The 72 Hour Machine

Very good, not a miracle.

If I wasn’t involved in a couple other projects I’d actually like to do some research on this. The Republicans have sold the operation as a magic bullet and people have bought it because they’ve done better than expected in 2 elections in a row. Reporters buy into the myth more than the reality because they aren’t much better at numbers than the average voter.

The thing is I’m not sure it’s really the key. It’s a good system and they do a decent job with it, but like all turnout operations, personal contact is more important than mail and most micro-targeting is by mail or phone. And I think this is the story everyone misses. What really got the GOP over the hump in 2002 was national security. In 2004 though, it was something related, but not the same as the 72 hour project–it was that people organized themselves. People from churches got together and canvassed on their own (someone tell Dennis Byrne-it’s a scandal). The self-organizing realized one of the aspects of the Dean campaign that the Dean campaign never fully realized.

How much difference can turnout really make? Consider the punishing arithmetic. Take a House race that this year would otherwise be 52-48 Democratic. What would turnout efforts have to achieve to overturn the putative victory?

Use white evangelical Protestants as an example. They comprised 23 percent of the national electorate in both 2000 and 2004, so let’s say they are the same proportion of our imaginary Congressional District. Say the 72-hour program was spectacularly — increasing their turnout by 20 percent while every other segment of the electorate held constant. In that case, evangelicals would constitute 26.4 percent of the electorate.

Assume for the sake of argument they continued to give the GOP the same 78 percent of their votes they gave to George Bush in 2004. Such heroic efforts would still result in a Democratic victory. And if white evangelical Protestants only offered 68 percent of their votes to Republicans, all that work would result in less than a 1-point shift in the vote. And that calculation makes the very unlikely assumption that one side enjoys great success while the other does nothing.

How likely is a 20 percent increase in turnout based on a GOTV effort? The best serious academic estimate is that all the GOTV work in the presidential campaign of 2004 increased turnout not by 20 percent, but by about 3 percent.

If you go back to 1994 the polling wasn’t so horrible in some respects–it didn’t look like Democrats were all going to stay home, but what it did show was some small differences in motivation that over the country led to a big trend in terms of seats. Democrats didn’t all stay home, but a small, but higher than usual did stay home more than usual and a small, but higher number of Republicans came out that year than usual and that led to what looked like a landslide. And in one sense it was.

With the advent of modern databases and easy to merge demographic information, micro-targeting can be done in a number of ways and from what I understand the Republican system is a bit different from most of the Democratic micro-targeting, but not necessarily much more effective. The biggest advantage comes from having it done relatively broadly.

I bet the biggest thing in 2004 was the self-organization and I think Karl Rove knows that too. That’s one reason he plays to the base so heartily is he knows that motivated volunteers can often do more by personal contact than the 30th mailer one receives in a campaign season.