From Campaigns & Elections:

Where do the most likely voters get their campaign news? Well it’s not late-night comedy shows or Twitter, that’s for sure. It’s actually newspapers. A whopping 80 percent of voters 35 and older are regular readers of newspapers in print or online. Yes, I said online. According to another national survey in January of this year, Moore Information’s American Voters Media Use Study, one in four Americans report using a mobile device for campaign news and of those newspaper sources are the number one choice for 58 percent. Even among young voters who do use smartphones et al for campaign news a whopping 62 percent go to newspaper sources. And it’s not just “mobile devices.” Newspaper websites rank #1 in 22 of the top 25 largest markets.

Need more proof that newspapers have made a comeback when it comes to political news and advertising? In the 2002 elections, the newspaper industry collected a paltry $35 million for political advertising. It’s likely that more money was spent on bumper stickers that year. But fast forward to 2010 and the newspaper industry increased their take nearly tenfold to over $300 million in political ad sales.

Download the”Readers Vote, Voters Read”  PowerPoint presentation on how and what voters read.

From the Daily Dish:

Jonah Lehrer examines group creativity. The article’s jumping-off point:

Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.

From the National Journal:

What kinds of questions and values statements provoke the sharpest divide between left and right? The team looked at responses to 107 questions and found that the most divisive questions included those in the following areas:

1) WAR, PEACE, VIOLENCE, EMPATHY WITH THE WORLD:

On key questions and statements in this category, liberals scored high, conservatives low: “I believe peace is extremely important”; “Understanding, appreciation, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature”; “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal”; “How close do you feel to people all over the world?”

On other key questions in this area, conservatives scored high, and liberals low: “War is sometimes the best way to solve a conflict”; “There is nothing wrong in getting back at someone who has hurt you.”

2) CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; MORAL ELASTICITY; AUTHORITY:

Again, on some questions in this category, liberals scored high, conservatives low: “I believe that offenders should be provided with counseling to aid in their rehabilitation”; “What is ethical varies from one situation and society to another.”

On other questions, conservatives scored high and liberals low: “People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed”; “Respect for authority is something all children need to learn”; “I believe that ‘an eye for an eye’ is the correct philosophy behind punishing offenders”; “The ‘old-fashioned ways’ and ‘old-fashioned values’ still show the best way to live”; “It feels wrong when … a person commits a crime and goes unpunished.”

3) THE POOR, REDISTRIBUTION, FAIRNESS:

Liberal high, conservative low: “It feels wrong when … an employee who needs their job, is fired”; “I think it’s morally wrong that rich children inherit a lot of money while poor children inherit nothing”; “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.”

Conservative high, liberal low: “[I place a high value on] safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self”; “[It's desirable when] employees [who] contribute more to the success of the company receive a larger share”; “[I value] social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources.”

4) MORALS, HEDONISM, SELF-FULFILLMENT, HIERARCHY:

Liberals high, conservatives low: “I see myself as someone who … is original, comes up with new ideas”; “Pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself”; “What is ethical varies from one situation and society to another.”

Conservative high, liberal low: “If certain groups stayed in their place, we would have fewer problems;” “People should be loyal to their family members, even when they have done something wrong;” “Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs that traditional culture provide”; “[I favor] restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms.”

Their findings show how profound the chasm is on values questions between liberals and conservatives. Generally speaking, not only do liberals place high importance on peace, mutual understanding, and empathy for those who have difficulty prevailing in competition, they demonstrate concern for equality of outcome, while conservatives place pointedly low or negative importance on such values. 9 On the other side, conservatives believe that the use of force is a legitimate method of conflict resolution across a range of domains, from war to law enforcement to the discipline of children. 10 Conservatives are more likely to believe in an “eye for an eye,” are more likely to respect received tradition, and are overwhelmingly committed to the proposition that individuals are responsible for their own economic condition — all views rejected by liberals.

