Summary: Will party unity be able to bring another win for the GOP in a traditionally Democratic State, or can Coakley secure Ted Kennedy's seat on Tuesday?
So far this blog has not really given any insight to the unexpectedly close special election for Senator in Massachusetts. It would be irresponsible if we let that continue. So here’s a little breakdown of what to watch for in the race.
First and foremost, this is a toss-up. Polling - both internal and independent - shows that this race has been getting tighter in the past two weeks. Nate Silver, the polling guru of FiveThirtyEight.com, agreed on this in a post last night.
Democratic State Attorney General Martha Coakley should by all means be a safe candidate in a liberal state like Massachusetts. But her approval rating (about 49%) is only about 8 points higher than her disapproval rating. Meanwhile her opponent - Republican State Sentator Scott Brown - has a firm approval rating at 57% with disapproval in the mid 30s.
Already fearing a Republican win, many Democrats are speculating that the Coakley campaign just isn’t doing it’s job well enough.
…some Democrats, eager to distance Obama from any electoral failure, are beginning to compare Coakley to Creigh Deeds, the losing Democratic candidate in the Virginia governor's race last year. Deeds ran such a lackluster campaign, Democrats say, that his defeat could be solely attributed to his own shortcomings, and should not be seen as a referendum on President Obama's policies or those of the national Democratic party.
The same sort of thinking is emerging in Massachusetts. "This is a Creigh Deeds situation," the Democrat says. "I don't think it says that the Obama agenda is a problem. I think it says, 1) that she's a terrible candidate, 2) that she ran a terrible campaign, 3) that the climate is difficult but she should have been able to overcome it, and 4) that Democrats beware -- you better run good campaigns, or you're going to lose."
Boy, does that sound familiar.
With the election coming up on Tuesday the campaigns are now heading into GOTV weekend. Polls will now be largely unreliable, and who will win is anyone’s guess. But from what we’ve seen, things aren’t looking much better for Coakley.
They should. With so many Democrats in Massachusetts it should be easy for the campaign to get enough of them to the polls on Election Day. It may mean a lot of stressful hours this weekend for her staff (and I’m sure they will be) but it shouldn’t theoretically be too difficult.
Of course, that’s what we said about the gubernatorial race in New Jersey last year.
And Brown’s GOTV efforts will be a lot easier with significant supplementation from other GOP campaigns across the country. Politico reports today that Republican congressional campaigns from Connecticut to Texas, Pennsylvania to Florida, and just about everywhere else are transferring their time and energy to the Massachusetts race.
Some campaigns are blasting e-mails to supporters, prodding them to cut checks. Others are temporarily turning their headquarters into phone banks. A few are even encouraging volunteers to head to Massachusetts…
Now that’s some party unity. The direct benefit to these other campaigns is not obvious. But apparently there is a morale effect. These other GOP campaigns believe that if a Republican can win Ted Kennedy’s old seat, then anything is possible - and that will really encourage their supporters.
There are definitely some undecided voters at this point - probably 4%-5% of the electorate. Voters who haven’t made up their minds by GOTV weekend typically split about 50-50 when they enter the polls. That might not be what Coakley wants to hear.
Yet, I have to imagine this race could be different. Many of these last minute voters who will make their decision on Election Day (even as late as when they head into the booth) will no doubt be thinking about Ted Kennedy’s legacy. It hasn’t really been a big enough issue in the campaign, but it helps - no doubt - that Kennedy’s widow recently cut this ad for Coakley:
Hopefully for Coakley, this message will resonate with last minute voters.
But hope is not enough. Inevitably, the Coakley campaign will need to get-out-the-vote this weekend like none other if they want to send her to Washington.
Note: because this is a critical 60th seat for Senate Democrats, we hope you can spare some time to make calls on behalf of the Coakley campaign. You can help them out this weekend by signing up to volunteer at www.MarthaCoakley.com, or through OFA.
Part 9 of our 10-part series: 21st "Century Campaigning"
Get-Out-the-Vote (or GOTV) operations have changed dramatically in the last ten years, and – chances are – they’ll change even more in the next ten.
