I don’t like mentioning the name of the GOP candidate, but if you’re interested you can listen to a discussion between Leon Neyfakh and Sasha Issenberg about his campaign, or rather, lack thereof.
It struck me because I am, for the most part, a huge fan of Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert. He did a corporate gig at my former employer while he was still working a day job at Pacific Telephone, and he was brilliant. His comic strip is brilliant. His books are thought-provoking. And brilliant. For the last year, he’s been using his blog to tell anyone who will listen that the GOP candidate is a master persuader (just like Adams) and will win the general election in a landslide. It scares me because Adams is a genius.
But.
Sasha Issenberg, author of Victory Lab, The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, makes some strong points in the podcast linked above. Specifically, U.S. general elections aren’t about persuasion they are about turnout. Adams says the GOP candidate will change all the rules and romp to victory. Issenberg wasn’t arguing directly with Adams, but noted that the Republican has 30 people in his field operation, while Clinton has 700.
What difference does that make? Clinton is preparing to mount a field operation to get out the vote. The man with the spray tan has eschewed such things as data-driven campaigning and get out the vote. He says he doesn’t need them.
Issenberg also noted that, in today’s hyper partisan political environment, only about 8 to 10% of the voters are actually persuadable. The rest of the voters make up their minds based on party affiliation and are immune to persuasion, or facts for that matter. Plus, he noted, if you have a get out the vote effort that is not done properly you will be getting out the vote for your opponent. Which is worse than no get out the vote effort at all.
Even if Adams is right, and Mr. Funnyhair persuades vast swaths of low-information, seldom-voting Americans to prefer him, it is useless if they don’t turn out at the polls. Again, this is the downside of wholesale politics versus retail (see article above). The candidate is not going to conclude each speech with, “Here are the deadlines to register to vote in all 50 states, and the hours the polls are open. Then I will read you a list of all 185,000 polling places. Listen for yours.”
Here are the numbers:
|
Voter Registration Statistics |
Data |
|
Total number of Americans eligible to vote |
218,959,000 |
|
Total number of Americans registered to vote |
146,311,000 |
|
Total number of Americans who voted in the 2012 Presidential election |
126,144,000 |
|
Percent of Americans who voted in the 2012 Presidential election |
57.5 % |
Now, Ronald Reagan believed facts were stupid things (I have never believed that was a slip of the tongue), but facts are facts. A wholesale campaign, dependent on rallies of thousands and TV coverage of millions will reach 218 million people, of whom a third cannot vote. And 14% of those who can vote, won’t.
Do you even know where your polling place is? I don’t, but I know how to look it up, and I care enough to take the time to do so. In the Republican primary, the candidate was speaking to the fired-up and the converted. In the general election—not so much. All of his new fired-up independent and nominally Democratic voters may find, on election day, that they aren’t registered, don’t know the polling hours and can’t find their precinct. Election day isn’t even a holiday in the U.S., so some people have to take time off from work to vote. And some people can’t or won’t do that, especially the high-school educated angry white men that form the candidate’s core constituency.
This issue is particularly ironic for a Republican (if he really is a Republican) since it is Republicans who have led the nationwide effort to make voting harder, through such tactics as eliminating early voting, reducing the number of precincts and making registration harder. They will surely succeed in suppressing the votes of poor and minority voters. Alas for them, they will also suppress the votes of unenthusiastic white votes as well.
To get people to vote, you need a ground game. Not only does he who must not be named have no ground game, he says he thinks he doesn’t need one.
Adams is probably right about the master persuader. A majority of Americans may come to believe the GOP candidate should be our next president. But he actually becomes president only if a majority of the people who actually vote think he should win. And for that matter, only if a majority of people in the right states who actually vote think he should win (because Electoral College).
And while Adams says everything is different now, I’m betting on human nature. People are lazy (I am sure Adams would agree), and tend to do what they are told or asked to do. Hillary Clinton’s thousands of volunteers (who will be recruited by her 700 and growing field staff) will ask millions of people to vote for her. Mr. Funnyhair won’t ask because he doesn’t think he needs to. We shall see if he is right.