Andrew Sullivan neatly summarizes:

Sasha Issenberg assembles evidence:

Under some circumstances, they can motivate people to vote. Before New York City’s  2005 mayoral election, Fordham University professor Costas Panagopoulos decided to take his curiosity about the effectiveness of signs to the streets. In the only known randomized academic experiment on the subject, Panagopoulos matched 14 pairs of Manhattan voting locations with similar turnout levels in previous elections. In each pair, he randomly designated one location as a control and the other as an experimental treatment: a small group of volunteers were dispatched to a nearby intersection, where they stood for 11 hours on election eve with white 2-foot -by-3-foot signs with “VOTE TOMORROW” written in blue. Once the polls had closed, Panagopoulos checked the numbers of votes cast in each of the 28 districts, and found that the ones visited by his sign-wavers had 37 percent turnout, nearly four points higher than those that didn’t.

Panagopoulos attributed that boost to the value of a quick reminder and speculated that seeing one’s neighbors publicly promoting the cause might instill a sense of social pressure to vote. That’s why Panagopoulos designed his experiment to measure if signs could change behavior on the boulevard, rather than just inspiring an already convivial small-town Main Street. “Detecting environmental effects in New York City, the epitome of urban anomie, would produce more convincing evidence,” Panagopoulos wrote.

and

As a working organizer, it surprised me that the principal effect organizers are going for wasn’t mentioned in the article or contemplated by the study. The effect we look for when asking a supporter to participate in a visibility campaign is an increase in the commitment of the supporter. Having taken the step of contributing resources – whether money or lawn space – to the campaign, a supporter has a personal investment in the success of the campaign and so is likely to do more. Sometimes this means more donating (and since donations are quantifiable, many campaigns focus on that), but what it will almost always mean is that the supporter will be motivated to advocate for the candidate among friends and family. That advocacy, which comes with commitment, is where the real persuasive value of lawn signs lies.

Slate writes:

In 2008, 14 percent of homes displayed a sign for a candidate, and 65 percent of them were for Democrats. A few traits were consistent across party lines: Young people, generally less politically active than older folks, were more likely to display a sign. (In the survey, young people indicated that signs were one of the forms of activism with which they were most comfortable.) The act of putting a sign in a window seems as contagious as leaving one of its panes broken: Those whose neighbors had signs were more likely to have one themselves, regardless of whether they supported the same party or different ones. Those whose houses were exposed to greater levels of car traffic—Makse and Sokhey coded every thoroughfare in their precincts into one of six categories, from “dead end” and “main artery”—were more likely to put out signs, suggesting that the motivation to put one out was more “strategic” (to reach as many people as possible) than “expressive” (a need to be public about one’s allegiances).

Voters decorate their lawns. In 2006, Auburn agricultural economist David N. Laband, who had previously conducted studies showing that people who wore campaign buttons and checked the Federal Election Commission contribution box on their tax returns were more likely to vote, started looking at signs. Along with colleagues Ram Pandit and John P. Sophocleus, they mapped Auburn, Ala., neighborhoods south of Interstate 85 and marked which houses displayed an American flag on Memorial Day and July 4. Once football season kicked off in the fall, they documented expressions of support for the Auburn Tigers with a flag, sign, pom-pom sticker, or an inflated figure of Aubie, the school’s mascot. Just before the elections they went back to the same neighborhood with an eye out for candidate signs. Seventeen percent of houses had a flag, 7 percent had football paraphernalia, and 12 percent had a political sign.

After the November 2006 elections, Laband matched the addresses up against the voting histories of the people who lived there. Households that displayed either an American flag, football insignia, or campaign sign were 2.4 times more likely to have a resident who voted in the elections than houses which had none of the three.    While campaign signs were the most strongly predictive of having cast a vote, just sporting an American flag made a household twice as likely to have a voter, and even Auburn football gear made it 1.6 times more likely. (The authors don’t account for whether they’re really measuring a mediating variable, like whether Auburn fanhood is a proxy for having a college degree.) The same sense of expressiveness that inspired people to publicly project their patriotism or fandom seemed to be driving them to vote.

