The Bannock Street Project involved a $60 million investment by Democrats, including 4,000 staffers in 10 key states, designed to help Democrats solve their mid-term turnout problems.
That $60 million from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) seems to have gone up in smoke, because there is no evidence that the project came remotely close to its goals of increasing turnout by key Democratic constituencies. In fact, it appears that Democrats might have been better off just giving that money to Democratic Senate candidates. We had about 10 potentially vulnerable candidates. That would have equated to about $6 million extra for each.
Even the New York Times felt impressed enough with the money committed to the project to write about it (before the election, that is):
http://www.nytimes.com/...
The project's goals were lofty: to duplicate nationwide Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet's successful efforts in turning out voters for his 2010 election.
Based on the results of last Tuesday's elections, it appears that the Bannock Street Project was a complete, unmitigated disaster and failure. It didn't come remotely close to doing anything it set out to do. The question is this: exactly what did they do with all that money?
Granted, it is possible that the Bannock Street project did help Democrats somewhat. If so, that's a frightening prospect to think how much worse the Democrats would have done without it. Would we have lost even more Senate, House and governor's races than we already did?
Suffice it to say, that it appears that the Bannock Street project did not come remotely close to achieving its objectives. The question is, why?
One thing that occurs to me has to do with all of the phone calls.
As someone who worked on the phone banks during this campaign (for the unsuccessful reelection campaign of Rep. Dan Maffei, D-NY-24), let me relate to you my experiences, especially during the last few weeks of the campaign:
During the last day, Tues., Nov. 4, some of the people contacted by me from the phone bank (which had moved to a local labor group's offices with a refocus on the entire Democratic ticket, rather than just Maffei's campaign), were livid. Some were loyal Democrats, many of whom told me they were sick and tired of all of the phone calls. One said it constituted nothing less than harassment. Another said that they were disgusted with the calls, were still planning to vote Democratic, but if they received one more phone call, they wouldn't.
The calls we made were using a "predictive dialer" system through a combination of phones and computers. We instantly updated results, which included noting whether someone was committed one way or the other. If so, presumably, we wouldn't be calling back those people (or so one would hope). It appeared that, regardless of what information we put into the computer system, many, if not most of these people were still being called by us.
Even worse, as the campaign moved into its final days, a lot of other groups started engaging in phone banks. My guess is they were likely using the same basic lists of voters identified as persuadable. Even on dailykos, phone efforts by moveon.org and dfa.org were promoted. In addition, there were other organizations likely involved in trying to reach these same people (i.e. Planned Parenthood and other liberal groups). It's quite possible that there were five, six or seven independent bodies contacting these same voters, some of them again and again. Some people told me they were getting five and six calls every day from the same people, and this was in an area where there weren't even any competitive Senate or governor's races going on, although we did have a competitive House race here.
Which brings me to the larger question: Do these kinds of phone calls work or are they counterproductive? If some unknown person calls, from miles away or from somewhere across the country, to try to persuade voters with a pre-determined script (usually consisting of nonspecific, superficial rhetoric about supporting "middle class values" or "protecting Social Security") does that really persuade anyone? Especially if someone feels they are being "harassed" by too many calls?
Was there too much of a concentrated effort going after the same voters identified as being persuadable by too many different groups?
My experience on the phone bank makes me wonder if this was going on across the country and was turning people off. The real question, if that's true, is how much of a negative effect might this have had?