An election wrap-up by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, author of Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns

In the final weeks of the election, both campaigns and their allies have been hard at work in every competitive state, knocking on doors and calling voters at home. The “ground wars”, the parts of the campaigns that are waged door knock by door knock and phone call by phone call rather than by television advertisement, direct mail pieces, or online communications, only really emerge from the shadows just before Election Day, though they have in reality been meticulously planned long in advance, waged for months on end, and are based technical and organizational infrastructures built over the years by both major national parties and certain outside groups.

Journalists and scholars sometime talk and write about canvassing and the like as if this constituted some sort of old-fashioned “grassroots politics”, a left-over from a romantic past, but in reality volunteers knocking on doors are working side-by-side with paid part-time workers and full-time campaign staffers, and are guided by sophisticated data analysis done by specialized consultants working at their computers far away from the sound and fury on the streets of Youngstown, Ohio or the quiet determination of those trying to get out the vote in the suburbs of Arlington County, Virginia.

We know who won, but nobody but the campaigns themselves really knows how well they’ve done on the ground this time around. The Obama campaign and its allies have certainly repeatedly insisted they have an edge, and have a result to show for it. They also had the time, the experience, and the resources to make sure that they won the ground war, just as the Bush re-election team in 2004 took advantage of their head-start to outmaneuver the Democrats in several swing states. But the Romney campaign has also been talking a good (ground) game, and there is no reason to doubt that they have at the very least been considerably better prepared to fight for every last vote than the McCain campaign was in 2008. Ultimately, it may have been the Republican Party and the candidate Mitt Romney who lost the election more than it was the Romney campaign and its outside allies.

What do we know about the two ground war campaigns at this point?

In terms of reach, a Pew Research Center survey released just before the election showed that neither side had a clear advantage. In the swing states, a massive 66% of all voters report they have been contacted in person by supporters of one or both candidates. (The figure is 44% at the national level, higher than the final figure in both 2004 and 2008, and this is before the final get-out-the-vote push.) According to this data, the two campaigns have reached about the same number of people, and the overall figure will almost certainly be a record high when the dust has settled.

In terms of resources, it seems clear that the Obama campaign and its allies have invested more in field organizing that the Romney campaign and its allies. The Atlantic reports that the President has had more than 800 field offices across the country, more than twice as many as the Republicans have (the RNC runs most of Romney’s field campaign for him, in part for complicated campaign finance reasons). Labor unions and other progressive interest groups have thrown additional millions of dollars and thousands of volunteers into the fray, as have various conservative groups. (With some parts of Obama’s 2008 electoral base having lost some of their enthusiasm for him over the past four years and some traditionally Democratic constituencies generally turning out at lower rates than many Republican constituencies, it has also been even more important for him to turn out the vote.)

In terms of targeting, making sure that the door knocks and phone calls reach the right people, that the resources invested are effectively used, Republicans were for years clearly ahead of the Democratic party in terms of importing techniques from commercial marketing and building the databases and tools necessary to adopt them for political purposes. But from 2008 onwards with the consolidation of a variety of Democratic/progressive data services in first the company VAN (later VAN-NGP) and collaboration across the party and within the coalition of interest groups backing it, the President and his allies has build what by all accounts is a clear advantage in terms of targeting technology and expertise.

What is clear even before anyone has had time to pore over the election result or coax more honest accounts of what happened out of the people involved is that the two campaigns and their allies have both prioritized field as an absolutely essential part of their overall strategy, that they have invested tens (and probably even hundreds) of millions of dollars in it, dedicated thousands of staffers to it, mobilized countless volunteers to help with it, and utilized both new and old technologies to guide the work—and that they have done it in different ways, encountering different challenges along the way, and with different effects. Social scientists have much further work to do to really understand how the process works and what it means, for electoral outcomes, and for democratic processes.

All we know for sure is that it matters—all the support in the world is not worth a thing if people do not come out to vote. Obama was the clear favorite going in to Election Day, ahead in the polls in most swing states—but such leads have eroded before in the face of an effective and determined last-minute campaign effort (George W. Bush was ahead of Al Gore by about two points in 2000 but lost ground to the massive field effort of labor unions and others supporting the Democratic nominee, resulting in the famously close result). Making sure supporters actually come out requires sophisticated planning and careful organization, hard work from thousands of field staffers, and millions of hours spent canvassing and phone banking by volunteers and people working for modest pay. If the political winds are blowing strongly in one direction or another, all this work can be in vain. But in competitive races—for President, but for every other office too—every little counts, and close elections can be won or lost at the door.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford and assistant professor at Roskilde University in Denmark.

