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Managing Election Campaigns
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Recently updated threads
- Concluding the class Tue, 2010-11-23 00:49
- Week Six: Get Out the Vote (GOTV) Sun, 2010-10-31 03:49
- Week Four-Five: Candidate Statements, Direct Mail, Campaign Organization Fri, 2010-10-22 06:46
- Week One: Understanding the problem Fri, 2010-10-22 06:15
- Miscellaneous Thu, 2010-10-21 16:20
Week One: Understanding the problem
In most countries, incumbency is all-powerful. There are few districts in which there is a level playing field, whether through greater access to media, greater fundraising capability, entrenched party loyalty, or other reasons. In this week, we look at the question, “what do we know about each voter,” in an attempt to be able to overcome natural disadvantages. And we learn how to test our ideas about voters through polling, distinguishing between deceptive “push-polling” employed as a form of voter contact and actual polling in which the campaign wants to understand voters in relation to the issues it hopes to raise.
We are still in the first few days of the course, but please don't be a lurker! Place your comments here. I'll be adding my own. Under miscellaneous, see my posting about "Stealth Candidates."
(thnking about the situation in Ghana)
There are few districts in which there is a level playing field, > trailblazer makes the needed connections and has to do less work the 2nd time around familiar faces (sometimes a child/relation of another previous public figure)
whether through greater access to media, > connections, who pay what to cover the event / popularity -media selectiveness - entertainment vale of hearing small candidates make mistakes to use as material for ridicule? they just follow what they see and don't ask enough questions or keep track of answers.
Thanks for this international perspective. I have a lot of questions for you, particularly what access to voter data candidates can access. Here in California, for example, we don't know who they voted for, but we know when they voted and if they voted by absentee ballot or physically went to the polls. We also know where each voter lives! So we can match that information to how their neighborhood voted, and what was on the ballot when they voted, etc... to come up with a profile. Who has access to that information in Ghana?
access :-)
that is a whole topics in itself i bet!
Depends how flexible your wallet is. What people promise (voters) and what they actually do at the poll are not always quite rational. since '92 when we went back to the pools there has always been allegations of bribes given and promises made (+ upsets at the polls because areas that had taken money had not kept their promises...)
Its almost like politicians-people don't remember don't remember their failed promises..
Think back to the "gangs of new york" film where ppl are running around voting multiple times, youth being instructed to vote etc.
After so many years of failed policies but a surprisingly stable community i think the 'educated' members of the voting public whose median age have dropped are pretty annoyed with a lot of the secrecy being shrouded in decisions being made.
Especially when there is a raising population of educated persons looking for work. and crime has been a problem brought on by the influx of drugs in the past decade.
Especially now we've discovered oil and want to avert the disaster of our brother nation Nigeria.
Political assassinations
Bought political posts
oil barons amidst poverty and gang warfare
where there are resources there will be instability for the best 'price' possible. the true cost is subjective.
i wouldn't call this an international perspective as each voting community has its own unique history that complicates their political atmosphere.
The biggest hurdle i see so far in the US political system is the electoral college. i'd have thought that after all these years they would have progressed to a full representation of one person one vote.
Wheich means if a person wanted to earn the most votes all they have to do is please a small section of the population and ignore all the other small places... how is that a balanced system?
Access depends on energy and perseverance, it is not a matter of being wealthy or monied. Just energy, initiative and perseverance. As a reporter,publisher and editor, I certainly can't afford to have copies of all materials. However, I can read and I can research and I can use the time and effort to do so.
At the present campaign, these United States may not be seeing the 'gangs of New York' running around, but we do see groups taking advantage of the first time voters, the easily influenced, the homeless, the down and out with bitterness and blinded by prejudice, and we do see groups taking advantage of the elderly who are starved for attention, the aged and the infirmed. Now that should be worth looking into in your area of your universe and that is taking an objective look at the present efforts for votes.
Of course, one-person,one-vote should really mean that everyone has roughly equal political representation. But if you live in Vermont or Alaska, you still get two senators. Relatively few countries have such disparities in the level of representation.
You also raise the issue of electoral fraud. To some degree, it exists everywhere and the best systems don't allow electoral fraud to rise to a general level. That's why they talk of "irregularities" in "free and fair" elections.
