COM 221: Targeted vs. message-driven strategies

A very interesting story in today's Los Angeles Times contrasts the Republican and Democratic GOTV (get-out-the-vote) strategies in a Florida congressional district during the run-up to Tuesday's election.

The article, by LA Times reporters Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger, sets up the contrast in the lede -- between the Republican's nitche marketing and the Democrat's repetition of a simple message, over and over and over again:

BOCA RATON, FLA. — Jewish voters received a pamphlet about Israel's fight with Hezbollah. Spanish speakers heard radio ads about Fidel Castro. Seniors got recorded telephone calls from crooner Pat Boone, now 72, about Social Security.

As Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.) fights to keep his seat in Congress, he is drawing heavily from the Republican playbook of dividing voters by their backgrounds and interests and appealing to them with tailored pitches. His success — along with his party's hopes for hanging onto its congressional majorities — relies in part on databases and search tools used to identify sympathetic voters and move them to the polls.

Shaw's Democratic challenger has a far different strategy. Instead of specialized appeals, state legislator Ron Klein repeats a simple message to nearly every audience: Iraq is a mess, and it is time for a change.

That contrast underscores a central question to be answered Tuesday in this South Florida House district and other competitive races across the country: Which political force will prove stronger — the niche-marketing effort, led by GOP strategist Karl Rove and powered by computerized outreach methods, or the classic "throw the bums out" mood of an electorate uneasy with the Iraq war and unhappy with one-party rule?

Well, we'll find out Tuesday. But I think there's a broader lesson here -- both techniques are proven, market-tested and effective.

The dynamics of this particular election in that particular congressional district will probably determine the outcome. That's how elections work. But the way the two candidates are going about it is a good, very timely demonstration of the underlying principles of public relations.

And GOTV at bottom is about public relations. It's moving your latent public to an active public, and you can read about in our textbook, Public Relations: The Profession and the Practice by Dan Lattimore et al. So I'll skip over the stuff about Tuesday's election in the LA Times story and get back to public relations.

Here's how "the GOP strategy of narrow-casting and voter identification" plays out in Shaw's campaign:

On Friday, as in GOP campaigns across the country, the Shaw team's "72-hour plan" got underway — its final effort to reach people who, according to their profile in the party's national database, are likely to favor Republican candidates.

At a field office in Boca Raton, dozens of volunteers turned up to knock on doors and talk to voters. A staffer distributed clipboards with printed pages of names, addresses and detailed maps.

The printouts came from the "Voter Vault," the GOP's national database, which tagged voters with labels showing why they were worth contacting: Some were dubbed "socos" (social conservatives) or "fiscos" (fiscal conservatives) or "soft Dems" (crossover voters). Each had already been identified as ready to favor Shaw. The goal was to persuade each one, using hints from the database, to make the effort to go to the polls.

Party leaders have built a 72-hour plan for every significant GOP race in the nation. The effort was developed by Rove and Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman after the 2000 election, in which Democrats outpaced the GOP in grass-roots activism and nearly won the presidency.

The "Voter Vault" is a central element of the plan, and the party invested more than $15 million to update the system this year. So far this election cycle, it has guided 24 million phone or in-person contacts to conservative voters.

Following the plan, over the campaign's final three days, GOP field offices in Shaw's district must file updated spreadsheets every three hours to the state GOP in Tallahassee, showing how many voters have been personally contacted. State party officials report that data to national headquarters, where staff members make sure that individual campaigns are meeting their goals.

And here's what Klein, the Democrat, is doing to hone his message and drive it home:

Klein acknowledges that the GOP has an advantage in voter turnout, but said his campaign has spent a year building a field organization and a competing database. However, his database received only limited help from the national Democratic Party, and it has less detail than the GOP's.

Despite fewer resources, Klein's field director developed a program to reach seasonal residents, or "snowbirds," at their homes outside Florida. Klein's campaign has tried to identify residents of gated communities that are off-limits to candidates and canvassers, and to recruit volunteers within the walls. It also used a visit by former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, disabled in Vietnam, to reach out to veterans.

Klein says he has employed enough canvassers to contact 60,000 backers in the final three days; on Friday alone, the campaign says, it reached 7,000 people by phone or in person.

And Democrats are counting on additional help from an ambitious voter-contact program by labor unions, though it is not coordinated with Klein's campaign.

Yet Klein's campaign appears to be behind Shaw's, whose workers say they reached 15,000 people Friday and have a goal of contacting at least 100,000 in the campaign's closing days.

Klein's GOTV efforts are more traditional than the Republican GOTV whiz-bangery, relying on volunteers and labor unions, and they're also more reliant on the message. That's why Cleland visited the district.

It's pretty clear Klein is also relying on free media, news coverage of the issues that resonate with voters this year ... the war, stem-cell research, scandals in the House Republican caucus ... and his GOTV effort is primitive compared to Shaw's. At the moment, whatever advantage Klein might enjoy seems like it comes mostly from the free media. The Times reports:

After 2000, Shaw's district was redrawn by Florida's GOP-led legislature to include more Republicans. But this year, even some Democrats have heard from Shaw about his opposition to President Bush's stance on stem-cell research.

By Tuesday night, voters here and across the country will show whether such precision tactics can withstand the broader wave of anger that Klein hopes will send him to Washington. A poll in Sunday's Miami Herald showed Klein with a 10-point lead, suggesting that Democrats may soon be celebrating.

But there's another election in just two years, when Iraq and GOP scandals may not dominate the debate. So what would Democratic incumbents, forced to combat all of the Republican advantages, do then?

"Maybe we can learn from them in the future," Klein said of the Republicans' tactics.

If not, even Democratic strategists concede, their party could soon find itself relegated again to the back bench.

That 10-point lead in the public opinion polls could evaporate by Tuesday's election. Congressional districts are notoriously hard to sample, and the only poll that matters is on election day. But the GOTV techniques being used by Shaw and Klein alike will be around as long as we have elections.