This weekend, the GOP plans a massive volunteer effort to make 2 million voter contacts, in the hopes of capitalizing on Romney’s strong performance in the first debate. But how important is personal campaign contact in this day and age? Is knocking on doors and making phone calls a quaint throwback to simpler times, or a powerful opportunity to sway the undecided voter? Rasmus Kleis Nielsen‘s new book Ground Wars is a look at how personalized political communication continues to impact electoral outcomes and with it, American democracy. Now as the presidential campaigns switch into high gear, he takes to Election 101 to look at how the ground wars are being waged, and to what effect, especially in the highly contested swing states.

Every Little Bit Counts…Especially for Romney

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

The Presidential election is nearing the home stretch, and both campaigns know every little bit counts as most likely voters are finally paying attention. Barack Obama is ahead in the polls in every swing state, and the Romney campaign will have to pull off a major upset to win in November.

In the final weeks, the bulk of media attention will focus on the debates, the daily battle to control the news agenda, and the ads released by the two campaigns, but under the cover of this “air war”, both sides are also preparing the final offensive in the “ground war” waged to capture every last persuadable swing voter and make sure every single sympathizer turns out to vote.

On the ground, the Obama and Romney campaigns are pursuing the same goal, but by different means. Both want to make that extra phone call and door knock to reach the undecided and go that extra mile to make sure the so-called “lazy partisans” get off the couch and cast their vote. But the ways in which they do it differ in important ways.

Barack Obama’s field operation is building on the staff, technology, and volunteer infrastructure of his highly successful 2008 campaign. President Obama does not seem to inspire the volunteer enthusiasm that Senator Obama did, but his campaign is more experienced, more generously staffed, and has had four years to further fine-tune their organizing and targeting technologies and test their tactics (in the battle around health care as well as in select races in the 2010 mid-terms). Efforts by local Democrats and especially organized labor will complement the Obama campaign in important ways, but the backbone of the President’s field operation is controlled by the Chicago headquarter and has been developed over the last four years at a deliberate pace.

Mitt Romney’s field operation, in contrast, is not even technically his. The Republican ground game is instead organized primarily through the Republican National Committee, which has invested millions in offices in swing states, hundreds of staffers on the ground, and updated technologies for targeting voters and organizing outreach. In addition, Romney will rely on help from outside allies including American Crossroads, the National Rifle Association, and the Christian Coalition, all of whom are engaged in well-financed voter outreach programs to make sure various Republican constituencies are turned out for Romney. Like the Republican National Committee, these outside groups have been able to plan their field operations well before it was known who the Republican nominee would be, but they have not had the advantage afforded their Democratic counterparts, who knew exactly who their candidate was.

These two campaigns wage very different ground wars—one campaign is relatively centralized, organized around the party’s presidential candidate and his campaign organization, whereas the other is more decentralized, organized partly around the national party organization but also a number of important outside allies, with less involvement of the candidate’s formal campaign organization.

Interestingly, we have seen a similar confrontation before, between two very different field operations—in 2004. Back then, it was also the incumbent, the Republican George W. Bush, who fielded a relatively centralized ground operation fueled mostly by volunteers, whereas the challenger, the Democratic John Kerry, relied on a wider coalition build in large part outside his formal campaign or even the auspices of the Democratic Party and partly reliant on paid canvassers. In retrospect, the relatively centralized apparatus spearheaded in 2004 by Bush’s two key political operatives  Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman is widely seen as having been more effective than the more sprawling coalition that Michael Whouley at the Democratic National Committee and Steve Rosenthal at the temporary outside campaign organization (pre-super PAC) “America Coming Together” strove to coordinate.

That difference is worth keeping in mind when the numbers start rolling in from campaigns keen to talk up their own ground game. As Election Day draws near, you will hear more and more talk about how many staffers each side has working in the field, how many offices they have in the swing states, how amazing their new technologies for targeting are, and how many millions of contacts they have made.

Experimental research documenting the impact of door knocks and phone calls proves that all this matters, and the monumental investment made in the ground war reflects that campaign operatives are increasingly focused on using personalized political communication as an integral part of their communications arsenal.

But ultimately, the political ground war is, like most other conflicts, not only about quantity—it is also about quality, about which campaign is better organized to get the most out of every dollar, every staffer, every volunteer hour invested in the ground war. That’s why we need to pay attention to every little detail, including how the two campaigns are organized and how they collaborate with their outside allies. Everything suggests that the Romney field operation is better than the McCain ground game in 2008, and benefits from more outside support. The question is whether it is good enough, faced with what appears to be a generously funded, battle-tested and supremely well-prepared Obama campaign.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford and assistant professor at Roskilde University in Denmark.