Campaigning
Door-to-Door Canvassing
Door-to-door visits by candidates or committee members is a very effective way to get the candidate’s message to the voter. Although some may dislike canvassing, it is important to remember that most people are kind and interested in hearing what you have to say. But you cannot be discouraged by the voter’s initial annoyance with being interrupted. Be friendly and quickly state why you are there. Once they understand that you do not want a donation, and you are not selling anything, and you don’t want to convert them to a new religion, they are usually receptive. Inexperienced canvassers should first go along with those who have good technique to model themselves after an expert. The canvasser should take the following items:
1. A street list with the names and addresses, and party affiliation of the voters.
2. A briefing sheet with information about the candidate that you should study beforehand and have with you to answer questions.
3. Brochure about the candidate to leave with voter.
4. Report sheet to record responses and questions from voters.A typical script should be brief: “Hello Mr. Jones, my name is Suzie Grassroots, and I’m a volunteer for Melissa Hart who is running for Congress. I’m helping Rep Hart because she shares my values and works hard to help her constituents. Do you have any questions? [Answer any questions.] Have you made up your mind about this election?” [When you are done, say:] “I hope you will consider voting for Congresswoman Hart on Election Day. Thank you for your time.” Give the voter a brochure and then leave and record the results.
Campaign Literature Distribution Secret
The two weeks prior to an election is prime time for a campaign literature distribution, or drop, because that’s when the average voter begins to think about the upcoming election. A literature drop is when volunteers distribute campaign literature about candidates to the voters’ homes without knocking on the door. This sounds simple enough, but the problem arises about where to put the literature. Federal law does not allow us to put literature inside a mailbox. Common locations to put the literature are the newspaper holder which is sometimes attached to or separate from the mailbox, inside the storm door, or under the welcome mat. Many homes do not have storm doors, or if they do, they are locked. Squeezing literature inside the door crack or behind the door handle is risky because wind can blow it away and rain can destroy it. The best solution is to purchase plastic bags in bulk with a loop that fits securely over the door knob. These doorknob bags are used by lawn service personnel to attach the invoice to your front door. The bag protects all the literature from the elements. A large supply of several thousand bags can be purchased for approximately $50 to $100. One vendor for these bags is Uline at 800-295-5510 or www.uline.com. It is a good idea to pre-sort the 4 or 5 pieces of literature from the various candidates and load them into the bags beforehand. Perhaps an elderly volunteer who cannot walk for the distribution would be willing to pre-load the bags with literature. Once loaded, all you have to do is deliver the bags of literature to the doors of the super voters in your district.
Importance of Personal Contact
In this age of e-mail, it is easy to get into the habit of communicating with our grassroots volunteers with one mouse-click which sends our electronic message out to everyone at once, and then think that our communications task is done.
While e-mail has legitimate grassroots uses for getting routine information quickly to a large group of people, we should always remember that not everyone has e-mail. And many of those with e-mail don’t check it on a regular basis. Or people delete e-mail messages without reading them when their mailbox overflows.
We must always bear in mind that it is still important to have conversations with co-workers by phone or in-person. Sometimes there is no substitute for a voice conversation for building morale. One-on-one conversations are also useful for asking people to help and for reminding people to attend meetings. Even after an e-mail blast and a written meeting notice, people often forget about the meeting. So, a timely phone reminder the day before can make the difference between someone attending or not.
Remember that the popularity of the cell phone was not created by the marketing departments of communications companies, even though they probably think so. The real reason why cell phones are so popular, despite being relatively expensive, is because people need to talk to each other. We must always keep this in mind when considering our grassroots communications strategy.
We should not forget to also use personal conversations to praise and thank our fellow grassroots workers.
Get Out The Vote (GOTV) Phone Calls
Many GOP committees resist phone bank efforts because they believe that people do not like to be called at home. However, various GOP groups have tested this theory and have discovered that calls encouraging people to vote have improved voter turn by as much as 10%. Even a 3% to 4% increase in GOP turnout can make the difference between winning and losing. GOTV phone calls should be made in the final 2 or 3 days of the campaign. Therefore, most of the work beforehand should be spent planning. You must recruit volunteers, prepare lists of voters to call, and develop a script for the callers. Identify the voters that you must call and calculate the number of calls that you will have to make. Do not call those with a perfect voting record. Call only those who vote sporadically or who vote only in Presidential elections. Assume that a caller will make about 30 to 35 calls per hour. For example, if you have 3500 voters to call and 10 volunteers, then it would take 3500 / (10 x 35) or 10 hours to call everyone. Studies show that reminder calls are just as effective on the night before the election as they are on Election Day, if not more so. Calling two days before Election Day has also been proven effective. But don’t call during a major sporting event! Do not call before 9:00am on Election Day. Here is a sample script: “Hi, this is ___your name___ and I’m calling from the _________ campaign (or “the Republican Committee”) with a friendly reminder that today is Election Day. The races for senator and governor are close and Rick Santorum and Lynn Swann need your vote. The polls will be open until 8:00pm. So I hope they can count on your vote. Thank you.”
If no one is home, leave the message on the answering machine.
