Republicans continue to beat us in the field. Even though our financial resources in 2006 reached parity with the Republicans, and we had much more enthusiasm on our side, they were clearly ready. Chris Shays and Heather Wilson and Steve Chabot and Deborah Pryce were incumbents that held on because they ran a tried and true effort to turn out their voters. We have serious problems in the way we run Democratic field operations. I've laid out ways we can improve upon them below.
- Volunteers, volunteers, volunteers. There is nothing more important than volunteers who volunteer to contact voters for a candidate. Democratic campaigns rely far too much on paid canvassers and robocalls to do their job. This is more expensive than a volunteer operation and far less effective than enthusiastic volunteers. The Republicans recruit volunteers at least six months before the election, train them, keep them enthused, and keep them busy through Election Day. The same volunteers are contacting the same voters in June and before Election Day. Democrats need to have a full time Volunteer Coordinator on the campaign from the spring through Election Day, working full time to recruit enthusiastic volunteers, keep them well informed and trained, and keep them involved.
- Targeting. We still rely way too much on geographical targeting. Democratic field directors still depend on Democratic performance (determining how the average Democratic candidate from President to dogcatcher fares in a precinct over many years). Field directors then target operations toward base districts (precincts with over 65% Dem performance) and swing districts (45%-65%). The problem with this strategy is that dependable Democratic voters in those precincts with less than 45% Democratic performance are not encouraged to vote and we turn out far too many Republicans by hitting those 65% or more base districts. Republicans threw out this logic years ago. Republicans target individuals, not precincts. Republicans use consumer data, census data, previous election data, geographic data, and demographic data to find individuals who are 95% likely to be a strong Republican voter. That way, they don't waste resources on turning out voters who have a 35% chance of being a Democrat. We have this system being constructed in our Voter file, but its progress has been slow and it has not been made available to every campaign. We need to devote more resources to develop this sophisticated voter file, give it to all congressional campaigns, and train our field directors in how to effectively individually target.
- The ripple effect. Republicans have become very successful at contacting voters, identifying them as strong Republican supporters, then following up with them, and giving them the resources to become envoys of Republican turnout in their own communities. When Republicans find a strong supporter, they put them in a special turnout database, follow up with them and thank them for their support and persuade them to become volunteers themselves, host meetings in their communities, and spread the candidate's message. When Democrats find a supporter, we don't follow up with them till election day and remind them to vote. We've wasted an opportunity to use their support to get more supporters. We need to replicate the Republicans and seriously focus on using these identified strong supporters and use them to turnout more supporters and spread our message.
- Previous elections must inform future elections. When Democratic campaigns are over, the field directors from those campaigns leave and find new work, usually in a different part of the country, and they basically throw out all the data they had on voters from the campaign. Each new field director then starts from scratch and must spend useless time building new voter contact information. If the DNC paid at the national level to have a database built after every campaign storing voter contact data for use in the next campaign, we'd start with a much better operation. Also, we should encourage field Directors or deputy field directors or anyone on the field team in a district to stay on in that district as long as possible, and if they decide to move on to another part of the country, train the next field director and field team to do their job well.
- Technology. The Republicans use palm pilots in every part of the country. There are still huge areas of the country where Democratic field operations are using paper lists and clipboards. Palm pilots save time and are far more effective. Palm pilots can hold directions, street maps, voter data, and are able to link up to a computer to download all voter data directly into the database, without having to do data entry. Every campaign in the country should have dozens of palm pilots. The great thing about palm pilots is that they can also be used to see which volunteers are doing the best jobs, getting the most contacts and give them rewards for doing a great job. Palm pilots can increase contact by as much as 50% because of the time they save too.
- Follow-up. Our follow up with voters is pathetic. The stress of campaigns and the lack of resources when campaigns near their end lead to field programs simply not following up with the persuadable voters they identified during the campaign. Direct mail and email are great ways to cheaply follow-up with voters, especially if their issues were recorded during first contact. Republicans always follow-up and usually contact a voter three to four times during a campaign.
These are just some ideas I have about field based on my experience and what we could do better, please give me your ideas in the comments too. If we had done a better job with field this year, we may have had another 30 Democrats in the House.