Signs do not necessarily translate into votes. But just because some people are the expressive kind doesn’t mean they’re always in a mood to express themselves. In 2010, before the midterm elections, Makse and Sokhey returned to Franklin County and found only 6 percent of homes had signs, down from the 12 percent they’d observed in 2006. The share touting Democrats had fallen to 57 percent. But the drop in signs did not translate into a steep drop in votes. The authors describe one of their precincts, 1028F on Columbus’s east side, as a “racially diverse, middle-class neighborhood”; more than three-quarters of its votes went to Obama in the 2008 general election, and 19 percent of its households had a sign for Obama or another Democrat. When the authors returned in 2010, shifts in the political climate were evident in local yards. Only 3 percent of homes had a Democrat’s sign this time, one of the lowest shares among 30 thirty areas that Makse and Sokhey tracked. But the party’s votes didn’t fall dramatically. The precinct gave nearly the same share of the vote to the Democrat at the top of its ticket in 2010 (Gov. Ted Strickland) as it did to Obama two years earlier— and experienced less of a turnout drop-off than other parts of the state.

“I’m not concerned about the very poor.”

Regardless of what Mitt Romney said after that all people heard was, “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” feeding into the stereotype Republicans have a tin ear to the needs of those less fortunate.

And at the same time Romney handed a sledgehammer to Obama with which Obama will beat him senseless in the general election. Within a few hours web ads were up highlighting Romney’s misstatement.

Herein lies a lesson: if you’re explaining you’re losing. Marc Caputo writes:

In politics, when you’re explaining, you’re often losing.

Campaigning isn’t so much about telling truths as it is about marketing — it’s more show than tell.

Candidate/product Romney is often showcased by his campaign in factories and warehouses to convey that the Republican is a jobs candidate.

Now Romney is in danger of being branded as out of touch, as “the guy who laid you off” in the parlance of his 2008 Republican opponent, Mike Huckabee.

As reporters and opponents were quick to point out, Romney this year said corporations are people. He said he likes to be able to fire people. Though he’s worth “between $150 and about $200-some-odd million,” in his words, he joked he was unemployed and had known the fear of “pink slips.”

These are snippets of quotes. Each time, Romney and his defenders and media critics have pointed out what he meant to say, how he was drawing analogies, using metaphors or joshing around. They say he’s the best guy to turn the economy around because he’s a private-sector turnaround artist.

But campaigns are about showing, not telling. All the lines were caught on camera in made-for-attack-commercial moments. The YouTube ads, the precursor to TV spots, virtually made themselves. Comedy Central’s The Daily Show strung the clips together, noting that Romney capped his week off with an endorsement from Donald Trump, whose “you’re fired” line seems to have been written by Democrats. The line of attack could be devastating to a candidate in must-win Florida.

As a candidate you should worry how you say what you mean to make sure your point is not lost by using inartful rhetoric. Never assume your point will be understood in translation.

Your opponents and the media are waiting to seize on your statements – even a portion of them – to use your own words to portray you do not care.

If there’s a lesson learned from the 2012 Florida Presidential Preference Primary it’s that 40% of the votes cast were done so before the actual January 31st election day by absentee ballots or early voting.

What’s always interesting to me is how often absentee ballots and early voting overlooked to the detriment of the campaign. Absentee ballots are treated almost as an afterthought. Campaigns are won or lost with absentee and early votes.

In this post I’ll concentrating on absentee ballots portion of voting as this seems to be often overlooked or misunderstood.

Where Do You Get Absentee Ballot Request Data?

You have two choices: your local Supervisor of Elections or the Division of Elections.  Your choice may hinge on whether you trust your local SOE,  how responsive and fast s/he is at getting your data, or if there’s a charge.

Some counties may provide phone numbers and/or email addresses of those who request ballots. Some counties will not turn over phone numbers, though I suspect that data should be provided as it probably falls under Florida’s open records laws. The Division of Elections’ data only provides email addresses.

For regional races and some county-wide races I prefer to get my data from the Division of Elections because I get the data faster and can manipulate it for the campaign’s needs faster.

When Should You Drop Absentee Chase Mail?

You should carefully time your absentee chase pieces. You can get a list of permanent absentee ballot voters and comunicate with them early on since you know they’ll receive an absentee ballot .

From there you time the drop of your absentee chase piece on the same day your Supervisor of Elections drops his/her absentee mail. This is so the voter receives your mail and the absentee ballot the same day.

