In presidential politics, the phrase “ground game” carries an almost mystical sense of portent. It is invoked by journalists, partisans, and campaign consultants as a vehicle for tipping close elections. But does it really matter?
Ground game—otherwise known as get out the vote (GOTV)—refers to any systematic operation designed to get a campaign’s supporters into the voting booth. The primary tools are mailers, phone banks, and door-to-door contact, along with transportation where needed. Once upon a time, these interventions were based on simple party registration and informal relationships (e.g., the precinct captain knew you because he worked with your brother-in-law). Today, voter lists are a great deal more sophisticated, with campaigns harvesting data to create detailed files on voters from dozens of sources, from your Facebook profile to your magazine subscriptions. A good voter list today doesn’t just know who you are, what your party registration is, and where you live—it knows what issues are important to you, who you’ve given money to, where you go to church, and who you’re likely to be supporting.
Sophisticated campaigns know a great deal about their voters. In a recent interview, Ted Cruz’s data guru, Chris Wilson, explained how the Cruz campaign approached the Iowa caucuses with a data-heavy focus on ground game. They constructed a model of 150,000 likely voters with enough data that they could be targeted almost individually. When a volunteer knocked on a door, a campaign app told them what issues the homeowner was likely to prioritize. As campaign manager Jeff Roe explained to National Review, volunteers were given caucus books for their neighborhood with “everybody’s names who are voting for us in it, and then everybody’s names of who they’re choosing between, and what issue they care about, and how to communicate with them about it.”
A few days before the caucuses, the campaign had identified 19,186 voters certain to support Cruz and could focus on making sure these people got to the caucus sites. Another 1,400 voters were tagged as onetime supporters who had drifted away. So the campaign targeted them in the waning days by having Cruz, his wife, or his father, Rafael, call them individually. On caucus night, the campaign knew personally almost half of the voters who caucused for Cruz. That’s the power of the ground game.
Or at least that’s one view. The other is that the effectiveness of GOTV operations and ground game has been fetishized by the media and wildly exaggerated.
“The bottom line is it’s all bullshit,” one Republican campaign consultant told me. “In a presidential election you just have high turnout, period. And the GOTV stuff just gets lost.” He went on: “The ugly little secret which deflates all the consulting bullshit and the media narrative is that the Dems spend a lot of money in off-years trying to get their voters to the polls. They fail, because off-year elections are tough for their voters. And then Republicans think they’re geniuses at ground game. Then in presidential years, the Dem voters show up, and suddenly the Democratic consultants become the ground-game geniuses.”
This skeptical view makes a good deal of sense. You can see how GOTV efforts would make a big impact in a small-scale election, like the Iowa caucuses. But in a large-scale presidential election, GOTV operations might be meaningless because whatever gains a campaign makes will be (1) canceled out by the other side’s operation and (2) swamped by the sheer statistical weight of a system with 150 million votes.
It isn’t just campaign consultants who are divided between the two views of ground game—there has been a good deal of research on the question over the last 20 years from political scientists, too. In 2013, Donald Green, Mary McGrath, and Peter Aronow tried to resolve the question with a giant survey of the literature and came to the conclusion that GOTV efforts produced very marginal gains, with door-to-door canvassing increasing turnout by 1 percentage point, direct-mail by 0.7 percentage points, and phone calls by 0.4 percentage points. Which buttresses the “it’s all BS” view.
But earlier this year, another two political scientists—Ryan Enos of Harvard and Anthony Fowler of the University of Chicago—looked at the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections to see if the revolution in voter data profiling might have changed the effectiveness of GOTV programs. What they found was shocking.
Enos and Fowler’s study is well worth reading because both the Romney and Obama campaigns cooperated with them and provided data on the number, timing, and instances of GOTV interventions. When Enos and Fowler compared the data, they found that, as you’d expect, both campaigns concentrated their ground game efforts in the battleground states.
The researchers then compared individuals in the same TV market, but different states, where one state was competitive and the other was not. This allowed them to establish a control group of people who saw the same media coverage but were not subjected to GOTV interventions. And then they compared this control group with people in the same media environment who were being targeted by GOTV operations. Their findings contained three distinct surprises.
First, they found that a good GOTV effort increased the likelihood that a voter would turn out by 7 percentage points. Second, they found that GOTV interventions were additive in their effectiveness. Which is to say that if you knocked on a voter’s door a second time, the percentage chance that they would turn out for your candidate increased again, by another 7 percentage points. Third, despite the media obsession with the failure of the Romney campaign’s much-derided GOTV effort, so-called Project Orca, Enos and Fowler found that it was roughly as effective as the Obama campaign’s celebrated program.
This being academia, there’s never a final word. Data scientist Aaron Strauss has produced research suggesting that the Obama campaign’s ground game was much more effective than Romney’s. Political science professors John Sides and Lynn Vavreck detected a small Obama advantage. And others continue to argue that the election was determined entirely by economic and demographic fundamentals, with GOTV operations mattering not a whit.
It’s all a bit confusing, but fortunately, Donald Trump is here to help settle the debate, once and for all.
Unlike every other major presidential campaign of the modern era, the Trump operation has essentially no ground game. So when voters go to the polls eight weeks from now, we won’t be contrasting the effects of a “good” GOTV scheme against a “poor” one. We’ll be able to see what happens when one side has a ground game and the other does not. That will clarify the matter a great deal.
If Trump is able to meet or exceed his final poll numbers in battleground states such as Utah and Georgia—okay, that’s a joke. Seriously: If Trump is able to match his final poll numbers in toss-up states where the Clinton campaign has a robust GOTV effort—states such as North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Florida—then it will be a sign that the fruits of the ground game are illusory. And campaign consultants everywhere will mourn the day their snake oil was exposed.
But if ground game does matter, then Clinton should overperform her final poll numbers in contested states as her campaign warps the makeup of the electorate without any offsetting efforts from the Trump campaign. Either way, the Trump campaign is likely to settle the ground-game question decisively.
For people depressed by 2016, it’s a pleasant little silver lining.
Jonathan V. Last is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
