- Originally published in Roll Call September 13, 2004
Copyright 2004 Roll Call, Inc.
Getting Out the Vote;
Want Higher Turnout? Go Walk the Neighborhood
By Amy Keller ROLLCALLSTAFF
From
robotic telephone calls and e-mail to door-hangers and direct mail,
campaigns have a wide variety of voter-mobilization methods at their
fingertips. But according to two Ivy League professors, old-fashioned
shoe-leather campaigning still beats out the more technologically
advanced competition.
"Face-to-face
canvassing raises turnout by 7 to 12 percentage points," Yale
University professor Donald Green told a group of activists earlier
this summer.
Moreover, door-to-door
campaigning has a relatively low cost of about $19 per vote, said
Green, who co-wrote, with fellow Yale professor Alan Gerber, a recently
published book called "Get Out the Vote! How to Increase Voter
Turnout."
More expensive tactics, such as direct mail and certain types of phone banking, cost as much as $200 per vote.
In
addition to cost, face-to-face canvassing offers candidates other
benefits, according to Green and Gerber's research in such states as
Connecticut, California and Indiana.
For
starters, door-to-door campaigning has a "spillover" effect within
households. Every 10 direct contacts brings, on average, an additional
six indirect contacts - that is, individuals who receive second-hand
information from visits made to a spouse, parent or roommate.
"That's one of the most exciting findings of the book," Green said.
Green
also detected evidence of "habit formation." A single knock on the door
can have a carryover effect from one election to the next in roughly
one of three cases.
"A lot of GOTV focuses
on persuasion," Green explained. "If you can raise turnout in one
election, you can likely raise turnout in the next election."
That's
good news for Congressional candidates who face re-election every two
years and are therefore stuck in a state of perpetual campaigning.
Not
all of Green and Gerber's research contained good news for campaigns.
The academics found that several frequently used, and often expensive,
get-out-the-vote tactics may be far less effective than once thought.
"Commercial
phone banks have relatively little effect," said Green. He said that
past research has never found the percentage boost from such efforts to
be statistically significant.
Green said he also studied the use of robotic phone
calls - including a study of turnout in the race by one Latino
Congresswoman - and discovered a "negligible, if any, effect."
One
experiment involving leaflets containing information about the voter's
polling place raised turnout by about 1 percentage point. Another study
of "nonpartisan" direct mail resulted in about a half percentage point
boost, he said.
While leafleting may be
"easier, faster and considerably less demanding than door-to-door
canvassing," the book reports, finding a leaflet at one's door is a
less memorable experience than having a face-to-face conversation with
a canvasser.
That said, the book warns that not just any door-to-door canvassing campaign will do.
GOTV
canvassing isn't always effective in densely populated areas because
one campaign often duplicates the efforts of others. Even more
surprising, Green said, "it turns out that the more you do, the less"
effective the effort may be.
The book, in
fact, details the failure of a nonpartisan canvassing campaign in South
Bend, Ind., prior to the 2002 elections. Their conclusion: The voters
may have been overwhelmed.
"Battling over
a contested Congressional seat, both parties apparently canvassed the
same turf chosen by the nonpartisan campaign, which may have caused
voters to become saturated with GOTV appeals," Green and Gerber wrote.
The
authors also noted that door-to-door canvassing for voter mobilization
can be improved if there's a "match" between the canvasser's ethnic
profile and that of the neighborhood.
One
get-out-the-vote campaign in Raleigh, N.C., that utilized both
Caucasian and black canvassers in a predominately white area
encountered significant difficulties, the book noted.
"According
to canvassers' reports, some white residents refused to open their door
to black canvassers," the book stated, and two black canvassers were
"accosted by white residents and told to leave the neighborhood."
Gerber and Green's research in Dos Palos, Calf., revealed that when a
team of Latino Democrats were randomly assigned to talk to both Anglo
and Latino voters, they had much better luck among Latinos.
Some consultants offered a slightly different take on the issue.
Jim
Jennings, a longtime Democratic campaign strategist who specializes in
get-out-the-vote efforts, said that while door-to-door canvassing is
the ideal method of contacting voters, it can be extraordinarily
difficult to mount a successful canvassing outfit.
"There
are many, many neighborhood where door-to-door can't be done without
seriously offending the people who live there," he said. Moreover, in a
presidential election, it is be next to impossible to amass "enough
bodies" to ring every doorbell.
In his
experience, Jennings said, the "next best thing up from a human being
at the door" is a piece of direct mail, particularly when followed up
by a phone call.