Dec. 16, 2002
Elections Show Successful Campaigns Emphasize Turnout
By J. Barlow Herget
RALEIGH - There was a knock on my door late in the afternoon of November 5th. There stood a young woman, a campaign worker, in a plastic poncho. Her hair was dripping wet from the steady rain, but she was smiling when she asked me if I had voted.
She offered to take me or have someone take me if I needed a ride. I had voted. She thanked me and trudged on to the next house.
She was an admirable example of the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts that political candidates are using to encourage citizens to go vote. Senator-elect Elizabeth Dole’s campaign, according to Rep. David Miner, R-Wake, put "a lot of resources" into telemarketing and direct mail to get voters out.
"There was a massive amount of phone calls; the goal was a million," Miner says.
It paid off, too, especially in Wake County. Dole carried Wake County, 120,000 to Bowles’ 98,000. Wake’s turnout, the state’s highest, was an astounding 22,000 more than Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s.
Similarly, it was a strong, late-hour GOTV campaign by Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu and her supporters that saved her re-election bid in December 6th’s run-off. In a little-noted article, "The Times-Picayune" of New Orleans reported how former President Bill Clinton set a fire under Landrieu and the city’s black leadership in a mid-afternoon, Election Day conference call.
Landrieu, accompanied by these leaders, raced through African American precincts until the polls closed at 8 p.m. She won the election by less than 40,000 votes but she carried Orleans Parish by a 4-to-1 margin.
Dole’s and Landrieu’s experiences will not be lost on future campaigners. The Republican Party, according to John Hood of the conservative think-tank the John Locke Foundation, took a hit upside the head in the midterm 1998 Election when Democrats unexpectedly gained seats in the House with an effective GOTV campaign. Republican Party officials learned from that lesson, says Hood.
"In 2000, they [Republicans] did some experiments in selected cities," he relates, emphasizing GOTV work such as recruiting people to make phone calls to their neighbors and Republican stalwarts. The GOTV experiments worked. "I’m absolutely sure that the turnout differential they enjoyed [in Wake County] in 2002 was part of a real deliberate strategy," declares Hood.
(The differential in Wake County also helped elect a Republican sheriff, a Republican majority on the Board of Commissioners, a Republican Clerk of Court and two new Republican legislators.)
GOTV campaigning has also been boosted as television has lost some of its luster as the best way for politicians to deliver their messages. Television certainly will remain the campaign tool of choice, but TV ad costs continue to escalate and audience share continues to splinter and drop because of more channels and ad-zapping technology.
The emphasis on turnout was forecast in "The New York Times" in September, when journalist Adam Nagourney wrote: "The once-overwhelming influence of television advertising on political campaigns is declining, Democratic and Republican leaders say, leading them to embrace aggressively old-fashioned campaign tools like telephone calls and door-knocking in this year’s Congressional elections."
Voters respond to such person-to-person connections, and politicians are eager to find new ways to reach voters directly. Improved telephone technology makes the recorded voice of an Elizabeth Dole or President Bush sound like the real thing.
Direct mail messages now target specific voters with special messages. For example, elderly citizens receive political mail about Social Security; women receive campaign ads about abortion; gun owners receive notices about Second Amendment rights. Pharmaceutical companies already have used data collection and computer technology to write personal, individual smoking cessation regimens for millions of customers, and it’s possible that politicians will do the same with campaign messages.
The use of the Internet continues to be examined by political consultants as a new way to make GOTV contacts with voters. For instance, I received several e-mails from friends reminding me to vote on November 5th.
Such personal contact is valuable in increasingly larger campaigns such as those for governor, big city mayor, congress or the state legislature. Each legislator in the North Carolina House today represents about 67,000 citizens; those in the Senate, about 161,000.
GOTV campaigns proved effective in this year’s elections, which means they will receive more attention in future elections. And while different in style from a television-based campaign, they do share one attribute: GOTV efforts don’t come cheaply. They thus give citizens another reason to follow the money.
Barlow Herget is a writer and a former member of the Raleigh City Council.
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