MORE SPECIAL DATES: Primaries in 5th CD set for Oct. 15, the election is Dec. 10, nomination papers due locally by July 31.
This just out. So we will have municipal election primaries Sept 24, The Primary for this race in Oct, the General in Nov, and the special in Dec. Good luck recruiting volunteers. Everyone is just plain tired, especially Super voters who get all the calls and door knocks. I know it needs to be done, but every month?
Please share widely!
Canvassing is good exercise! And with this information, I can now set the date of my annual holiday party. With all the primaries, I expect a lot of candidates. I may need to rent a tent. Plan on bringing a coat.
Another Plus?!?!?
Writes the “Energizer Bunny” of door-to-door canvasing . . . 🙂
Don’t GOTV the supervoters quite so much. There is a reason they are called supervoters – they almost always vote. Yes, you will need to get them to vote your way in a primary, but once you have them move on to the next voter rather than constantly re-asking and reminding. In the general cycle. If you know they will vote and that they will vote Democratic save your energy for other voters. This is both politic AND a better use of limited campaign time and human resources.
n/t
Apparently Galvin has mentioned interest in AG if Coakley runs for Gov.
He is statutorily obligated to set the election dates within a certain, not-very-large range.
The law provides for an 145 – 160 day window and a primary 7 weeks before the general election. There was no mathematical way have the election align with the local elections, even if Markey had resigned his seat on election night. He *could* have used the legally questionable tactic of waiting two days to declare the seat vacant, and allow the Democratic primary to fall on the same day as the local elections, but that would set the general election for Christmas eve, and people would (justifiably) be kvetching about that too.
Six weeks between Dec 17th and Nov 5 would be plenty of time in a district that is unlikely to see a competitive general election. It would have been very easy to align the Congressional primary with the municipal general election. I talked to one of Watertown’s election commissioners who told me that was her preference, even though it would be a little more complicated. (The folks in the Town Clerk’s office, however, were dreading having to do a two-ballot election).
That said, only some of the communities in the 5th (the cities) are having municipal elections, and fewer still are having September preliminaries.
The primary is 7 weeks before the general in regular elections, 6 in special federal elections and 4 in special state elections:
https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleVIII/Chapter53/Section28
December 17th would be just fine for the general and would allow some consolidation.
but not many are at 100% in every major election and almost none are 100% in municipals and specials. Less than 1 in 5 typically vote for Boston mayor and not much more than that voted in the last US Senate special.
Furthermore, those with high turnouts in partisan races often have low turnouts in municipals and sometimes vice versa.
There is a method to the madness.
VAN, for example includes within a voter’s history whether they tend to vote in specials, vote in municipals, etc. I completely understand the method – that’s what I went to grad school for – but I’ve also seen some campaigns that have caused me to wonder what they are thinking.
You recognize the importance of communicating with these near 100% voters during the primary and have said as much. So they’re all being communicated with in a Christopher-style campaign anyway, correct? It’s just happening in the primary.
If that is being done, you already have the ID. So it’s not like you’re asking and re-asking over and over again.
So the real issue here is GOTVing high frequency voters who have already been GOTVd.
Now let’s have a thought experiment and touch on some math, focusing on a very small part of a voter universe — good voters having a bad day, at risk of missing their first election in a while.
In any given major election, roughly half the targeted IDs from a target universe are high frequency voters and the other half are more spotty, at best. That’s a rough estimate and will vary from election to election, but if you think I’m wildly off the mark, feel free to let me know.
Of the ‘good’ half, it’s safe to say 1 in 30 of those could have something that comes up which would make it less likely that they’d vote. We all have at least one crappy day a month, where unexpected or difficult things happen, right? Sick kid, work issue, whatever. It happens to the best of us. Even me. So that should be a fair baseline number, in a pseudo-Bayesian light, right?
Seems like a very small group of people, then, right? Well, yeah, it is, but it’s still 1.6% of the IDs that we have to be worried about. Many a campaign have been lost by less. These near 100% or otherwise high frequency voters should absolutely be getting GOTVd. When you’re already making the canvassing and phone lists, already sending out the bulk mail, the comparative effort to add these people is relatively small.
Indeed, when the people most expected to show up start ‘surprising’ you, that’s when you know something could be going wrong. It’s worth the expense and effort to be assured that the people who you know will vote actually do, especially when many of these people probably would have missed past elections were it not for us incessantly bugging them on election day.
Third paragraph should read:
that “supervoters” should be contacted on Election Day or the last, GOTV weekend. Don’t agree they should be contacted multiple times between primary and general. Plenty told me they were (might have been LCV in addition to Markey people) and they were annoyed.
Most of the canvass lists I was given personally this spring focused on Lynch voters and sporadic voters.
the big issue that arises for campaigns and may make it feel as though people are contacted many times is household size.
Say someone is knocking a neighborhood and the woman of the house answers it on your list. She listens and says they’ll vote for Obama. They’re IDd.
If that person has a husband, significant other and/or kids who have voted and are in the universe, a volunteer isn’t necessarily going to get the ID’s for them.
Sometimes volunteers won’t even ask — that can be harder ask for the volunteers, when they know the person at the door wants to get back to whatever they were doing.
So we’re then stuck in a situation where there are other people in that household who are in the voter universe and need to be IDd. When we get back to them, if that woman opens the door again, we’re ‘asking her twice’ even though she may not have been our target then at all.
Volunteer training and experience can improve this drastically, by getting people comfortable to ask about others in the household after they first secure the ID. Once people do a lot of canvassing, they get much better at this.
I also think this is one of those areas where phones can still be useful; we can follow up and ask if someone is home in a way they won’t realize they’re being contacted by a campaign unless the person actually is home.
We also have to realize that campaigns are huge and can never be perfect. Things do slip in the cracks when you’re working with universes in the tens or hundreds of thousands, or even occasionally millions.
Lastly, the campaign is only one campaign making the ask. There are other campaigns and, beyond that, labor unions and issue organizations out there running their own things — organizations that can’t coordinate. So, say Planned Parenthood is knocking on member doors asking them to vote for Elizabeth Warren. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign may have knocked on those very doors just weeks or days prior. To a normal voter, it looks like the campaign stopped by twice, but a campaign and an issue organization can’t coordinate.
…I know that there are voters being contacted multiple times by the campaign itself, and extra reminding is certainly in order for a special. If you are going through the same list multiple times you should focus on those who were not contacted the first time. The vast majority of people are not home when you go through most lists. In a regularly scheduled campaign you basically have three rounds of contact, though possibly several attempts within each round. The first is ID, but even this isn’t blind as you can use other data to make educated guesses about which contacts will be most effective. Some are definitely with you; some definitely against you; the rest are persuadable. The first group you put aside for possible GOTV; the second you ignore for the rest of the campaign; the third go to a pursuasion round. The second round is persuasion where of course the object is to improve the numbers in the group definitely for you, which again you put in the GOTV pile. The third round is GOTV of your positive IDs, BUT before you do this consider the frequency of voting. Those who always vote are lower priority than those who only sometimes vote. Finally on election day a good campaign will pollcheck, though in a regular election parties rather than individual campaigns do this function. The actual turnout throughout the day determine which precincts and individuals you need to nag to get to the polls.
There’s no such thing as looking at VAN demographic data and saying someone is “definitely with you.” You may look at a slice of data and feel good about that slice as a whole, but a decent size chunk of that slice will sit out or vote for the other person, or could if something goes wrong.
Let’s take this for example: there’s a husband and wife from Brookline, both of whom are 28. They’ve voted in every mid term and presidential election since they were 18 and always pulled a democratic ballot in the primary — every time.
So, these people are safe to put into the Christopher-sanctioned GOTV-only list, right? It gets little safer than that.
Well, maybe. At least until Martha Coakley talks about how she doesn’t want to shake hands with people in the cold at Fenway Park.
That’s a real life example of two of my friends who’ve always voted Democratic, but refused to vote for Martha Coakley. One of them voted for Scott, the other a 3rd party.
We lost that election because there were all too many people like them, and Martha’s campaign didn’t see the need to call them up and ask them for their vote and try to persuade if it was necessary — not until it was far too late in the process and the damage was done.
Let’s also look at their neighborhood. They lived in a densely packed, easily-canvassed neighborhood in Brookline at the time. It takes about the same amount of time to walk that neighborhood whether there’s 35 doors you’re asking people to knock on or 50.
