The Boy Who Could Change the World (17 page)

But because these are people with a history of donating, the calls are not always so overtly angry. Sometimes you reach practiced professionals who know just the questions to ask to determine if you're the kind of candidate they'll support. They'll angrily quiz you on their pet issue, sound out your support for business in general, or even begin deal making right over the phone.

I've heard of countless candidates who abhor call time. Running for office seems like a glamorous and important profession; it's difficult to lower yourself from that image to the reality that it consists mostly of begging strangers for money. Like children who hate doing homework, candidates devise all sorts of excuses and devices to avoid having to do it. But it is inescapable, and never-ending—even winning is no escape.

After the consultants comes the world of political staffers. These are the people you actually employ, as opposed to the consultants you just rent. Being a political staffer is a dark life. You spend one year out of every two working 90-hour weeks, rarely leaving the office, sleeping only with the other staffers who work on the campaign, and giving up any semblance of an outside life. Then you typically spend the other year unemployed.

Occasionally your candidate succeeds and you manage to get a job in their administration, but this is rare and limited. Most campaign skills don't translate well into office and even when they do, an office employs far fewer people than the campaign. So you try to pick up work on “issue campaigns,” organizations that try to use campaign tactics to get particular legislation passed. But without a strong
model and a clear deadline, issue campaigns are a pretty demoralizing experience on their own.

So the job attracts a specific kind of person, an odd type of person, who would give up a steady job to throw themselves into semiannual fits of obsession over a random person. (Every two years the staffer claims, “
This
guy is really special, he's the real deal,” without even a hint of self-consciousness.)

But the campaign staffers play little causal role in the campaigns, other than through the difficulty of hiring reliable people for such an unreliable job. So let us dwell no longer on their plight.

We have our team and their squabbling semblance of a strategy. But what does the actual campaign look like?

First, obviously, you raise money. A healthy war chest scares off potential opponents, gets you taken seriously by the press (before any actual votes are cast or polls are taken, the press usually judges candidates by their success in the “money primary”), and supplies you with the resources to run the rest of your campaign. This means the ability to raise money is crucial in its own right—before even a single dollar gets spent, the race is biased toward those who can fund-raise.

Then there is the “inside game” of collecting endorsements from local public officials, unions, interest groups, and the rest. These endorsements sometimes come with practical benefits—like lists of donors and volunteers that can be tapped—but mostly, like early money, they help give the candidate the air of viability to the press and public.

“Viability” is especially crucial in a primary because in a race without the usual two-party labels, so much of voting is based on the bandwagon effect: people like to pick a winner. Furthermore, in a simple plurality system like America's, voting for someone other than the top two candidates is essentially throwing your vote away. So it's crucial to make sure everyone considers you one of the top two.

Once you've met the threshold to be viable, you need to actually start moving people toward your side: persuasion. In a typical campaign, there is a long-running argument held in the media—through debates, dueling quotes to the press, competing public events, and
so on—which is then underscored through things like TV ads (in big campaigns) and mailers. The highly informed voters watch this argument like a prize fight, but they usually come into it rooting for a particular side and not waiting to be won over. The rest of the public glimpses it only through a dark glass. Key phrases and arguments glance their consciousness, perhaps enough to sway them one way or another, but rarely with any degree of significant thought.

As with the rest of campaign strategy, it's very unclear what affect any of this has. A massive experiment by Gerber et al. (2007) tested the effect of television and radio ad purchases during Rick Perry's (R-TX) 2006 campaign for governor. It was a four-way race pitting then Lieutenant Governor Perry against a Democratic House member, humorist Kinky Friedman, and the Republican comptroller, who was running as an independent. By randomizing when ads were purchased in different areas, and measuring their effects with follow-up polls, the study concluded that the television ads boosted Perry's vote share by about five points, irrespective of whether his opponents ran ads. However, the effects were short-lived, fading after a couple weeks.

All other measured effects have been on this scale. But such results are very hard to interpret because they come in the context of an already hard-fought race. We know the Republican is going to get a large percentage of the vote, and the Democrat will as well. But if Kinky Friedman bought a passel of television ads, would it boost his name recognition scores from zero percent to five percent (because TV ads are worth five points)? From zero percent to 25% (because they'd indicate he was a serious contender)? From zero percent to zero percent (because nobody will ever take him seriously)? It's hard enough to measure the effect of a simple action on the wider social world. It's practically impossible in a hard-fought zero-sum game like a political race.

But while time taken out to record ads is crucial, most of the candidate's days are spent on what's now called “earned media” (the old term, “free media,” was deemed misleading because it required too much work to really be “free”). These are the endless series of bogus campaign “events” held in the hopes of persuading some reporter to write about it or, even better, some television station to cover it.
The candidate goes to a steel mill and shakes hands, the candidate declares his opponent a tax cheat, the candidate attends a debate. Ideally, it gets another mention for the candidate in the papers and maybe a quick chance to include a sound bite or two.

Finally, there is the issue of turnout. Campaign progress is always measured in percentages, as if there is a static population of voters and the goal is simply to win more and more of them over to your side. But in most elections, most eligible voters don't vote—and this is especially true in the crucial primaries.