Get Out the Vote Shortcut
One of the classic techniques to get out the vote on election day is to station poll watchers at every polling location recording voters as they show up. Then the poll watchers’ list a picked up several times a day and taken to a phone bank where those Republicans who have not yet voted are called. But this system is labor-intensive and requires complicated coordination. One way to reduce the labor and complexity of this undertaking is to look beforehand at voting records of the voters in your district. You can obtain voting records from a CD of Allegheny County voters from the Board of Elections office or from RCAC. You can aquire the phone numbers of Republican voters from Voter Vault through the RCAC office. Those who vote all the time do not have to be called and those who have not voted in 5 years also do not have to be called because they either moved or are deceased. Those Republicans who have intermittent voting records are the ones that you need to call. And this voter call list will most likely be the same as the one that would have been created using the laborious method of poll watchers checking off voters. So now, all you have to do is organize a phone bank to call those on your list of absent-minded voters and remind them to vote. The Get Out the Vote phone calls should be made on the day before the election and/or on election day. Be careful to call every voter only once. Otherwise, some will feel harassed and respond negatively.
Storing Volunteer and Voter Information
Whenever you talk to someone new who expresses interest in volunteering for Republican activities, ask that person for his/her contact information and store it as soon as possible in your computer database system. Contact information should include name, address, phone numbers, and e-mail address. You should also look up their voting district and record that as well. Once you have stored information in a database system like Microsoft Access, you can easily create address lists, phone lists, email lists, and mailing labels. Taking the time to learn basic computer database skills will save you so much time later. When designing your database record structure, put the first and last names in separate fields as well as the address number and street name in separate fields. This will enable you to produce lists in alphabetical order by last name or in alphabetical order by street name. You can also obtain a CD free of charge with voter information for the entire county from the County Dept of Elections located in Room 604 of the County Office Building at 542 Forbes Street downtown. You can then extract the voter data for your municipality and insert it into your own database. This information not only provides names, addresses and party affiliation but also birthdates and past voting records. However, this data does NOT include phone numbers. You need at least one gigabyte of memory on your computer in order to access this CD. An updated version of this information is available about 2 or 3 months after each Primary and General Election and only one copy per election is available free of charge to any voter in Allegheny County. This information is much more useful than the traditional hardcopy street lists because you can sort your database and create customized voter lists according to age, party, voting record such as for example “every Republican over 55 who voted in the 2004 Primary in District 6.
How to Find Democrat Swing Voters
A “Swing District” is a precinct where Democrats are more willing to vote Republican if they like the GOP candidate. These are the precincts that candidates and committee members must target in order to win elections because that is where you will find the most Democrat voters willing to split their ticket and vote Republican.
To determine which precincts are swing districts, do the following steps:
1. Select a recent past statewide or district race where a Republican candidate lost, getting only the GOP hard-core base. (Craig Pepper for PA Treasurer in 2004) This is the BASE VOTE.
2. Select a recent past race where a Republican candidate easily won by a high margin. (Mike Turzai for State Rep or Jane Orie for State Senator in 2004) This is the HIGH VOTE.
3. Subtract the BASE VOTE from the HIGH VOTE for the precinct. This is the RAW NUMBER of swing voters.
4. Divide the RAW NUMBER of swing voters by the total voter turnout for that precinct. This gives you the SWING PERCENTAGE for the precinct.
5. Do this for every precinct in your district.
6. Rank all the precincts by SWING PERCENTAGE from highest to the lowest.
Then concentrate your campaign efforts on those district with the highest SWING PERCENTAGE since those Democrats are most likely to change their vote if you give them a good reason to do so.
Using Bulk Mail Instead of Stamps
Throughout the year, a local committee should mail various items such as pre-election newsletters to the voters and fund-raising solicitation letters to the party faithful. Large scale mailings can be expensive, especially with the postal rates going up all the time.
One way for a local committee to reduce postage costs is to use bulk mail instead of postage stamps. Bulk mail refers to the reduced rate that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) offers to organizations for mass mailings of at least 200 items or more. The letters must be pre-sorted by zip code and placed into separate trays provided by the USPS. In place of a stamp, you imprint the your bulk mail account number on the envelope.
Then you must fill out paperwork and deliver the letter trays to the USPS bulk mail facility on California Avenue in the North Side.
A bulk mail account may be purchased for about $150 a year. However, RCAC has a bulk mail account and makes it available to a local committees to use as long as they pay for their own postage.
While the cost of stamps keeps going up, the price per letter for bulk mailed items actually went DOWN at the last postal rate change so that the bulk mail cost per letter is now a little less that half of what it would cost for a stamp, 20.4 cents. This means that if you mail 1000 letters, you would save $204 by using bulk mail instead of stamps.
Such great savings make it worth your time to go through the sometimes painful process of learning the rules for bulk mailing .
Local chairs and authorized committee members may call RCAC to get the bulk mail account number and instructions for using it.
How Candidates Can Get Their Message Across
Everyone loves a good story. That’s why we pay money to go to the movies or to buy a good novel. A candidate’s story is a way to grab the voter’s attention. Abe Lincoln’s story of being born in a log cabin is an example of a compelling story. So is Senator John McCain’s experience as a POW in Vietnam.
Voters are interested in knowing about candidates. Who are they? Where do they come from? Why are they running? How can the voters relate to them? Answering these questions in an appealing manner helps a candidate connect with the voters. Examples of items to include in the candidate’s story are education, work experience, military experience, volunteer activities, family information, where you live, any obstacles that you have overcome, and reasons why you decided to run for office. Of course, your story should always be true.
Although a good story will grab the voter’s attention, the candidate must also offer more compelling reasons why the he or she deserves to be elected such as the candidate’s stand on issues and the candidate’s vision and plan of action if elected.
Persuasive communications is a key to winning elections at all levels, and this is sometimes forgotten by local Republican candidates who assume that the voters will automatically discern the purity of the hearts and the brilliance of their ideas.