The impact of early voting and the ground game

[Lantern]

There has been a lot of talk in recent weeks about early voting and the ground campaigns and how they will affect the election. The consensus appears to be that the Obama campaign has invested more in this area and has a better organized ground campaign than Romney, building on the sophisticated techniques they had employed in 2008.

This Halperin article has some interesting details.

Said one senior official: “But the most important thing about early vote is one thing and one thing only: are you getting your sporadic voters to vote? Because if it’s just chasing people who are going to vote anyway than it’s just…a zero sum game. But all the data I see says we are getting our sporadics to vote at a higher rate than they are, which, especially for any Democratic candidate, is a bigger challenge because we have lower propensity voters. That’s exactly what we are doing and we feel great about that.”

As I read it the argument is:

1. Parts of the Democratic coalition like young people and minorities have historically had a turn out problem.
2. Modern data mining techniques can zero in on those voters who support the Democratic candidate but are relatively likely to skip voting. However with the right persusasion these people will vote early since it’s a lot more convenient.
3. Therefore early voting is not about time-shifting people who will vote for you anyway. It can fundamentally increase your turnout particularly on the Democratic side.

This may be relevant to the issue of minority turnout in this election compared to 2008 which has been discussed here a lot. Minority turnout may well be on the lowish side nationally, while being good enough in the 3-4 states that Obama needs to win because of the ground game.

I also found this nugget from an articlein the Atlantic interesting:

In a technical sense, the Romney campaign actually does not have a ground game at all. It has handed over that responsibility to the Republican National Committee, which leads a coordinated effort intended to boost candidates from the top of the ticket on down. The RNC says this is an advantage: The presidential campaign and the local campaigns aren’t duplicating efforts, and the RNC was able to start building its ground operation to take on Obama in March, before Romney had secured the GOP nomination.

“The Romney campaign doesn’t do the ground game,” Rick Wiley, the RNC’s political director, told me. “They have essentially ceded that responsibility to the RNC. They understand this is our role.” The disadvantage of this is that the RNC is composed of its state Republican Parties, which vary dramatically in quality. States like Florida and Virginia have strong Republican operations, while those in Iowa and Nevada haven’t recovered from attempted takeovers by Ron Paul partisans, and the Ohio GOP still bears the scars of a protracted leadership fight earlier in the year.

Currently Obama is up, in varying degrees, in each of those states but if that assessment is accurate he is most likely to out-perform his polls in those states where the GOP ground game is weakest: Ohio, Nevada and Iowa. Of course if he wins those states he will almost certainly win the election.

[Foxy40]

Of course I can only speak of personal experience but I voted yesterday. The reason I voted yesterday was because my son was over visiting and he made it plain that he wasn’t going to have time to vote on election day. So we piled into the car, hit a diner for lunch and went to the nearest early voting place. That was one ballot that would not have been cast. The lines were fairly long and the woman behind me in a wheelchair with her daughter also said that she wouldn’t have had time to vote on election day if they didn’t have this opportunity because it take a while to get her out of the house and her daughter works. So that makes two. So, yes, from what I have personally seen it will increase turnout.