Flipping GOP voters a long shot for Dems

Here’s some bad news for Democrats ready to spend millions of dollars to persuade working-class white voters to ditch President Trump and vote for them: You’re wasting your money.

Turns out that it’s really hard persuading voters to go your way in a partisan race if they weren’t already leaning in your direction. So concludes a new study from researchers at UC Berkeley and Stanford.

Or as David Broockman, an assistant professor of political economy at Stanford, and Joshua Kalla, a doctoral candidate in political science at UC Berkeley, wrote after studying 49 different campaigns where a Republican faced a Democrat:

“Our best estimate of the direct effects of campaign contact on Americans’ candidate choices in general elections is essentially zero.” That’s ze-to-the-ro. One hopes their research tosses another shovelful of dirt on the cynical, old-style school of campaigning that relies on blitzing voters with TV commercials they don’t watch and carpet-bombing their mailbox-

with truth-stretching flyers they don’t read in the last two months of a campaign.

The only people who still prefer campaigns like those are that sliver of the American population known as “political consultants” — those people building new back decks on their homes with the cut of money they get from buying expensive TV spots for their clients.

The study’s authors offer another suggestion: Try something different. Like spending time actually talking to voters.

“If Democrats want to win back working-class voters or if Republicans want to defend vulnerable incumbents through persuasion,” they write, “they would do well to heed this example: Don’t give up on persuasion; look for new ideas, be they about new modes, messages or messengers.”

The good news for Democrats is that some candidates and campaigns are already getting that message. Like Stacey Abrams, who is running for governor of Georgia.

Abrams, who was the Democratic minority leader in the Georgia Legislature before resigning in August to focus on her campaign, would be the first African American woman to be governor of any state in the nation’s 241-year history. People are “shocked but not surprised” that it has taken this long, Abrams told me on The Chronicle’s “It’s All Political” video podcast last week when she was in San Francisco for fundraisers.

She doesn’t plan to win by chasing working-class white voters in a Georgia that “is not the Georgia of ‘Gone With the Wind’ or even the Georgia of the (1996 Summer) Olympics,” Abrams said. Georgia is 53 percent white and 47 percent people of color. “In the Deep South, particularly in Georgia,” she said, “race is one of the strongest predictors of your political leanings.”

With that in mind, she’s going to try to form a coalition that includes the 23 percent of progressive whites who vote for Democrats and the state’s communities of color, who overwhelmingly back Democrats. She’s united that coalition before, in a smaller size. Since she became leader in 2011, Democrats have flipped six Republican legislative seats and held them. One reason for that success: The New Georgia Project that Abrams founded registered more than 200,000 voters of color between 2014 and 2016.

She spent more time turning out votes than trying to convince voters with different views.

“We have held (those seats in the Legislature) because we don’t pretend to be Republicans,” she said. On the trail, Abrams is fond of saying that Democrats lose, both in Georgia and nationally, because they keep trying to persuade “Republicans to be Democrats instead of getting Democrats to be Democrats.”

That’s because persuasion is hard — especially if done at the last minute. Abrams said that while Democrats often talk about turning out their base voters, they also often ignore African American, Latino and Asian American voters until a couple of months before election day.

“The challenge Democrats have had is that we talk a great game about the need to actually do that outreach, but we relegate that outreach until the last few weeks of the campaign to a very narrow sliver of voters,” she said. “And we repeatedly ignore those infrequent voters because they don’t vote. Well, they don’t vote because we don’t talk to them.

“So we create this unvirtuous cycle where they don’t vote, we don’t talk, and then we talk about why they don’t vote,” Abrams said.

California progressives may be getting the meses sage, too. This week, billionaire San Francisco Democrat and environmentalist Tom Steyer announced that his NextGen America advocacy group will work with the California Labor Federation to try to reach 500,000 voters in seven GOP-held congressional districts that Hillary Clinton won in last year’s presidential election.

The labor organization typically does big outreach campaigns, but this is different in a couple of ways: Its members are starting early and are going to try to have indepth conversations with voters, not just drop a flyer on the doorstep. Doing that, said California Labor Federation Executive SecretaryTreasurer Art Pulaski, “brings us to something that is much more indepth and long-term than we’ve ever done before.”

Typically, when progressives quantify how great their grassroots campaigns are, they will brag that they “knocked on 10,000 doors.” What goes unsaid: Maybe only 300 people answered the door when they heard that knock. And maybe only 20 changed their mind if they answered the door and had a conversation with the canvasser.

But NextGen leaders promise to focus on having deeper conversations with voters. “It won’t be cookie-cutter,” Steyer said. And they’re going to spend less time pleading with people who don’t like them to change their mind.

“A lot of our focus will be on turnout rather than persuasion,” Jamison Foser, a senior adviser at NextGen told me Wednesday. “We’ve learned that you can’t just direct some advertising at people late and expect them to turn out.”

NextGen will see how the program goes in California as they roll it out to swing states across the country. If they want to retake the House, progressives had better hope that others are learning that lesson, too.