:-) a practical lesson in oxymorons! > "irregularities" in "free and fair" elections.
I was researching the various ways that candidates develop voter profiles when I came across a description of the 2005 Bloomberg campaign for mayor of New York. [1] Their strategy was an audacious one. They went beyond the ordinary stereotypes of voters as purely ethnic or class voters. They called hundreds of thousands of people in order to develop psychological profiles of various groups of voters. Then they targeted each group with a specific pitch designed for their concerns and fears.
Although the article does not reveal the exact number of people contacted by the campaign (it just says, "[t]hey called hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers"), I'll be conservative and assume they only called ~200,000 people. At a cost of ~$10 million that comes out to ~$50 per person just for the *profiling* of voters! This demonstrates the incredible resources that wealthy incumbents can mobilize to target voters.
Can this be done on a shoe-string budget? A large cadre of volunteers might be able to go door-to-door and carry out such a survey, particularly in smaller constituencies. Of course, it would be difficult to develop campaign materials for multiple categories of voters with limited resources.
So how do you effectively combat creative and well-backed candidates? Do you have to hope they are not as clever as Bloomberg?
[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/nyregion/metrocampaigns/15playbook.html
A little education:in regards to "wealthy incumbents"- as a reporter, or journalist, I have found that the wealthy incumbents really do not use their money. They use people and that means volunteers.
This is one of those situations wherein we see and think with an underlying prejudice. Go Figure.
These activities are done on a shoestring budget. It is a matter of how and to whom and to where those opportunities are applied.
Back to the 2005 Bloomberg Campaign - thank you for sharing that wealth of knowledge and your research.
You're really getting to the heart of the question here: "Can this be done on a shoestring budget?" $50 per voter is an extraordinary expense that few beyond the millionaire/billionaire style candidate can afford. So the question resolves to a campaign's ability to attract volunteers.
In my own experience, in Oakland in 1986, we organized 200 volunteers, each of whom spent from an hour to dozens of hours working on a local school board campaign in a district with some 50,000 voters. Why would they do that? Because Oakland had just experienced yet another teachers' strike against a dysfunctional school district. The electoral district was the Berkeley-border, which had a large group of highly active parents, veterans of the various social movements.
So the question gets back to motivation. If the issue is not pressing and the relationship of the candidate to perceived needs is not immediate, there is no way to get people off their couches.
We're going to get back to this when we examine how to use volunteers. Thanks, Lucas, for a great post.
Hi! I just started this course today and I've been reading all the comments that are very interesting so far. Here, in Argentina, volunteers are a great help for political parties but fund raising is mostly applied in higher levels. There's is even a limit of money a person can donate to a political campain.
Regarding the voter data we can access is very relative, like many things around here. There is public access to demographic voting and that's of great help. Here, voting is obligatory, so the list of voters is huge.
The great majority of information that gets to the people is trough the media, but it's contaminated but their interests, specially these days where there is a big fight between the National Goverment and the largest media corporations.
You've pointed to the country-specific nature of actual tactics that campaigns have to use. If voting is obligatory and 97% actually vote, then you can only tell how an individual voter may have voted by group behavior, eg. polling results from individual neighborhoods. I know Argentina fairly well, but I don't know anything about how electoral resutls get reported.
You may be able to help us understand the role of social shocks in election results, eg. the crash of 2001 (while we have for comparison the crash of 2008 and the rise in US politics of the "tea" party).
About the voters. In spite of the obligation to vote (starting at 18 years old), there is a important percentage of people who doesn't vote. At nationals, it's around 80 % usually but in some districts, it might come down to 60 percent.
About the impact of the 2001 crisis, well, it would be hard and mostly inadecuate to explain in a few lines. The economy was coming down those years pretty strongly and unemployment stroke hard. The Government (Federal and some provincies) issued local currencies. The Argentina peso was valued, by law, as equal to the american dolar during the 90s and after it was devaluated it began a rising race. Nowadays, a peso is worth about a quarter of a dollar. Returning to 2001, not only the lower class was hitten but the middle class as well. There was a bank lockup to the accounts in dollars. Massive movements around the country yelling "que se vayan todos", asking for all politicians to go away. But there was no massive representation. Every politician became a "bad word" and politics lost credibility. Both left and right parties gained voters in the next elections, in 2003. The voters were very segregated. The winner of the election had 24% and the second, 22. The had to go to ballotage but then, the winner, Carlos Menem, resigned to Néstor Kirchner, who had the support of Duhalde, who was the president who replaced several presidents that took power after the dimission of De la Rúa in 2001, after a violent protest in front of the Government palace. Duhalde controlled, in those days, the most popular districts.
