RALEIGH, N.C. — The foot soldiers in the battle for control of the Senate come well armed. With data-infused smartphones and tablets in hand, they have an unprecedented amount of information about the potential voters they are trying to persuade and more money than ever in a midterm election to do it.
This fusion of old-school door knocking and an overlay of data analytics has been changing elections for at least three cycles, but each advance builds on its predecessor with voters largely unaware why the canvassers know so much about them.
So now, even before Emma Benson, a field director for the conservative political organization Americans for Prosperity, knocks on a door, she has more than 700 data points about the person behind it, like magazine subscriptions, car ownership (make, model, year), propensity for voting, and likes and dislikes mined from Facebook and Twitter, from rock bands to baseball teams.
All fodder for her pitch for voters to throw out Senator Kay Hagan, a Democrat.
Advertisement
With the political tide against them, Democrats’ last chance to hold their Senate majority comes down to a vigorous get-out-the-vote effort. But the fight has changed.
Republicans, outflanked by a superior Democratic turnout operation in the past two presidential elections, have been spending tens of millions of dollars to improve data collection to achieve a rough parity.
“The left is still ahead on the ground — they just have more resources,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, referring more to turnout muscle than to money. Yet the steeper climb is for Democrats, whose support among young, female, and minority voters historically drops off in midterm elections.
President Obama’s approval ratings are hovering near all-time lows, and Republicans have successfully persuaded their core supporters that the election is a referendum on him.
In few states has the ground game been as intense as in North Carolina, where Hagan is locked in a close race with Thom Tillis, a Republican. Maria Palmer, a Chapel Hill town councilwoman working a phone bank for Hagan, understands why, from her outreach to Hispanic voters.
Advertisement
“Many of them were not planning on voting,” said Palmer, who is from Peru. “They’re angry there has been no immigration reform. They’re angry with a lot of things.”
Some of the grass-roots campaign efforts have an underground dimension. Mysterious fliers with a grainy image of a lynching have appeared in black neighborhoods, warning voters that if Hagan loses, Obama will be impeached.
A conservative group is running online ads to draw young voters away from Hagan and to the Libertarian candidate, Sean Haugh; the ads say, “Get Haugh, get high,” promoting his position to legalize marijuana.
And if voters are confused about who exactly is trying to get them to the polls, there is good reason.
Americans for Prosperity on the right and Planned Parenthood, labor-backed Working America and the League of Conservation Voters, among others, on the left are augmenting the robust efforts by the campaigns and the parties themselves.
Americans for Prosperity, financed by the billionaire brothers David H. and Charles G. Koch, is the most significant player on the Republican side, providing far more clout than either Tillis or the Republican Party.
“As far as large-scale, smart operations, nobody on our side compares,” said Donald Bryson, Americans for Prosperity’s North Carolina director.
Advertisement
For all the labor and money spent on turnout, dividends often pay out in the margins, affecting only a few percentage points, but can swing a close election.
On Wednesday, Seth Noble went door to door on Penny Lane in Cary with a brief soft sell.
“Would you take a two-question survey? Just two questions?” Noble, 24, a North Carolina State University senior working for the North Carolina Republican Party, asked potential voters. Hagan or Tillis? Voting early or on Nov. 4?
The night before in Chapel Hill, Pat Wellington, a Hagan volunteer, worked her way through an online call sheet at a campaign phone bank. She urged a likely Hagan voter to vote early, saying his polling place could be very busy on Election Day and reminding him of his neighborhood’s early voting location.
Workers like Wellington and Noble are, in the end, critical to any ground campaign, no matter how sophisticated data collection and targeting models are, said Sasha Issenberg, author of “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns.”
“The great irony of the modern ground game is it’s this meeting of incredibly modern analytics and data married to very old-fashioned delivery devices,” he said.
“It’s people knocking on doors; it’s people making phone calls out of phone banks; but the calculations that are determining which door and which phone are different.”