Supervisors of Elections mail absentee ballots to overseas military personnel no later than 45 days before Election Day. They then mail the domestic absentee ballots between 28 and 35 days before Election Day. From there, Supervisor will may daily absentee ballots as the requests come in, until the 6th day before Election Day, which is the state-mandated deadline to request absentees.

This means you’ll have one large absentee chase mail drop to coincide with the first send-out of absentee ballots and then piece-meal absentee chase mail to coincide with individuals who request absentee ballots.

Again, these are simple concepts but it’s amazing at how often it’s overlooked.

Steps to a Successful Absentee Ballot Program (The Low Budget Option)

Step 1: Download your data and open in Excel. Your data will likely come in a CSV or tab-delimited file. This only means you need to use Excel to open the file and tell it how the data is seperated and Excel will seperate the data into appropriate columns. If you have a true voter database into which this data can be imported, that’s even better, but for low-ballot or low-budget races this may not be an option.

Step 2: Sort your data by Absentee Ballot Request and Absentee Ballot Return Dates. By doing this you can see when a ballot was requested and when or if it was returned. If a ballot has been returned you can completely mark that voter off your list. There’s no need for you to even consider communicating with him/her further – that vote has been cast.

Step 3: Send the list of those who have not returned ballots to your mail vendor OR, if you’re doing it yourself, prepare labels, append them to your mail, and get that mail to the post office the day the Supervisor of Elections is mailing his/her absentee ballots.

As mentioned above you’ll have one large absentee chase mail drop to coincide with the absentee mail drop from the Supervisor of Elections. This will occur in two stages. The first is the minimum 45-day mailing deadline for overseas military ballots. The second stage is domestic absentee ballots that are mailed approximately one month before Election Day.

You’ll need to contact your local Supervisor to determine the specific drop date. From there you direct your mail vendor to time your absentee ballot mail chase with the Supervisor of Elections.

Step 4: Do this daily for all absentee ballot requests. Each day you’ll need to download the absentee ballot request data and sort by date to determine who has requested and who has returned ballots.

You’ll need to mail your absentee ballot chase piece on a daily basis to those individuals who’ve requested absentee ballots. Again, timing is important: make sure your chase piece hits the mailbox the same day the voter’s absentee ballot.

It takes a little extra effort but can swing an election in your favor if you work it dilligently.

Step 5: Follow-up with those who have not returned ballots.

Most ballots are returned when they’re received by the voters, then a lull occurs, and then as Election Day draws closer voters tend to return absentees at a faster rate. However, on average 10% of absentee ballots are never returned.

As Election Day draws closer make sure you follow up with those who have not returned absentee ballots with mail, phone calls, and emails.

The Division of Elections provides email addresses but not phone numbers. Your local Supervisor of Elections may provide both or neither. If you have a database or a vendor that processes data that vendor can append phone numbers to the absentee ballot list.

Be careful if you email voters. Make sure you provide a method for them to unsubscribe or opt-out of receiving political emails. Believe me, they’ll let you know their dislike of you emailing them.

Absentee ballots must be returned to the Supervisor of Elections’ office by 7 PM on Election Day. A voter can not return a completed absentee ballot to a precinct polling location, but can take their absentee ballot to one to have it destroyed and vote in-person.

To wrap up:

1. Get electronic access to absentee ballot data from the Division of Elections or your local Supervisor of Elections.
2. Mail your absentee ballot chase piece to the absentee ballot list on the same day the Supervisor of Elections drops its absentee ballots. Do this daily to make sure all absentee ballot voters receive your mail.
3. Follow-up with mail, phone calls, and emails to everyone who has not returned ballots.
4. Absentee ballots are mailed by the Supervisor of Elections to overseas military personnel 45 days before Election Day and to domestic absentee voters approximately one month before Election Day.
5. The last day to request absentee ballots is 5 PM on the 6th day before Election Day. If Election Day is on a Tuesday, the latest a voter can request a ballot is 5 PM on the Wednesday before Election Day.
6. Ballots must be returned to the Supervisor of Elections’ Office by 7 PM on Election Day. Completed ballots may not be returned to a voter’s precinct voting location, though a voter can return an absentee ballot to be destroyed and cast a live vote.