What it is important to understand the elections here, its that the bipartidism is strong, sometimes divided in different parties, and that the "clientelism" (dependency of people from public programs) is really important here. Another factor to take in account, is the presion of local oligarquic groups of presion into political decisions, the influence of international organisims (the FMI guided the econimcs of the country to the crisis of 2001), the influence of countrys like the US, etc.
The media also play a very big role. The concentration is ferocious. Social networks, blogs and stuff like these are just rising here, but with no too much power in a massive and regular way as, for example, the role that had in the Obama campaign, specially regarding the fund raising issue. Even Frank Greer said that in a conference he gave in Buenos Aires last year. Argentina is a very divided country in many ways, even tough it seems pretty equal. Economics differences take the first place in that list. The consumist type of society that is promoted here, gives the appearance of equality, but the real needs of a large country, where the media focus its attention mostly in the country's capital, doesn't take in account what the needs of the voters really are. And that can be observed in the last elections, where the diversion is clear.
A huge, and most recent social shock, as for the question of Larry, is the conflict Government - Agricultural sector that started in 2008. The main (public) discussion was about export taxes, specially on soybeans. But then the arguments move all around different matters. This fight make a huge cut in the relation of the the Gov't with the most popular newspaper (owner of many TV channels, magazines, radios, websites, etc), Clarín. Several months later it was approved at the Congress a new law of regulation for TV and radio. The old law was redacted by the last military regime. It might be hard to understand the relation of this two things, but it was a point of born of a new era. The fight with media oligopolies influences a lot the news that we get around here from those media. The new law not only tries to cut some power from them but also gives place to alternative ways of communication.
This explanation is highly incomplete but it's what I can say in such few words. Also, my English is very rusty and it's taking me a hard time.
Sebastian, thanks for giving this explanation. We have a very international class and it helps for us to understand national and cultural differences as they impact elections. Less so in Argentina, but in other Latin American countries (Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, etc...), voters sometimes massively and suddenly turned away from historic parties,instead voting for "independent" candidates (Uribe) and in other cases sweeping away the historic parties from power (Ecuador and others). In the United States, there is now a lot of commentary as to whether the tea party or other forces could become a third party. My personal opinion is that the two parties have significant legal and institutional advantages (winner-takes-all elections versus proportional representation, debates that typically exclude third parties (Nader in 2004), and elections commissions that are composed of the two parties. However, in moments of crisis, even these advantages can potentially be swept away as other countries' histories show. Argentina's president (de la Rua???) in 2001, had to leave office by helicopter, such were the demonstrations against the government.
In my country, the poll results are published office by office, and by electoral district. In principle, each political party may well appreciate its electoral weight, a fine way, referring to these results.
Generally, results have shown that such opposition parties get more votes in cities than in rural areas, in the South of the country than in the North, more popular among youth than adults. Virtually, no opinion poll is conducted.
When voting is obligatory, but you have precinct election results, then you have to develop profiles of individual voters from aggregate data. This is obviously not optimal. So you could focus on identifying strong voting patterns, such as high for/against percentages when certain issues were on the ballot. If there are no ballot issues (constitutional revisions, such as Kenya, or local school bond issues in the United States), then you would truly be left looking at party results or unique characteristics of candidates that could explain these high percentages.
Again, voter data based on past behavior provides clues to future behavior. So, even without new opinion polls, there is still an opportunity for analysis.
But why couldn't you (or a hypothetical campaign) run its own opinion poll?
In Maltese "free and fair" elections there are several alleged "irregularities". The incumbent has a stranglehold on the country's public media and most people are loyal to a party based on their upbringing.
Recently the opposition has launched a strategy, similar to what is being described in this forum, based on volunteers.
In order to get a better ideo of Maltese voters, during the last elections there was a "low" turnout of about 93% (voting is not compulsory) as many complained that they were unhappy with the then and still current incumbent.