1.7 "Does Campaigning Work?"

1.  What was the overall general finding of Broockman and Kalla’s analysis of campaign activities?

            Kalla and Broockman found that outreach activities don't have much of an effect on voters' choice of candidate in general elections.

2.  What two time frames did Broockman and Kalla analyze in their study?

            They analyzed campaign efforts two months before the election and right before election day.

3.  At what rate did they find that people were actually persuaded with campaign activities close to the election?

            Kalla and Broockman found that, if the campaign action happens within two months of election day, the average effect on voter preferences was effectively zero. About one in 800 people reached were persuaded, they estimate. 

4. How were the results different in the study between activities months before the election, and those that occur close to the election day?

            When the campaign action happens well before election day, and the effects are measured quickly thereafter, there's a real impact on opinions — but it disappears before election day. The sooner you get to the election, the more voters get set in their ways and choose candidates by their partisan alignment, and aren't persuadable by additional campaigning.

5. What types of voting are campaign activities most likely to impact voter outcomes?

            While campaigns can rarely persuade people in general elections, Kalla and Broockman do find that campaigning significantly increases support for primary candidates and ballot measures. And while your partisan identity tells you how to vote in general elections, it’s of much less help for ballot initiatives and primary elections.

6. What type of effect did they find that canvassing can have?

            Canvassing can have a major impact on voting especially when it starts well in advance of the election.

7. What potential lessons could their experiments have for political campaigns in the future?

            One takeaway is that campaigns and non-campaign groups like Working America could do well to focus more of their energy on boosting turnout at the end of a race than persuading voters earlier on. Another is that campaign funders should consider directing more money to primary election and ballot initiatives, where persuasion does appear possible.

8. Describe the two statewide cases where canvassing did have an effect on voter decisions.

The first case occurred in the 2008 US Senate race in Oregon. It was an unusual race; Oregon is a reliably blue state that’s had a Democratic governor for the past 30 years, but the two-term incumbent, Gordon Smith, was a moderate Republican. Smith was unusually pro-LGBTQ for a Republican at that time, most notably pushing for sexual orientation to be added to the federal hate-crimes statute. That led to a common misconception that he also favored abortion rights, when he actually identified as pro-life. With that in mind, Planned Parenthood Advocates of Oregon and NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon worked together on a campaign in which they identified pro-choice voters and targeted them with mailings and phone calls hoping to educate them on Smith's actual views, and the pro-choice views of his opponent Jeff Merkley. Crucially, the groups worked with political scientists to randomize which voters got these treatments.

The more intriguing case of persuasion working occurred in North Carolina. Working America, in the effort being studied by Kalla and Broockman, did an experiment early on in the election where canvassers left flyers attacking the Republican governor, Pat McCrory, for his signing of a "bathroom bill" restricting trans rights, which cost the state billions in business. The experiment concluded that the flyer was persuasive for black voters, but not white voters. Working America then adjusted its technique and only handed out the flyer to black households. By the end of the campaign, the effort as a whole was persuasive, due to this targeting.

9. What is the problem with campaign efforts to get new voters registered ?

Voter registration is costly; an experiment by Temple's Nickerson found that voter registration efforts cost about $60 per vote for campaigns running them, far more than turnout efforts.

10. Why are persuasion efforts mathmatically more effective than finding new voters?

            Persuasion efforts can effectively net campaigns two votes, by subtracting one from the opposing campaign too.