When I first read about how much bigger the GOTV operations of the GOP and other conservative organizations are this year than 2008, I was worried. I then did some research and decided that the Right's GOTV's isn't getting the job done. Details on the either side.
Two days ago, the RNC was bragging to the press about their ground game:
By any and every measure, this year’s ground game is significantly moving the needle on the ground.
Overall, we have made more than 26 million voter contacts, thanks to the efforts of our 73,000 volunteers. This week, we expect to make our 30 millionth voter contact. By mid-September, we had already surpassed the 2008 operation in total volunteer voter contacts.
We’ve knocked on nearly 2 million more doors than in all of 2008, and we’ve made six times more phone calls than at this point four years ago. (See below for a state-by-state breakdown of the numbers.)
In addition to our volunteer voter contact program, direct voter contact through an aggressive absentee ballot, persuasion, early vote and GOTV mail and phone program in our battleground states will ensure targeted voters are contacted dozens of times through our paid effort. This coupled with our unprecedented volunteer voter contact effort adds up to the largest, most sophisticated turnout program ever put on the field in Republican politics.
I also read
this article about the GOTV operation of Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition:
...[T]he Faith and Freedom Coalition intends to spend between $10 million and $12 million this election cycle. FFC aims to mobilize 17 million right-leaning, religious voters it has compiled in a database using sophisticated microtargeting methods, Reed said, using phone calls and mailers. Reed's master plan calls for more than 5,000 volunteers to make contact with millions of voters in person, with 25 million voter guides being distributed at 117,000 churches around the country before Election Day.
Then there are
other groups:
Conservative activists nationwide are mounting an aggressive voter mobilization effort and building an extensive field organization network designed to provide Republican nominee Mitt Romney and other GOP candidates an edge if the race is close.
Both the organizers of the efforts and some worried Democratic strategists say they are already seeing results.
President Obama's campaign has focused much of its effort on mobilizing its celebrated grass-roots network of expert organizers and neighborhood team captains. But in key battleground states, that machinery is being challenged by a conservative coalition that includes the National Rifle Association, billionaire-backed Americans for Prosperity and a newly muscular College Republicans organization with a $16 million budget.
:
One of the major players on the right is Americans for Prosperity, the group co-founded by billionaire David Koch. The group plans to spend $125 million on the 2012 campaign, half of it devoted to field organizing in political battlegrounds. AFP has 116 staff members on the ground targeting 9 million voters that the group has found to be "up in the air" about how to assess Obama's economic record, said its president, Tim Phillips.
"This is a totally new ballgame," said Luke Hilgemann, the Wisconsin director for AFP, who oversees 12 full-time staff members and thousands of volunteers. "We're matching the left and exceeding them in lots of things that we're doing."
Sounds pretty frightening. Digging a little digger, it turns out not to be. Let's
look at the RNC a little closer:
Much of Obama’s campaign [901 person] staff consists of on-the-ground organizers deployed around the country early this year as part of a field program designed to identify and register Obama voters, and ultimately get them to cast ballots. The Romney campaign has taken a different tack. It is relying on the Republican National Committee for the bulk of its voter registration and mobilization program this fall. The RNC appears to have a smaller staff than the Democratic National Committee. Last month, it employed 208 people, paying them a median annual salary of $40,814. The DNC had 291 staffers who were on track to make a median annual salary of $35,394. But RNC officials said the staff at the party’s headquarters does not count organizers out in the field, who are paid directly by the state parties. "Our more than 600 staff in over 250 battleground Victory offices are working around the clock to make sure we get voters to the polls and that every Republican, independent, and disaffected Democrat hears our message," RNC political director Rick Wiley wrote in a memo last month.
So the Obama campaign has direct control over its GOTV operation (in conjuction with the state and national Democratic parties) where as the Romney campaign has outsourced their GOTV operation to the RNC which in turn has outsourced their GOTV operation to the state parties. There isn't enough detail to get an idea of paid field operatives, but it sounds like Obama and the Democrats have a large advantage.
Another way to look at is to look at the number of field offices:
I went through the campaign websites to tally up the number of field offices in the 11 swing states I examined for my paper [on 2008 election]. Romney has no shortage of money, but Obama's field offices outnumber Romney's in each state.
A major problem with outsourcing the GOTV operation to the state parties is that some parties are more effective than others. For example, the Nevada GOP party was taken over by Paul supporters who have no interesting in working for Romney. That has lead to an
interesting situation:
"We’re a battleground state. There will still be a significant amount of money spent here," said Robert Uithoven, a GOP consultant. "(But) the money will be spent around the state party and not through it. And that’s never a good thing."
One Republican elected official said, "If Republicans win this election, it will be in spite of the state party, not because of it."
