comprehensively that McCain has this year (no YouTube):

Audio: George W. Bush: I believe we need to encourage personal responsibility so people are accountable for their actions. And I believe in government that is responsible to the people. That's the difference in philosophy between my opponent and me. He trusts government. I trust you. I trust you to invest some of your own social security money for higher returns. I trust local people to run their own schools. In return for federal money, I will insist on performance. And if schools continue to fail, we'll give parents different options. I trust you with some of the budget surplus. I believe one fourth of the surplus should go back to the people who pay the bills. My opponent proposes “targeted tax cuts” only for those he calls the “right people.” And that means half of all income taxpayers get nothing at all. We should help people live their lives, but not run them. Because when we trust individuals, when we respect local control of schools, when we empower communities, together we can ignite America's spirit and renew our purpose.

The most likely scenario -- absent a blockbuster revelation -- is McCain's ad splurge falls flat, and Obama, virtually uncontested in the field, is if anything able to expand his current lead by getting more of his voters to the polls.

At this point, only an October Surprise or voters finally getting cold feet about Obama in the final 72 hours will move the polls 6 points. TV ads alone are actually a remarkably inefficient way to move the polls at the national level with interest in the race this high -- especially if this is what McCain is putting up.

May this be the last traditional, by-the-playbook Republican campaign ever.

In the past few days, details have begun to trickle about Obama's vast GOTV infrastructure. Zack Exley's "The New Organizers" is one of the must-read pieces of this election cycle as far as I'm concerned. The Washington Post popularizes the subject a little bit more in its Sunday edition.

The gist is that the Obama campaign has effectively melded top-down and bottom-up GOTV strategies, setting up a network of volunteer "Neighborhood Team Leaders" responsible for 8-12 precincts with often dozens of volunteers under them. The key is that you have volunteers in supervisory roles on the ground, not desk jockeys parceling out call sheets and walk lists. And decentralized though it may be, these are not kids in orange hats or freelancers who think it'd be fun to raise money for a blimp.

Exley describes the process of entrusting a volunteer with the big job of overseeing thousands of voter contacts:

After Glenna had proven her reliability and effectiveness, Ryan asked her for another special one-on-one meeting where he invited her to formally agree to become an NTL. He spelled out all of an NTL's responsibilities before allowing her to accept it and even gave her a binder spelling it all out in writing: She would work with him to recruit other team members such as coordinators for canvassing, phone banking and data management. Her team would be responsible for connecting with all of the Democratic and undecided voters within their "turf." Other volunteers who stepped forward in her area would not be managed by campaign staff, but by Glenna's team. As team leader, Glenna would report results to Ryan a couple times per week and would be held accountable for meeting specific goals by certain deadlines.

In many ways, this is like the pyramid volunteer structure often attributed to Bush-Cheney '04, in which a meritocratic leadership structure was built outside local Republican Parties. Except that this is happening lower down in the food chain, at the level of the individual volunteer in a precinct. Obama volunteers are expected to do more than volunteers on other campaigns, which is basically to park your butt in a headquarters and make lots of phone calls.

Promoted and bumped. -Patrick

I've been involved with many facets of many different types of campaigns: local school board, city council, state legislature, statewide gubernatorial, congressional, ballot initiative, and in-state presidential organizations. When I occassionally speak at campaign management and organization seminars, I am often asked the question: what is the most important part of the campaign? That question is so hard to answer because (1) campaigns are short-term "fire-fighting" operations as much as they are long-term strategic organziations, and (2) each part of the campaign (or at least a good campaign) is interconnected.

Yes, most of the money that gets spent is on paid media, and some will say that because of this, fundraising is the most important facet. While I don't disagree, something that I focus a lot of my attention on is GOTV efforts, a low-cost and high-importance category that has to be planned from the very beginning of the campaign but is executed in the last 72 hours.

So here are a few items of interest that all deal with GOTV efforts:

In the regular debate about about how the right can catch up online, several points are often missed. The first is that the left has developed a movement based on the interconnectedness of people inside the movement. People get recruited, energized, and leveraged. This may or may not be as much a function of larger demographic and political trends, as it has something to do with the netroots specifically.

At the same time, the right has often been better at campaign mechanics, especially in recent years. Our assumption seems to be that if we get enough people to go and vote in this country -- which we still believe is just right of center -- then we can win. If McCain wins, it will probably be because his ideas are basically in line with a just-right-of-center country, while Obama's may not be.

In recent years, our political-technological innovations have focused on turning out normal people at unbelievable levels. In that context, I want to highlight something from Jose Antonio Vargas hints at this in his piece on Cyrus Krohn and the RNC:

[...] Then-Rep. Bobby Jindal was an attractive candidate, Krohn says, and it was projected to be a tight race. For 3 1/2 months, using online micro-targeting and data-matching, he identified a set of voters and turned them out to the polls.

Statewide turnout for the Louisiana race was 46 percent. Of those voters who interacted with Krohn's online targeting -- he won't say how much of the total vote -- 76 percent voted, he claims. Krohn says he's not suggesting that the RNC is responsible for Jindal's win. What it does suggest, however, is that the model could have significant impact on voter turnout, he adds.

Technology should lower the costs of things that campaigns already do, and those lowered costs should allow new ideas and techniques. The 72-hour program massively increased the efficiency of the GOP's GOTV efforts, at the same time that the RNC and Bush-Cheney got better at recruiting more volunteers to do those things.

The Louisiana story makes clear that we likely still have significant advantages here. Our GOTV is almost certainly tremendously more efficient, helped by the things that Cyrus is working on, existing technologies like 72-hour, and non-electoral technology developments. These efficiencies will allow us to stretch our precious GOTV dollars and volunteer time by deploying them where they make the most incremental difference in actually delivering the next vote.

If this ends up being a close election, or a very close election, it is going to come down to electoral technology. Maybe it will be ACORN crashing the rolls and delivering illegal voters. Maybe it will be Cyrus massively increasing turnout and optimizing our GOTV through what he is doing. Maybe it will be just that they recruit and register and vote more people than we do, or vice versa. But my hunch is that if we win a nail-biter, what Cyrus is doing will deserve a big chunk of the credit.

I don't want to downplay what the left is doing at all. We clearly are not competing with them in this space. Social media should give us more opportunities to communicate with voters and future voters alike. And we should be able to exploit the efficiencies and new modes of communication to better organize people.

But in some places, we are doing very, very well. And Jose's story on Cyrus should make that clear.