(Thre is some important stuff here. Pay attention. - promoted by quinnelk)
In my ongoing quest to push the idea of prioritizing call lists differently, I will use the results from the State Senate District 3 to prove that calling supervoters is DUMB
Some facts about the SD3 Race:
Turnout for the Primary -- 12% of voters
Turnout for the General -- 12.3% of voters
Twice as many Republicans cast their ballot during the primary as Democrats. Dean beat Suzan Franks by the same by a 2-1 margin.
Basically, everyone who cast a primary election ballot cast a general election ballot. Most voters who didn't vote in the primary didn't vote in the general.
What does this mean? |
| Calling primary voters was completely worthless. The time and energy used to call these people five or ten times could have been spent engaging voters who did not vote in the primary, notifying them of the election, and encouraging them to go out and vote.
I know, I know the Republicans called the supervoters, too. They have the resources to waste. We don't. We can't possibly hope to compete with Republican head-to-head with the same strategy. Brute force tactics are stupid. We need a better strategy than Republican to win, not the same strategy funded at 10% of theirs.
Primary voters did not change their vote and cross party lines in the general to any discernible degree, we can see that from the results. However, the district's demographics would have better favored Democrats if turnout was higher. In fact, the demographics of the entire state favor Democrats when turnout is higher.
We need to learn some lessons from this race, namely expanding the universe of voters that we contact, and shifting resources away from calling supervoters, who are going to vote and are going to vote predictably. Instead we should prioritize our resources towards contacting younger, less-frequent Democratic voters who may be genuinely unaware of the race, election date, or the stances of the candidate and are more likely to benefit from the contact.
It was absolutely inexcusable to contact the same voter 10 times when many other voters were not even aware an election was taking place. The law of diminishing returns dictates that there is less and less benefit as the number of contacts per voter goes up. We will boost turnout higher by contacting more voters instead of the same voters, especially those who have a 90%+ chance of voting, numerous times.
Lessons learned, we hope. |