GOTV has always existed in some form or another throughout American electoral history. But modern GOTV methods really began to take shape across the pond. In the United Kingdom’s 1945 general election, Labour Party MP Ian Mikardo and his campaign developed a system in which the Reading constituency he represented was canvassed for Voter ID. The campaign then generated lists of supporters called “Reading sheets” for volunteers to remind to vote on Election Day.
The Reading System also began a GOTV tactic known in the U.S. as “poll watching” – in which campaign workers watch to make sure that voters identified as supporters have made it to the polls already and can be crossed off the list. If not, they get reminded to vote again.
In the United States, national GOTV operations really started to be noticed by the media following the 2000 general election. It was a year where the vote between Al Gore and George W. Bush was so close that getting supporters to the polls could make all the difference in many states.
That fact prompted the GOP to make important strides in the way GOTV was to be done in the future. They developed a new system they labeled “the 72-Hour Program” for the 2002 midterm elections.
From a 2003 Washington Post article on the new program’s implementation:
The 72-Hour Project was born of necessity after the 2000 election, when Republicans discovered that Democrats had done a better job of getting their voters to the polls in one of the tightest presidential races in history.
With prodding from White House senior adviser Karl C. Rove, White House political director Ken Mehlman and RNC Deputy Chairman Jack Oliver, the party undertook a top-to-bottom review of its get-out-the-vote operation, poured more than $1 million into more than 50 experiments to test how best to reach out to voters and then methodically set about implementing their findings in the midterm campaigns.
It paid off. In the subsequent 2002 and 2004 elections the GOP significantly drove up turnout among the Republican-friendly Evangelical community and scored some important victories for their party.
Still, the efficacy of such extensive GOTV programs is of considerable debate. Yale University has devoted an entire website to research done on the effectiveness of GOTV operations.
And Democratic strategist Mark Mellman argues that putting such weight on GOTV really only makes a difference when a race comes down to a couple thousand votes or so.
“Experiments on turnout by [famed political scientists] Alan Gerber and Donald Green suggest that the most effective means of increasing turnout raise it by less than 10 percent — and that’s for people who get canvassed in person. None of this is to suggest that GOTV efforts are not valuable. When 2000 or 200 votes decide an election there is no question that GOTV efforts can make all the difference in the world. But again, that is simply not the case that is being argued by GOP operatives.
Can’t micro-targeting help them achieve spectacular successes? Anyone who has ever modeled data knows there is much more salesmanship than science in Republican claims about these efforts. Our firm and others on the Democratic side have been using these models for half a dozen years or more and we know they can make our efforts much more efficient; expand our GOTV and persuasion universes; and provide message guidance. So when races are otherwise marginal, the lift models provide can make all the difference between winning and losing. But no model is going to turn what would otherwise be a 5-point loss into a victory.”
With this idea in mind, how will campaigns adjust their GOTV strategy so it only counts if a race is going to be close? How will they plan such an important operation ahead of time if they don’t even know if it will be worth it?
And if these questions don’t make campaigns rethink how they do GOTV, maybe some recent trends will.
As we mentioned in our post on Monday, early voting might change a lot of campaign strategy in the next few elections. In fact, when polls showed then-Senator Barack Obama with a substantial edge among early voters, we commented on the importance behind the Obama campaign’s efforts.
“The real advantage of having supporters vote early is that the campaign can focus more time and energy on supporters that vote less frequently (because they are less politically engaged) in the final 72 hours.
So have early voting laws made October a month long GOTV period? It would certainly appear so, as this tactic is sure to be used in presidential campaigns to come.”
But if campaigns are going to devote time and energy to such a “Get-Out-the-Early-Vote” operation, what will that look like? Will they rely on more time-effective methods to convince folks who were already going to vote for them to do it early – methods such as email, robo-calls, text-messages, and direct mail? Or will they actually redirect volunteers from important Voter ID operations to make calls and canvass these supporters?
Ultimately, these aren’t questions that can be answered yet with any certainty – but they are questions that campaigns will have to answer for themselves in the next ten years.
The only thing that is certain is that GOTV will continue to evolve and is likely to look much different in 2020 from what it looked like in 2008.
