Are Local Political Party Mailers Cost-Effective?

Factual Questions
1

My local politcal party spent thousands of dollars on a county-wide pre-election mailer to those registered with the party. The mailer showed which candidates in the county were party-endorsed, among other things.

Do any studies show this kind of mailer is cost-effective? Are there better ways for a local political party to spend its money? I haven’t found anything.

I realize many people have personal anecdotes as to whether they personally use the mailers to make their votes or whether they throw their party mailers in the trash. I’m looking for analysis or statistical proof that political mailers have a positive impact or influence on voting generally.

If I had to guess, I would say each mailer costs about $.30 and about $15,000 total spent, which is about 50,000 mailers.

Thanks.

2

I don’t know the answer to your question, but the mailer may be better targeted when you think. I worked for someone running for school board once, and I got a list of voters with names, addresses, ages, party affiliation, and the number of times they had voted in the past few years. I wrote some Perl scripts to extract names for a mailing list, I’m sure the parties have very sophisticated ways of generating targeted mailing lists.

I have a follow up question - are the damn phone calls useful, besides in making people mad. My wife was about to vote for anyone who didn’t call - but that was the null set.

3

Here in Minnesota, we call that a Sample Ballot.
Here are a couple of examples: http://www.scc.net/~t-bonham/2006General.pdf
http://sd62.danmcc.com/images/sampleballot2006GeneralSD62-ltr.png

These are one of the most effective things the party provides to its endorsed candidates. People who work as Election Judges here will tell you that a large number of voters come into the polling place carrying one of these Sample Ballots, and vote from it. In cases where there are multiple candidates (like the 4 Minneapolis School Board seats this time), it’s actually necessary to rotate the order of the names, otherwise they tend to finish in the order listed.

It is considered very effective, and one of the most cost-effective ways to spend party money. (The actual cost this year was about 20¢ apiece, including everything – printing, addressing, & postage.) The only item I can see as possibly more cost-effective is GOTV (Get-Out-The-Vote) phone calls targeted to your known supporters.

There is a great deal of effort spent in targeting these mailings appropriately, to get the best bang for the buck. (And that involves a whole lot of pre-effort, in building the database to enable this targeting. We started grassroots work 18 months ago, knocking on doors to obtain this info, and entering it into our voter database.)

A lot of effort went into reaching what we called ‘drop-off democrats’. Those are people who vote democratic in Presidential election years, but drop off (don’t vote) in mid-term elections. We felt that if we could identify them, and get them out to vote, they would vote democratic and give us the additional votes needed to win.

But to do this, the state party was neglecting some other groups that our local district felt were important. Specifically, those who vote democratic, and who always turn out to vote (primarily the elderly, and party regulars). The state party felt it was unnecessary to mail Sample Ballots to them, they would vote anyway. But our District felt that the reminder was needed, and 20¢ was a small price to pay for an almost sure democratic vote. (Plus we had several local races that were non-partisan – the ballot would not indicate who the democratic candidates were.)

Another disagreement was over known regular voters whose party affiliation was unidentified. The state party did not want to mail to any of these. Our district pointed out that many of our precincts voted between 75% - 90% democratic. So we felt that in mailing to them at random, we had between a 3-1 up to 9-1 odds that we would reach a democratic voter. And we felt those odds were worth the cost.

In the end, our district party went out and raised money to send an additional 25,000 Sample Ballots into our district, targeting these specific groups (in addition to the regular targets). And it seems to have worked: all our local candidates were elected (with over 80% of the votes), and we had the best turnout in the entire metro area of the state (over 72%). We really believe in Sample Ballots!

4

For a local candidate, the mailers cost less than any other form of advertising. Pluse you get better coverage. For the cost of one 30-second ad that only a portion of the electorate will see (and which will also be seen by many more people who couldn’t vote for your if you wanted), you can reach every voter household in your district.

TV works if you can blanket the viewers with ads. If you can’t afford that, a mailer is going to do a pretty good job for the cost.