AP: GOP devotes $250M to midterm strategy: Keep House majority
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  AP: GOP devotes $250M to midterm strategy: Keep House majority
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Author Topic: AP: GOP devotes $250M to midterm strategy: Keep House majority  (Read 2718 times)
junior chįmp
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« Reply #25 on: April 15, 2018, 12:06:13 PM »


And let's not even talk about 2016....Trump didn't even have a ground game operation while Hillary inherited Obama's.

Lmao, I forgot about that sh!t. Hillary had the most amazing ground game operation in American history (hundreds of millions of dollars) and she turned out slightly less voters than Obama and underperformed the polls pretty much everywhere besides Arizona and Texas (states where she didn't really have a groundgame operation anyways).

Yeah that's due to demographics not ground game.

In 2008, Obama had 4 field offices in North Dakota and won 44.50% of the vote there. In South Dakota, Obama had 0 field offices and won 44.75% of the vote.
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Virginiá
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« Reply #26 on: April 15, 2018, 12:39:19 PM »

^ I agree, mostly. But I don't think GOTV/organizing is completely useless. I think it needs to be done differently, with more money and resources and a long-term presence, so 365 days a year. The party really needs organic organizing though, not just paid. Paid organizing can only do so much. Unions and other community groups that involve copious numbers of people who interact with their community on a daily basis to help drive voting. In this sense, Democrats letting unions rot is one of the worst mistakes they could have made over the past generation.

What really needs to stop is presidential candidates lighting hundreds of millions of dollars on fire with TV ads that barely do anything. How many lost elections and different studies do we need to show that it is useless?

I posted a thread about this with a good Atlantic piece about how most campaign tactics do not work:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=273865.0
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Ebsy
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« Reply #27 on: April 15, 2018, 12:49:19 PM »

The Republicans spent millions of dollars on staff and paid canvassers in PA-18 so if all of that 250 million is as well spent as that, Democrats will still be looking at a very good year.
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Chief Justice Keef
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« Reply #28 on: April 15, 2018, 01:02:37 PM »

President Clinton and Congressmen Ossoff and Saccone can testify that throwing all the money you've got at campaigns leads to electoral success.
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BuckeyeNut
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« Reply #29 on: April 15, 2018, 01:59:27 PM »

Uh. Clinton had a sh**t ground game with no persuasion phase. What are y’all talking about.
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The Mikado
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« Reply #30 on: April 15, 2018, 02:37:31 PM »

^ I agree, mostly. But I don't think GOTV/organizing is completely useless. I think it needs to be done differently, with more money and resources and a long-term presence, so 365 days a year. The party really needs organic organizing though, not just paid. Paid organizing can only do so much. Unions and other community groups that involve copious numbers of people who interact with their community on a daily basis to help drive voting. In this sense, Democrats letting unions rot is one of the worst mistakes they could have made over the past generation.

What really needs to stop is presidential candidates lighting hundreds of millions of dollars on fire with TV ads that barely do anything. How many lost elections and different studies do we need to show that it is useless?

I posted a thread about this with a good Atlantic piece about how most campaign tactics do not work:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=273865.0

While TV ads are basically useless, especially for Presidential candidates (they can serve for name recognition purposes for down ballot candidates, but name recognition wasn't an issue for Trump or Clinton), the way campaigns are set up, media consultants usually get paid in a fraction of the TV cash, so they have an incentive to drive as much towards advertising as possible.

One of the things Trump did that was actually really clever was to minimize advertising as a part of his campaign and use more free things like social media. His immense online army on social media was invaluable to him, and it wasn't all Russians: a lot of them were 4-chan browsing alt-right losers, but that group knows the Internet better than anyone else and can use it to their advantage.

Trump also realized that if he was constantly making news, the press would have to cover him and was willing to do outrageous and outlandish things that other politicians wouldn't dare do.
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DrScholl
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« Reply #31 on: April 15, 2018, 03:10:47 PM »

Ground operations are highly useful and can be the difference in narrow wins. Canvassing and phone banking allow you to zero in on voter turnout better than ads or mailers.
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Statilius the Epicurean
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« Reply #32 on: April 15, 2018, 04:04:00 PM »

The thing is that from anecdotal evidence the GOP are actually very good at building a ground game, and being able to turn out voters (Both Florida, and WI spring to mind as very skilled state parties)

The problem was when groups tried to throw millions in TV advertising to prop up Strange, then Saconne. 

