How To Deploy Your Candidate

Mitt Romney greets supporters in Cincinnati on Thursday. Ohioans should expect frequent visits by both candidates in the campaign's closing days.

Photo by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

As the presidential election heads into its final days, the most important decision strategists in both campaigns are making is where to send the candidate. There is no more precious resource: Every visit initiates a multilevel strategy to capture votes, voter information, and volunteers who can be squeezed for one more hour of effort.

In this final stretch, the size of crowds at rallies can reach into the tens of thousands. The candidate?s pitch is more urgent: What voters choose to do with their ballots will change the course of the nation. But beneath that vast sweeping feeling of history is an intense and focused game of gathering and sifting. To most of us, the attendees at a rally look like an undifferentiated blanket of people, but to those working the political ground game, it is a pixelated assortment of uncollected cellphone numbers, hands to work the phone banks, and sturdy legs to walk neighborhoods. In states with early voting, the people a candidate draws to a rally are fresh meat to be cajoled onto a bus and taken to a polling place. ?How about we get in our car, vote early, and bank our votes,? said Sen. Rob Portman Thursday morning in Cincinnati, ?so that on Election Day we can make sure other people get out and vote.?

In this process, the candidate is the flypaper. Before Barack Obama or Mitt Romney visit a town, their campaigns email supporters and targeted undecided voters. At a minimum, their teams will obtain a piece of private information, perhaps a cellphone number, that can be used to encourage someone to vote. Even better is if they can score a commitment from someone to vote early. ?Best of all is if they can obtain a promise from that voter to volunteer for the campaign, thereby adding another foot soldier to the cause.

The ticket to see the candidate is the bait. Voters can get them at the local campaign office. Once inside, a volunteer takes down as much information as possible and tries to secure those commitments for future volunteering. Campaigns are consumed with the idea that individual voters are motivated by community contact. Neighbor-to-neighbor appeals work the best. A campaign outpost in the neighborhood is effective because a voter is handed a ticket by someone who looks like them or shares their experiences. That is why the number of offices in a state can matter. (In Ohio, the Obama team has more than 120; Romney has about 40.) They expand a campaign?s ability to make neighborhood connections.

Every ticket has a code. When you show up and get your ticket scanned, the campaign knows it. Staffers with iPads will stop you to ask for more information like that all important cellphone number. (In the campaign vernacular, the voter is being ?caged? for information.) If they don?t convince you to get on the bus or drive to the early voting location after the rally, the campaign will contact you in the next several days. You?re likely to get a phone call from someone who attended the rally and voted, asking you to do the same. When you are trying to gather every possible vote, it is more effective to begin the conversation with I see that we were both at the rally together than with the generic I?m calling in support of candidate X.

But most rallies now are filled with the faithful who are already likely to vote. They represent a different opportunity. They can be used to make voter phone calls and contacts that are crucial in motivating all kinds of voters, though the biggest prize these days are ?low propensity voters.? These are people who have intersected with politics at some point and in some way?signing up on that web site or giving that small donation is ?how they got on one of the party lists?but who aren?t regular participants. These are the voters who take the most work to get to the polls, either because they are lazy, only mildly interested, or because they have complex allegiances. Maybe this resident of Canton voted for Ohio Gov. John Kasich but against his collective bargaining legislation. Both parties want that guy. Republicans know he?s open to their team; Democrats know that he cares about unions.

The Obama and Romney campaigns understand that if they are simply using the early voting period as a time to bank the votes of people who would otherwise have waited in line on Election Day then they are doing it wrong. The team that wins will be the one that grows the size of their vote. For Democrats, this is even more crucial. Polls show the president is doing better with registered voters than with likely voters. Obama needs to erase the distinction, or at least shrink it.?

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=81de8f2c8c76dd5341c5e759c29e5a6d

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