Iowa is another state where the state GOP party is led by a Paul supporter. In Ohio, party GOP chair Kevin DeWine and Gov. John Kasich have been at odds since Kasich’s 2010 election. DeWine sought to stay on through the end of this year, but resigned in April ahead of a vote in which Kasich backers sought to oust him. Veteran former GOP chair Robert Bennett has taken the reins of the party again.
Then there is the financial weakness of many state GOP parties:
In California and Illinois, the state parties have more debt than cash on hand for federal races, while the New York Republican Party had just $54,000 in federal funds in the bank at the end of February....As of the end of February, the Hawaii GOP had $29,000 in the bank in federal funds and was carrying over $100,000 in debt....The Minnesota GOP is so deep in debt it has stopped paying the lease on its headquarters.
What about the GOTV operations of conservative organizations such as Americans for Prosperity (AFP), National Rifle Association (NRA) and the Faith and Freedom Coalition (FFC)? I haven't seen much about the Americans for Prosperity and the National Rifle Association GOTV operation, but
this article has an outreach flyer from the FFC. The flyer is 16 questions. The second question has an Issue Summary box preceding it:
The anti-American Communist dictator of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, calls Barack Obama "Comrade Obama" and remarked that he believes President Obama is to the Left of himself and Fidel Castro.
Reading the flyer, it looks to me that the people the FFC is reaching out to are those that think Obama is to the left of Castro and Chavez. Those are the people that can be persuaded to send money to the FFC, but they were going to vote against Obama anyways. So if anything, the FFC GOTV campaign is going to suck money and volunteers away from the RNC GOTV in order to line their pockets. I would not be surprised if the NRA GOTV campaign is likewise more focused on benefitting the NRA then the GOP.
So the GOP and conservative organizations have ramped up their GOTV operations. Have they/will they be effective? To me, a GOTV operation has three components:
Assessment - determining who the voter is going to support, who strongly does the voter support the candidate and how likely is the voter to vote without help. With limited resources, it is import to focus those resources on voters who will likely vote for your candidate only if resources are applied to them
Persuasion - persuading undecided voters to support your candidate and voters who weakly support your candidate to more strongly support your candidate
Mobilization - getting those people who are willing to vote for your candidate to vote
I have no idea of how to determine if the Assessment part of the GOP and conservative organizations' GOTV operations has been effective. However, the Persuasion part is fairly easy to assess - are undecided voters particularly in battleground states moving towards Mitt Romney and are Mitt Romney voters becoming more enthusiastic? All of the polls I have seen indicate just the opposite. In the battleground states, Romney didn't get a bounce from his convention, Obama did and Obama's lead has been growing steadily since the convention.
An early indication of how effective Mobilization has been is the number of requests for absentee ballots by party in battleground states. As kos recently wrote, the Dems are crushing the Republicans in Iowa with 105,669 Democratic ballot requests to 18,542 Republican ones. In North Carolina, the Republicans are ahead 51% to 27.9%, but that may be because there isn't a standard form for requesting an absentee ballot in North Carolina and consequently the number of absentee ballot requests are low (66,664) compared to the expected number of votes (1.5 million).
When discussing GOTV, a strong possibility is that a solid GOTV operation is not nearly as important for the GOP as it is for the Democrats. As GOP voters are older and wealthier, they are much more likely to vote without any prompting. As Seth Masket said in a post I mentioned earlier:
It may also be that field offices are a better investment for Democrats than for Republicans. (Notably, my paper found that Obama's 2008 field offices helped him win in a few states, while McCain's didn't help him nearly as much.) Democrats traditionally turn out at lower rates than Republicans; perhaps the field offices can help Democrats mitigate that. Also, field offices may be vital for Democrats in overcoming new voter ID laws by communicating voting requirement information directly to voters.
Long term, I think the building of GOTV operations by conservative organizations is going to be a disaster for the GOP. The GOP needs to stop moving right or it will just constantly lose more and more voters. But if in the primaries, the decisive GOTV operations are controlled by ultraright organizations, then the GOP candidates will continue moving further right.
Lastly, I am coming to the conclusion that the importance of GOTV is being dwarfed by the fact that Romney is a laughingstock. We have a very unprecedented situation - Romney the challenger got no bounce from his convention and Obama's numbers have risen steadily since the DNCC. My theory - Romney is badly losing the comedian wars and no one wants to support a candidate that people are mocking. Comedians want to make jokes where (1) people understand the context and (2) fit a preconceived funny stereotype. Eastwood's chair bit was so bizarre and so heavily covered that it stepped all over Romney's message and it was the only part of the RNCC that most people discussed. The fund raiser videotape was another event bizarre and important enough for most people to hear about. So comedians are pounding Romney right now. Consequently, weak Romney supporters are embarrassed and turning undecided. Undecided voters are appalled by Romney and are swinging to Obama. That is why I think you are seeing the steady rise in Obama's numbers. And the Obama's GOTV campaign is there to get all of the new supporters to vote.
