Political parties tap apps to track, persuade voters
Both the Republicans and the Democrats have stepped up their ground games in Arkansas as Election Day approaches, finding new ways to reach individual voters using technology and an unprecedented amount of manpower.
According to organizers for both parties, they’re using technology in new ways to identify voters, target messages and get those people to the polls. And both parties are banking on high-tech computer apps to actually make retail politics more personal.
A new Republican technology used by the door-knocking volunteers in Arkansas, a phone application called GOP Data Center and Beacon, allows volunteers to update real-time information about voters.
“It’s no longer about quantity of voter contacts. I mean, that’s still important. But the focus in this ground game is on quality interactions,” said Fred Brown, the spokesman for the Republican National Committee’s Arkansas Victory 365 campaign.
Brown said the party has opened 11 field offices, hired more than 50 paid field
workers and signed up more than 500 volunteer precinct captains in every area of the state.
The party isn’t revealing the exact number of volunteers or how many voters they’ve contacted. Activists are praising the new technology.
“When I used to do doorto-door years ago we had this paper walk book and that was awful,” said volunteer Alysson Humphrey, 22, a senior at Arkansas Tech University. “Now we have this great app that tells you who lives there, what number the house is, it has the form right on it. It’s super quick, and it’s allowed me to get a lot more houses done.”
At a campaign stop last week at the Little Rock field office, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus talked about the new focus on technology; an effort that was launched one year before the 2014 general election.
“We call it Victory 365, which is our plan to be everywhere all the time with nonstop ground game, data and being obsessed with the mechanics,” he said. “Some entity out there has to be obsessed with the things that some people might find to be pretty boring, but I happen to believe that races are won and lost on the ground. They are won and lost now with data and infrastructure and technology.”
Erik Dorey, deputy campaign manager for Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, said new technology has helped Pryor supporters to track 244,449 attempts to reach voters in person or on the phone since the program ramped up in June, recruiting record numbers of volunteers. But, he said talking about the details of how the technology works would put the party at a disadvantage just two months before the election.
The goals of creating a personalized campaign pitch and having neighbors talk to neighbors is the same at both parties. Dorey said canvassers still hold clipboards instead of using phones to collect data on voters because the campaign feels like it’s more personal. But all of that survey data is entered into an application that targets get-out-the-vote efforts on Election Day.
Dorey said the personal approach has helped the party recruit unprecedented numbers of midterm election volunteers, although the precise number isn’t being disclosed. In June, the party had recruited more volunteers than the 1,216 volunteers signed up during the entire 2012 midterm election cycle. He also said 70 percent are people who have never volunteered at a campaign before.
The Democratic Party has opened 40 field offices, including some in areas of the state that have never had a Democratic field office before, including Lonoke County and several others.
“This year we’ve built and are continuing to build the largest and most sophisticated grass-roots ground game that Arkansas has ever seen,” Dorey said.
Pryor is in the midst of a nationally watched Senate race with Republican challenger U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton. It’s the most expensive race in Arkansas political history, and it’s flooding the Arkansas airwaves with campaign advertising.
“What wins this election for Mark Pryor and our ticket are these one-on-one conversations from volunteers who are invested in this election,” Dorey said.
For some Republicans, technology has been a sore point. Effective technology was a key reason Barack Obama was able to organize a young, energized base to take the White House in 2008; ineffective technology undermined Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s 2012 get-out-the-vote efforts, according to news reports.
The ORCA implosion, as it’s called by pundits and poll watchers, involved an application called ORCA used by the Romney campaign to get supporters to the polls. The decades-old paper version called strike sheets — lists of voters checked off by volunteers when those voters appeared at the polls — was supposed to be replaced by an easy-to-use electronic version that would allow volunteers to more effectively contact registered voters on Election Day who hadn’t yet voted.
However, too many volunteers tried to use ORCA, causing it to crash on the day America went to the polls, preventing volunteers from having contact information for Republican-leaning voters.
Jeff Gulati, associate professor of political science at Bentley University and a member of the executive board for the Informational Technology & Politics section of the American Political Science Association, said technology is going to have a “profound effect” on this election cycle.
“What they’re trying to do is identify voters that would be sure to support their candidate and make sure that they turn out on Election Day,” Gulati said. “It’s not like taking a poll to see who’s the most popular. It’s cultivating that intensity of support through targeted messages and other means and getting those voters to show up.”
Gulati said that despite the Democrats’ reputation of having the better technology and ground game, it was Republicans who started the political technology wars in the 1990s.
Tired of seeing Democrats in power, Republicans hoped new technology would help them make a breakthrough, Gulati said.
“The out party tries to catch up and come up with the next new thing,” he said. “The Obama campaign was different than what Democrats had done before. Now you see Republicans are much more engaged with the technology and ground game in general.”
Humphrey and a Republican staff member huddled over a smartphone at the Victory 365 office Saturday deciphering a cluster of blue dots. Each dot was a person or household with data collected on voting histories, polling responses, party registrations and deeper information on important issues to that voter — gun rights or health care for example.
They chose a Cammack Village neighborhood with more independent voters to maximize their efforts before the worst heat of the day set in. Some people answered the door and quickly affirmed their vote for Cotton and other Republican candidates. But even those voters who said they planned to vote for Pryor gave helpful information that will allow the party to target mailers and other voter visits to try to persuade them to vote for Republican candidates.
The last time Andrea Schafer, 69, volunteered for a campaign, it was her father Maurice Britt’s successful 1966 Republican campaign for lieutenant governor. But when a friend’s son who was organizing the new Democratic Lonoke office asked if she wanted to help, Schafer began making 60 to 80 phone calls almost every weeknight for Mark Pryor.
Smartphones aren’t essential; the office has landlines.
“In Lonoke, and small towns, as far as I can see, it’s still door-to-door, telephone calls, and mail-outs. It’s personal contact that matters,” she said. “Everybody has been very kind … not necessarily positive in terms of who they are voting for, but everybody’s nice. They know you’re a member of the community and they’re willing to listen to you.”
Tracking those “soft responses,” when voters are willing to listen and talk about issues instead of giving brief, hard answers, are key voters both parties will be trying to win over during the next two months. Both parties plan to continue those efforts past the election, cultivating voter lists and keeping volunteers organized and ready for the 2016 presidential election.