While recent polls showing a tightening race and the fear of public disarray at the DNC have a lot of Democrats worried, there is evidence to suggest that not only is the polling fundamentally flawed but that a wave election may be brewing. For that, you have to look at the ground game, the mechanics of the GOTV, and less reported but more significant registration numbers.
In politics, we tend to believe that policy and popularity are the twin drivers of winning elections. Which is why the press will always run the narratives about surprise upsets and the public political spectrum shifting. However, the more that I study the history of elections and rise of different ideologies, the clearer it becomes that the more organized candidate who can identify and turn out their base effectively usually wins. Even when the base is ideologically the minority in the region. The major impact of organization is that it helps lessen the uncertainty of turn out. Bad weather, bad polling, all manner of trivial elements can depress turnout for either side. GOTV minimizes the variables and allows a campaign to more effectively deploy their resources on election day.
The strength of the GOP for many years has been their GOTV. Their dominance in the South was driven, in part, by their embrace of the Evangelical community and their social conservatism. The network of churches, community associations and clubs contained an already existing and powerful structure for turning out voters. From your pastor to your Elks club meeting to your local volunteer group, a tightly interacting web of surrogates was there to drive voters out to the polling stations on election day.
One of the great advances in the last fifteen years has been the ability of the Democratic Party to integrate technology into their own GOTV efforts. While the flow of money to GOP operatives kept the Republicans locked into expensive mailers and phone banking, local candidates and regions were starting to see the advantages of the internet for fundraising and organizing. Howard Dean’s campaign was the first fusion at a national level of grassroots activism and coordinated online organization to drive a candidacy. His 50 state initiative exposed the underbelly of the GOP congressional strongholds, although the party would fail to properly exploit it.
Fast forward to 2008, when Barack Obama’s technical infrastructure was a key element in his election; identifying and targeting likely voters, registering them, and using those models to understand where the true strengths and weaknesses were, regardless of the polling. Meanwhile, the Republican nominee, John McCain, spent tens of millions in wasted generalized ad buys and mailers in areas that polled decently but were virtually devoid of a properly supported and coordinated campaign.
In 2016, we are seeing the evolution of those first steps into a powerful and effective structure for the general election. The Clinton campaign’s recruitment and tracking technology is robust, adding data at a tireless speed, and is providing the framework for campaigns all the way down ticket. The integrated use of data, along with volunteer roles, resources and tracking is allowing the Democrats to build a virtual version of the old locally run party machines. Because of this, in almost every swing state, Democratic registrations outstrip Republicans by a 2:1 margin. The over reliance on the Religious Right and the lack of investment into technology has the GOP already starting at a disadvantage. Now, with a candidate who is barely fundraising and entirely lacks the ability to coordinate a national campaign, the RNC is attempting to fill the void with inadequate resources. Worse, voter enthusiasm for Trump among Evangelicals is fairly tepid. Even if they still vote, a loss of their core of volunteers will make the distance to match in GOTV efforts even more expensive and difficult.
While many people like to cite the rise of the Independent voter as the new x-factor, they actually fit into the recruitment model of the last hundred years. Most Independents generally favour one party or another, and largely vote with them. The ones who don’t fall very broadly into three categories: fringe candidate supporters, single issue voters, or the politically disinterested. Those three categories are the voters you don’t bother to invest in, because they’re mostly off the map unless there’s a personal alignment. However, the liberal leaning Independent is where the effective, coordinated GOTV becomes even more essential. Voter registration is a process that is driven by enthusiasm. Let’s be honest, most people follow the action.
Thanks to major investments of staff and volunteers on the ground, what the base and Independents are seeing are Democrats. Events, tours, phone banks by volunteers, creative use of social media, even Pokemon Go to make it easy to see the machine in process. It reinforces even if they aren’t with the party in official affiliation, they can be with them in the voting booth with their chosen community. Each one that ends up in the system becomes the gateway to similar Independents and the coordination to approach them with a targeted message for their community.
This process rarely shows up in polling. Participating in polls is a fairly easy thing. And well designed polls capture a snapshot of the community. But they rarely catch the underlying movements and shifts happening, which is exactly why Sanders success was so unexpected. While the polls in many states had him DOA versus Clinton, the fusion of thousands of smaller communities turned his candidacy into a movement.
Right now, the GOTV efforts are the same thing. Thousands and thousands of targeted communities, each one brought in and identified by a range of different priorities and driven by different passions. As November draws closer, the job switches from identifying and targeting to fusing them together for a single push.
Polling will go back and forth, and I won’t suggest a kind of ‘unskewing’ that the Romney campaign deluded itself of. But polling, especially this far out, has a real blind spot in capturing activity on the ground. What we know for sure that is the single most successful software coordinated campaign is part of a larger, more advanced structure, supported by paid staff and volunteers. On the other side, the GOP is uncoordinated, underfunded, under-resourced, and is lagging behind strongly on registration. If this continues, when the polls shift, it will not be to a tight race but to the emerging of a wave election.