If it takes approximately the same amount of time either way, do you really want to take the chance that those 15 or so people you thought you could count on from looking at demographic data will all really vote for your candidate without asking them first? That not a single one of them could have heard something or knows something that would make them question that candidate?
What happens when your candidate says or does something that makes your campaign suddenly realize, late in the game, that you really couldn’t on those 15 people from that area, after all? Are you going to re-walk that whole list? Will there be time?
You can’t take anything for granted, especially at the individual level. If I’m door knocking or phone calling for my Town Democrats and stumble on a member’s door, I’ll even knock or call them, unless I’ve previously heard them say they’re voting for my candidate — as well as *everyone in their household.* It takes about 15 seconds to say, “Hey, I know you’re probably voting for Ed, but I just wanted to make sure. Oh, you are? Good. How about your wife and kids?” Why wouldn’t you do that?
PS. You’re not the only one who’s been on the inside, Christopher. My campaign training comes from MassAlliance and one of the first things they’d say is “assume nothing.” This is how I’ve run my campaigns since then and I’ve never lost.
One of the campaigns I managed at the field level was a state rep race that had the second closest margin in the entire state that year and we were considered the underdog going in. What do you think the result would have been if I started making a whole bunch of assumptions and took huge swaths of homes in walkable neighborhoods off my canvass list because I thought they could be counted on based on demographics? We would have lost, that’s what.
What you want to do may make things slightly ‘easier’ on voters during an election, though you won’t get credit for it: other campaigns and groups will be contacting them, and when you GOTV them at the end, they’re going to be just as annoyed and give you just as much ‘blame,’ but by that point, you won’t even have an assurance of their vote.
Heck, that flawed strategy could be ‘good enough’ for a candidate to win a campaign they should have won anyway, but even then, I wouldn’t recommend it. I’m sure Martha Coakley felt that way and look how much good that did her.
Where your strategy will fail almost every time is in a campaign everyone knows will be close. When you’re running a campaign that could be decided by less than 1 or 2%, you can’t make guesses as to who people will vote for. That defeats the purpose of the entire Democratic GOTV strategy.
You have to aggressively campaign everyone in your target universe. Yeah, it may bug them. Just train your door knockers to smile when someone looks busy and say “sorry for bothering you, I know campaigns are crazy, but we really appreciate your time. Thanks!”
In a campaign where you don’t have the time or resources to contact these people, then maybe you operate with the assumptions you make on this list.
But that is by nature a flawed campaign. They happen, especially in specials, but I wouldn’t turn what could be a very good campaign into a flawed campaign because you don’t want to talk to the people who are potentially your candidate’s biggest supporters — people who could, you know, join your email list, write checks and volunteer, but won’t if they’re never asked.
I DID say that the first round was to ID voters, though you do start with a list of those that are likely. Of course you ask for reasons you mention. Given that the campaign, even a well-resourced one, still has some limitations you focus on who is likely to vote for you or could be persuaded, basically a triage setup. The other variable is the breadth of the voter pool and what the strategy is. There are campaigns that focus on the electorate already in place and those that try to expand the electorate and I’m sure we can all think of examples of each type. So most of what you say above sounds fine, and you are especially correct about not assuming. I’m just suggesting that time and manpower is generally better spent reaching out to additional voters that you haven’t touched yet rather than recontacting those you already have. There are always variables unique to each race and campaign which need to be accounted for. My explanation above is admittedly generic, but that’s why consultants get the big bucks:)
Our current electoral overload is more like an electoral earthquake. Tectonic plates — offices — have been static for decades, while the people occupying them have been looking for higher office for just as long. Pressure mounted until something had to give… and we find ourselves here, now, still in the after shocks.
Crazily enough, it may take upwards of a decade or two before all the dust settles.
We’re going to be very tired for a very long time. I could do for a dose of whatever Kate’s having…
The 5th special is followed by a legislative one for the General Court. If you are voting solely to avoid having to vote again the Sheriff is your man.
…if it is a state senator who wins state reps might look to move up creating yet another vacancy!
I suspect Hecht will run if Brownsberer wins, the two are quite similar and he ran a good race for second against Will last time around. I suspect Carl’s opponent Bob Trane would make a run if Carl won, not sure how deep the genuine progressive bench is for his district. Don’t know enough about Waltham or Framingham to comment on the other two.
…one character from Waltham we don’t want anywhere near the legislature:)