Lol...ground game is overrated. The only reason the GOP is good at turnout is due to older voters skewing GOP and turning out at high rates in off year elections. The muh whole ground game turns voters out is a myth. People turnout when they are motivated,...no amount of commercials, canvassers, or policy papers will motivate a voter. Republican voters especially will not turnout with boogeyman Obama and Hillary not being on the ballot or in office

Yeah this lol. You can invest a million dollars in ground game and it'll only increase turnout by 3% at max.

There is no mythical dollars that makes people turn out. They either care to turn out or they don't.

Increasing turnout by 3% is a huge amount.
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Mr. Smith
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« Reply #33 on: April 15, 2018, 04:09:36 PM »

Uh. Clinton had a sh**t ground game with no persuasion phase. What are y’all talking about.

Not really, anyone else with her numbers would've won Florida and Pennsylvania, Trump legit swamped with white votes as an override.

Her game was good, just badly distributed. Too much in NC rather than Wisconsin or Michigan.
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BuckeyeNut
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« Reply #34 on: April 15, 2018, 04:41:02 PM »

Uh. Clinton had a sh**t ground game with no persuasion phase. What are y’all talking about.

Not really, anyone else with her numbers would've won Florida and Pennsylvania, Trump legit swamped with white votes as an override.

Her game was good, just badly distributed. Too much in NC rather than Wisconsin or Michigan.


She literally ran no persuasion phase in the Midwest. You can't call that good. It was big, sure, but quality > quantity, and she did not have the former.
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Virginiá
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« Reply #35 on: April 15, 2018, 04:59:23 PM »

I canvassed a great deal for Clinton's campaign in Florida, and about 90% of the neighborhoods I was sent to were minority communities, where our task was to make sure they either voted or were going to vote, give them materials, etc. We were explicitly told not to try any persuasion.

The fact was that a lot of people I talked to were not enthusiastic about Clinton. I don't think this could be fully fixed by any amount of GOTV or persuasion. She was a bad candidate drowning in scandal, and for all the effort we put in, it was wiped out away by another bad media cycle at the end. Imagine GOTV efforts are like breathing into one of those tubs that tests your lungs. You keep breathing in, raising the ball, you feel you're doing real well, then someone periodically comes along and presses it down and you have to start all over. That was like Clinton's campaign. No matter how hard you worked, you could always expect some new scandal, some new FBI investigation update, something new to happen that would suck the energy right out of everyone.

Obviously it would have been nice to run some persuasion efforts and put a lot more effort into the rust belt, but I'm not totally sure what would have happened. Clinton did put a lot of resources into Pennsylvania if I recall correctly, and she still lost it by more than (or close to) states where she put few resources.

The lesson here is that the party should put up a (mostly) scandal-free candidate perceived to be authentic and who can also energize their supporters.
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junior chįmp
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« Reply #36 on: April 16, 2018, 01:04:13 AM »

The thing is that from anecdotal evidence the GOP are actually very good at building a ground game, and being able to turn out voters (Both Florida, and WI spring to mind as very skilled state parties)

The problem was when groups tried to throw millions in TV advertising to prop up Strange, then Saconne. 

Lol...ground game is overrated. The only reason the GOP is good at turnout is due to older voters skewing GOP and turning out at high rates in off year elections. The muh whole ground game turns voters out is a myth. People turnout when they are motivated,...no amount of commercials, canvassers, or policy papers will motivate a voter. Republican voters especially will not turnout with boogeyman Obama and Hillary not being on the ballot or in office

Yeah this lol. You can invest a million dollars in ground game and it'll only increase turnout by 3% at max.

There is no mythical dollars that makes people turn out. They either care to turn out or they don't.

Increasing turnout by 3% is a huge amount.

Except it doesn't increase turnout by 3%. In 2008, McCain had almost twice as many field offices as Obama in Florida and Obama won Florida anyway. In 2016, Trump had no functioning field offices in Florida and beat Clinton who had many.

If voters have skin in the game or a stake in the outcome then they will vote....not because some political science nerd knocks in their front door and gives them a brochure.
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