Addressing Potential Voters is Increasingly Problematic.
With communication technologies, we often substitute the convenient for the best. We can break off a long friendship with a text. But so impersonal a message is arguably a long way from meeting to talk through a suddenly troubled relationship. Ditto to a friend in behalf of a particular political candidate. We should expect what is innately human: presenting ourselves and our words in real time and space. The timeless and innate defaults of discourse should not be lightly tossed aside. Among other things, disembodied messages enable all kinds of unintended noise. Just try reading someone’s body language in a Zoom meeting. It is like night driving with dark glasses.
To be sure, there are obvious advantages to various electronic extensions. Mass media allow millions to receive a single message. We expect that the great and significant will come to us through many channels, sometimes low levels of retention. Skepticism is also justified given the number of “dark posts” that hide the actual sources of deceitful messages. These may ostensibly support a candidate, but deliberately offend readers in the process. If a campaign has enough money, there are also many ways to target voters using radio or cable advertising strategically.
And let’s make it even more complicated. Predicting elections through polling actually measures attitudes. We ask people what they think. But voting itself is a private behavior. As we all know, what people say and what they do can be two different things: a factor that might mean the possibility of a Trump polling undercount. After all, he is a convicted felon and, according to a federal judge, the rapist of E. Jean Carroll. Voters may prefer to hedge what they say to a pollster.
And so to a timely and practical question. How are voters for the upcoming election to be reached by candidates or committed activists?
As interesting or unsettling as it is, let’s aside the presidential race a moment. There are roughly 510,000 electoral offices in the United States. Many of those seeking support in a local election have no better option than to canvass their friends and neighbors door to door. Paid media is often too expensive. So is phone or direct mail enough to have a positive effect on a person’s voting behavior? As the 2000 study below suggests, neither form is likely to increase voter turnout. At that time only in-person contact (via door to door canvasing or a live meeting with a candidate) are likely to move the needle. Canvassing increased the baseline of voter turnout by almost 10 percent.
Of course campaign tools are now more varied. We have many more ways to target voters, using public voter data and social media algorithms to reach potential supporters and voters. But getting real action may mean getting past the advertising clutter and stock appeals on social media to showing up as a citizen’s front door. One interesting study indicates that attitudes about transphobia could be moderated in about ten percent of the population if a personal appeal was made—again—at a homeowner’s front porch.
However promising these results, there is now reason to believe that our increasingly digital world as well as the long interregnum of Covid pose challenges to engaging others on their doorstep. A neighborly knock on the door seems to be greeted with more caution. One common alternative is to formally invite neighbors over to meet a candidate. In this format a city council candidate visits perhaps four homes over several days where a supporter has promised to fill their living room with potential supporters. The larger the constituency, the more the gathered group will hear from a volunteer, a candidate’s partner or staff member.
It is also good to remember that elections on won on the margins. Not everyone needs to be persuaded. In most cases a change of about 6 percent of those voting is enough to make the formerly defeated candidate the top vote getter.
