Make It Personal

[Joanne98]

Two political scientists challenge the conventional wisdom about voter turnout.

Harold Meyerson | July 18, 2008

Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout (Second Edition) by Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber, Brookings Institution Press, 225 pages, $18.95


***

The late Alan Baron, sometime political consultant and full-time political wag, used to tell a story about a campaign kibitzer in Des Moines in the autumn of 1964. Every day as the election drew closer, the kibitzer would turn up at Democratic Party headquarters and implore the directors of the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation to use sound trucks. Such trucks, he insisted, if properly used--touring the streets of Des Moines while amplified voices urged the folks on the sidewalks to vote Democratic--were guaranteed to tilt the election in the Democrats' favor. And on Election Day, in no small part just to shut the guy up, the field directors did dispatch a couple of sound trucks to ride around town.

That day, the Democrats won a victory of historic dimensions. Powered by Lyndon Johnson's epochal landslide over Barry Goldwater, Iowa Democrats won all their usual offices and a slew of others they'd never won before.

The next morning, the kibitzer resurfaced in Democratic headquarters. "What did I tell you?" he gloated. "Sound trucks."

One of the problems for political candidates and their campaign managers is that seemingly more respectable versions of Baron's kibitzer are to be found in countless (though by no means all) political-consulting firms across the country. They tell prospective clients how their mailings, phone banks, or TV spots have boosted their previous clients' turnout, and if their prospective clients would just sign this contract, they too will know the thrill of victory.

To which Donald Green and Alan Gerber, both professors of political science at Yale, respond in no uncertain terms: Oh, yeah?

What Green and Gerber have done would seem conceptually obvious--except, no one has done it before. Working with academic colleagues and a range of political and civic groups and campaigns across the nation, they ran more than 100 experiments in elections over the past decade, testing which get-out-the-vote tactics--direct mail, phone banks, door-to-door canvassing, radio and television ads--actually turned out more voters. They designed all manner of GOTV efforts and employed them on groups of randomly selected voters while not employing them on a control group of other randomly selected voters, then checked after the election to see who'd voted and who hadn't, and whether those results had any correlation to the respective GOTV drives. They worked with nonpartisan good-government groups, with groups trying to mobilize African American, Latino, low-income, or environmentally inclined voters, and occasionally, and, remarkably, with candidates' campaigns--remarkably, because not many candidates will respond favorably to establishing a control group of voters who don't get canvassed or phoned or mailed on his or her behalf.


http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=make_it_personal