Most voters are pretty firmly tied to a party identity—political scientists have found that even folks who identify as “independent” voters usually vote straight party tickets. (For example, Tea Party activists may consider themselves independent of the Republican Party, but they're never going to vote for the Democrat.) As a result, there's very little room for persuasion in a general election (though that hasn't ever stopped a major campaign from trying) and turnout becomes the crucial factor.

Despite that, turnout is treated with far less importance than persuasion in the average campaign. Part of this seems to be because of a widespread misconception among politicos about how persuadable people are. After all, the entire campaign seems to be a debate between competing ideologies—it'd be hard to understand why you'd go through all that effort if nobody ever changed their mind. Part of it seems to be a result of always seeing things in percentages. Part of it may be the result of the Median Voter Theorem.

The Median Voter Theorem, a key result in rational choice politics, says that candidates both move to adopt the policy views of the median voter so as to get the maximum number of votes. If both candidates are right in the middle, with one just slightly to the left and one just slightly to the right, then they pick up the most votes—any move to an extreme would cede moderate voters to the remaining centrist.

Even a cursory look at any recent campaign will make clear the Median Voter Theorem doesn't hold in real life. It's hard to even think of a federal election where the candidates were barely distinguishable. This could be because of persistent “irrationality” on the basis of voters and candidates, but it could also be because of turnout
effects. If moving to the center causes people at the extremes not to show up, then it's not as costless as the MVT would suggest.

But there's also a rational reason for not focusing on turnout: convincing people to turn out is hard. Under some analyses turning out an average voter is actually more expensive than persuading one, when it'd have to be half the price to be cost-effective. That's because turning out a new voter increases your lead by just one vote, while persuading an existing voter increases it by two (one new vote for you and one vote less for your opponent). It takes a lot to get disaffected voters to the polls. By contrast, people who really like voting tend to do it every time no matter what's going on.

Those tend to be the people who vote in primaries, when turnout is especially low. As a result, even though there's more room to increase your vote through turnout, turnout is even less of a factor. Even if the entire primary electorate considers themselves to be hard-left Democrats, you can fight a vicious campaign about who's the real hard-left Democrat in the race and who's the corporate shill. Because turnout is so low these battles are usually fought among very high-information voters, who follow the twists and turns of a complicated campaign.

All the tactics of persuasion have been tested on turnout as well—and much more rigorously, since public voting records allow you to costlessly measure their effect. (There's no need to poll the potential voters; you just look up their voting history.) Tactics like knocking on voters' doors have been found to be surprisingly effective, and calling people up and even mailing them letters can be cost-effective under the right circumstances.
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Measuring these effects is a burgeoning field of study, especially since IRBs will let you work to turn voters out but not to persuade them who to vote for.

Much of this work (calling, knocking on doors) can be done by well-harnessed volunteers. But even there, many campaigns turn to trained professionals (or in the case of phone calls, trained robots) to do the work for them—an expensive proposition. The ads and
mailers are quite expensive as well, which is the main place where all those millions of dollars in campaign spending go.

Still, our understanding of what effect any of this has is still in its infancy. The first major study
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was just over a decade ago; even basic methodological issues haven't been worked out. So while we know that everyone spends a ton of money campaigning, we don't really know what difference it makes.

After all this campaigning, Election Day arrives. The candidate goes out in the morning to vote—one more earned media event—and then spends the rest of the day running around town, shaking hands, trying to get people to go out and vote. The field team executes on their get-out-the-vote strategy, getting periodic check-ins from each of their branch offices.

Volunteers drop by the polls to make sure everything is in order. The more ambitious ones ask to see the list of people who have voted so far. This information is then reported back to headquarters and supposedly used to redeploy resources where they're most needed, although doing this intelligently during the rush of Election Day is rather difficult.

Some campaigns have so many volunteers that they can station people at key polling places to listen for each voter's name as they request a ballot. The volunteer can then check this voter's name off on their list and send the results back to HQ so the campaign has a live list of who's voted and who hasn't. People who haven't voted yet then get barraged with phone calls until the man at the polling place sees them get their ballot.
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But for campaign leadership, Election Day is often an anticlimax. Everything has already been planned—unless there's some late-breaking emergency, there's nothing more you can do except watch the staffers execute and check your email for exit poll data. As the
polls begin to close, the staffers file out to the campaign party, usually held at a nearby hotel, while leadership stays back, continually reloading the early election returns and trying to decipher what it all means. (“We're doing surprisingly well in the south!”)

Eventually even they head over to the party and, as the results come in, emotion starts to build in the crowd. The candidate is with his team of advisors in a decadent suite high above, praying he doesn't have to make The Call. But then reality sets in, his jaw sets, and he excuses himself to the other room to dial the number.

Or else—the phone rings! He goes to the other room, comes back with a big grin, bounds down the stairs, through the cavernous hallways, through the kitchen, and bounds out onstage! All smiles and waves! The crowd is cheering! They conceded! We won!