Sides Chapter 5: Modern Campaign Strategies Flashcards
What is a campaign strategy?
It is a strategy that is a proposed pathway to victory. It is a plan for how to win, and it is driven by an understanding of who will vote for the candidate and why they will do so.
What are the (4) key aspects to a good campaign strategy?
first, in any election, the electorate can be divided into three groups: the candidate’s base, the opponent’s base, and the undecided. Second, past election results, data from lists of registered voters, and survey research make it possible to estimate which people fall into each of these three groups. Third, it is neither possible nor necessary to get the support of all people everywhere to win the election. Fourth, once a campaign has identified how to win, it can act to create the circumstances to bring about this victory. In order to succeed, campaigns should direct campaign resources to key groups of potential voters and nowhere else. Research should allow a campaign to determine how best to mobilize the candidate’s base and persuade the undecideds.
What are vote targets?
These targets are based on estimates of what the upcoming election will look like: how many total votes the campaign believes will be cast in the election, how many it will need to win, how many votes its candidate can expect no matter what, and how many persuadable (swing) voters are out there. Campaigns typically come up with vote targets by examining data from recent comparable elections.
How do campaigns profile vote targets?
Most campaign surveys are probability samples, in which some number of individuals from a registered voter population are randomly selected and asked a set of questions. The key to a probability sample is that every individual in the population of interest has a known probability of being selected. Because selection is random, a small number of completed interviews reveal the general opinions held throughout the population, with a known and relatively small margin of error.
We can examine the issue preferences of persuadable voters to develop a plan for winning them over.
What is the second step to identifying swing voters?
Acquire a list of registered voters and augment it with demographic information on each voter. From this they can (1) estimate a turnout propensity score, which models the likelihood of a voter casting a ballot based on past turnout and a series of known predictors (2) a candidate support score, which models the likelihood of someone voting for a candidate based on party affiliation and a series of known predictors. The second task is to use voter file information along with polling information to estimate a persuadability score, which predicts how open each voter on the list will be to appeals from the campaign’s candidate.
What is microtargeting?
isolating specific voters (those who are relatively less likely to currently favor this candidate) for digital outreach, mailings, phone calls, or in-person visits. This was developed in the 2000 and 2002 elections.
What encompasses a candidate’s decision to run for President?
Motivation, Resources, Opportunity:
