Targeting Voters: Citizens and Partisan Get-Out-The-Vote Efforts

Abstract

The major political parties have put more resources into their get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts since the 2000 elections. Both parties have turned to "microtargeting" to develop sophisticated strategies to contact those citizens who can be persuaded to turn out and to vote for their candidate. In this paper, we examine who gets contacted by the parties and whether the parties’ investments in microtargeting appear to produce different patterns in contacting over time. Of course, parties have always sought to turnout their most loyal supporters on election day, but if the parties' microtargeting strategies work as intended we should see individual partisanship being less predictive of who gets contacted as parties are better able to contact citizens who may not be ardent supporters but are persuadable. Using data from the National Election Studies for both congressional and presidential elections from 1990-2008, we examine who is most likely to be contacted and whether the characteristics of targeted potential voters have changed over time.