Pennsylvania GOTV Observations

By Fester:

My wife and I live in Pennsylvania and on Tuesday our household will contribute a net margin of zero votes for Obama or Clinton.  My wife re-registered from unaffiliated to the Democratic Party in order to vote in this primary.  She fits a couple of favorable demographic and consumer profile groupings for each campaign.  I'm either a Democratic supervoter now or I am two elections (this primary and general) short of having eight consecutive elections where I picked up a ballot. 

GOTV is focusedn on ensuring your supervoters make it to the polls with techniques such as a door hanger and a call to make sure that grandma, who has voted in forty seven straight elections, has a ride to the polls, or in getting the least attached and most marginal votes out to the polls.  This is the much harder and more intensive work as three to eight pre-election contacts are needed to reliably move a freshly registered voter from a low probability of voting to a high probability of voting.  People who usually vote with the I aoccassional lapse are not pushed as hard as momentum will deliver a campaign's fair share to the polls. 

As a supervoter and a newly registered potential swing voter lives in this household, I would have (naively) predicted that we would have been bombarded with mobilization and motivation messages over the past six weeks.  Instead we have received almost nothing besides the Allegheny County Democratic Party endorsed candidate door hanger and my first GOTV identification call from a union affiliated with the Clinton campaign.  They were trying to assess where I stood and if I was a persuadable for Clinton.   At this point I am a 1 (sure thing) for Obama, so we had a pleasant conversation for a minute or two, and he went on down his list.  Tough work, but the guy was doing a good job with a weak script. 

I am just surprised that we have not seen more GOTV activity in my neighborhood as it should be a swing area (Creative Class gentrifiers and young families, older blue collar ethnic whites, and a growing African American population within 500 yards of my front door) in a delegate rich area that CQ magazines predicts as a 4:3 Obama delegate win.  If Clinton can scratch out a 50%+1 win or Obama pushing towards 64.5% of the vote for a 5:2 split that has major implications for the statewide delegate split. 

Right now all of the GOTV activity that is visible or rumbling loudly on the grapevine is the more traditional flush the best precincts out and don't worry about the rest.  This is traditional Democratic GOTV techniques and technology but it is step back from some of the microtargetting of Democratic voters in highly Republican precincts that we engaged in 2006.  Those techniques took a significant time and money investment before the pay-off was worthwhile, but they worked as they helped push Jason Altmire into Congress and a couple of Dem. state reps back to Harrisburg.  So I am hoping that the national coordinated campaign for the summer re-engages in those and improved versions of those techniques while the current flush the best and ignore the rest tactics are temporary field expedients.