These steps will help you get a successful absentee ballot program off the ground. Don’t let absentee ballots be an afterthought or your race could very well be one.

Slate writes:

Campaigns know, for instance, that undecided voters are not all the same. Here are a dozen different types of self-described undecided voters, and how the Republican presidential candidates are dealing with them in the final days before the Iowa caucus. N.B.: Some voters likely fit into more than one category.

1. THE FUTURE BANDWAGON RIDERS

2. THE WEDGIES

3. THE FOLLOWERS

4. THE PEER PRESSURED

5. THE LIARS

6. THE APATHETIC

7. THE MAVENS

8. THE SUBCONCIOUSLY ALREADY-DECIDED

9. THE KNOW-NOTHINGS

10. THE CHRISTMAS EVE SHOPPERS

11. THE ASHAMED

12. THE HATERS

Full read.

Andrew Sullivan writes:

Many of them are apathetic:

A large chunk of people decide late because they just don’t care about politics and tune it out for as long as they can. Tulane’s Brian Brox and the University of Arkansas-Little Rock’s Joseph Giammo examined the attributes of late deciders in presidential general elections and found that a large chunk of them resembled the “stereotypical apathetic citizen.” They tended to be less partisan and politically active than early deciders, treated the candidates as interchangeable, and weren’t inclined to care who won.

One surprising twist: Brox and Giammo found that these “low-interest late deciders” seemed to recoil at information sent their way. The more Republican ads they saw, the less likely they were to vote Republican; Democratic ads pushed them toward the GOP. “These voters may actually be likely to become irritated with the efforts of candidates to attract their votes,” Brox and Giammo write, “since we know that they have little interest in the campaign in the first place.”

Taegan Goddard writes:

Joe Klein notes that negative campaign ads “have been more effective and brutal this time because no one has to get up there at the end and say, ‘I’m Mitt Romney and I approved this message.’”

“That line came in for a fair amount of mockery when the federal government began to require it a few cycles ago. But it worked. It became harder to for a candidate to have an ad accusing an opponent of being a mother-raper if he or she had to appear at the end and say, ‘I approve this message.’…”

“This time, however, the vast majority of Iowans don’t know that friends of Mitt Romney have put several bajillion dollars worth of ads up eviscerating Newt Gingrich… It’s a coarsening of a system that is already too coarse. And we can thank the Supreme Court for that. It certainly doesn’t bode well for the general election next fall.”

Slate writes:

Despite stereotypes, men are actually more fickle at the voting booth.

…

Women’s identification with the Democrats represented something different from, say, the movement of white Southerners en masse from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Rather, the gender gap amounted to a group developing distinct electoral preferences for the first time, and is similar to what might be called the church gap. According to Ronald Brownstein, prior to the ’70s, the frequency with which a voter attended church had no bearing on who he or she voted for. But in 1972, church-goers have aligned themselves with Republicans, and they have remained there ever since.

Of course, voters still shift along the political spectrum a good bit, and when they do, men appear to move more dramatically. Studies have shown that Americans tend to act as a counterweight to the size of government. When government spends more and enacts bigger programs, Americans tend to become more conservative and to want a smaller government. When government shrinks, Americans want it bigger. Looking at social survey data going back to the 1970s, Paul Kellstedt, a political scientist at Texas A&M University, found that if women move just a little bit to the right or left, men will move many more percentage points. This asymmetrical movement causes the gender gap to expand and to shrink.

The idea that women’s political views remain relatively stable while men’s fluctuate contradicts some of our assumptions about gender. For one thing, the male voter is typically seen as the standard for the public at large, with women and other groups as viewed as mere special interests. (This is despite the fact that the majority of voters are women.) Men are representative; women are outliers. As Time magazine put it in a 1982 story on the gender gap, “Why can’t a woman vote more like a man?” This thinking may help explain our permanent election-year fascination with all those moms—Soccer Moms and Hockey Moms, Walmart Moms and Security Moms—whose identity don’t extend beyond their children, and whose beliefs and purchasing patterns are thought to offer the answer to the presidency, if only they can be riddled out.