Tag Archives: gotv

Weekly Poll Update: Hillary Clinton Still Flying High

by pwbqczv Posted on October 21, 2016

Mother Jones

Sam Wang’s meta-margin hasn’t changed much in the past week. He now has Hillary Clinton leading Trump by 4.4 percentage points:

Wang’s current prediction is that Clinton has a 99 percent chance of winning and will rack up 339 electoral votes. He still has the Senate tied, 50-50, but the Democratic meta-margin is up to 1.7 percent and the probability of Democratic control is 79 percent. On the House side, he has Democrats up by about 5 percent, which is not enough for them to win back control. Here’s Pollster:

Clinton has dropped a point and is now 7.3 percentage points ahead of Trump. For what it’s worth, if you look only at high-quality live phone polls, they have Clinton up by a whopping 9.5 percentage points. In the generic House polling, Pollster has Democrats ahead by 5.2 points, down a bit from last week.

If you add to all this the fact that Clinton almost certainly has a far superior GOTV operation compared to Trump, she could win the election by anywhere from 6 to 10 points depending on what happens over the next couple of weeks. Republicans appear to have resigned themselves to this, and are now putting all their energy into downballot races. This means the Senate is likely to be very close, and the House will probably stay in Republican hands—though only by a dozen seats or so.

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Weekly Poll Update: Hillary Clinton Still Flying High

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How Democrats Plan to Address the Midterm Blues

by BettinaYLPM Posted on April 2, 2014

Mother Jones

How big is the midterm penalty for Democrats? Eric McGhee tells us in handy chart form. Given President Obama’s current approval rating, his model says Democrats would have a 75 percent chance of holding the Senate if this were a presidential election year. But in a midterm, Dems have only a 10 percent chance:

Ed Kilgore writes about this a lot, and warns Democrats not to get too mired in fruitless efforts to attack the “enthusiasm gap.” After all, the kind of people affected by enthusiasm are the kind of people who are likely to vote anyway. A loud populist message might thrill them, but it won’t do much to affect turnout among minorities and the young, who typically have more tenuous connections to politics. Instead, Democrats should focus on old-fashioned efforts to get out the vote. Or, more accurately, brand new rocket science efforts to get out the vote:

There’s plenty of evidence that turnout can be more reliably affected by direct efforts to identify favorable concentrations of voters and simply get them to the polls, with or without a great deal of “messaging” or for that matter enthusiasm (no one takes your temperature before you cast a ballot). Such get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts are the meat-and-potatoes of American politics, even if they invariably get little attention from horse-race pundits. Neighborhood-intensive “knock-and-drag” GOTV campaigns used to be a Democratic speciality thanks to the superior concentration of Democratic (especially minority) voters, though geographical polarization has created more and more equally ripe Republican areas.

….If that’s accurate, then the most important news for Democrats going into November is that the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee is planning to spend $60 million on data-driven GOTV efforts specially focused on reducing the “midterm falloff” factor. The extraordinary success of Terry McAuliffe’s 2013 Virginia gubernatorial campaign in boosting African-American turnout for an off-year election will likely be a model.

Messaging matters. But in midterm elections, shoe leather matters more, even if it’s mostly digital shoe leather these days.

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How Democrats Plan to Address the Midterm Blues

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Poli Sci Profs Say Poli Sci Wizardry Didn’t Help Obama In 2012 After All

by KrystalMckenney Posted on February 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ryan Enos and Anthony Fowler have a new paper out that tries to figure out if the Obama campaign’s widely reported techno-wizardry in the 2012 election really produced a big get-out-the-vote advantage over Mitt Romney. Apparently not:

The Obama campaign of 2012 has been championed as the most technologically-sophisticated, evidence-based campaign in history while the Romney campaign was more traditional. Does this difference manifest itself in the data? Did the technological sophistication of the Obama campaign lead their GOTV efforts to be significantly more effective than Romney’s?

…. Our analysis, while admittedly crude, allows us to roughly compare the effectiveness of the Obama and Romney campaigns in mobilizing their respective supporters. Despite the technological sophistication of the Obama campaign and its devotion to a data-driven, evidence-based campaign, we see similar mobilization effects on both sides of Figure 2. It appears that the two campaigns were roughly comparable in their ability to turn out supporters.

Logic and conventional wisdom suggest that you should concentrate your GOTV effort on strong partisans, since these are the people most likely to vote for you. These are the voters Enos and Fowler analyze, and they conclude that both campaigns mobilized strong partisans about as well. Strongly organized precincts showed a 7 percent improvement in turnout on both sides.

Now, it could well be that the Obama campaign spent more money on GOTV and was thus able to influence more voters. It’s also possible that Obama was able to perform sophisticated targeting that went beyond just the most rabid partisans. So take this with a grain of salt. But if Enos and Fowler are right, the poli-sci-driven rocket science of the Obama campaign didn’t actually make much difference. The core GOTV efforts of both campaigns were about equally effective.

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Poli Sci Profs Say Poli Sci Wizardry Didn’t Help Obama In 2012 After All

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