How Behavioral Science is Remaking Politics. Look How Far We've Come Apart. In the witches’ brew of fearmongering, unkeepable promises and poll-tested metaphors that both parties serve up to the electorate every four years, you can always find this predictable dash of inspiration: the image of Americans uniting and working together for the sake of the country. President Obama said in Charlotte, N.C. that America is “about what can be done by us, together.” In Tampa, Paul Ryan said, “Whatever your political party, let’s come together for the sake of our country.” And Mitt Romney closed his convention speech with three invocations of “That America, that united America.” But America is not united and it is getting less and less unitable with each passing decade. You can see us coming apart in three simple graphs. Voters Going Off The Grid. Voters Going Off The Grid Targeted Victory, in partnership with SAY Media, Chong & Koster and pollsters Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies and Thomas Eldon of SEA Polling and Strategic Direct, today announced new research designed to understand how electoral and advocacy campaigns can effectively reach voters in the upcoming election. 31% of Likely 2012 Voters Are Not Watching Live TV We asked likely voters how they consume video content across a variety of platforms.
Our study found that 31% of all likely voters hadn’t watched any live TV in the week prior (by “live TV” we mean watching programming as it is broadcast over the air or cable without a delaying device like a DVR). In fact, we observed an even higher level of this kind of behavior in the key battleground state of Ohio, where nearly 40% have not watched live tv in the last week. There are no significant differences in this behavior by age, gender, or party affiliation. Video Consumption Is Up While Live TV Use Is Down.
Michelson & Nickerson, Voter Mobilization Review. Is Voting Contagious? by Nickerson. Campaigns Mine Personal Lives to Get Out Vote. Inside the Obama Campaign's Hard Drive. Obama's tech guru and his microtargeting whiz kids are building a new kind of Chicago machine. Can they help the president hold on to the Oval Office? Harper Reed went from selling arty T-shirts to hunting for Obama voters. Photograph by Jacob Dehart DURING THE 736 DAYS beginning May 9, 2010, Harper Reed walked an average of 8,513 steps, reaching a high mark of 26,141 on September 13, 2010, and a low of 110 on April 21 of this year. (His excuse: broken pedometer.) On that day, Reed, age 34.33 as of this writing, sent one tweet, 55 below his average.
Reed was traveling from Chicago to Colorado, where he grew up, where he has spent 39.5 percent of his time away from home since 2002, and where, in 1990, he attended his first concert (David Bowie, McNichols Arena, row HH, seat 8). FLOWCHART: How Obama for America Gets to Know Jane Q. Reed describes his campaign role as making sure technology is a "force multiplier. " That faith in the power of crowdsourcing informed his other ventures.
Voter ID laws: Will they mobilize angry Democrats? Photo by Andy Manis/Getty Images. Five days before the failed vote to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Rob “Biko” Baker sat behind the wheel of his Ford Fusion in a working-class neighborhood of Milwaukee’s West Side and watched two of his college-age volunteers knock on doors. They were doing what canvassers for the League of Young Voters, the group Baker serves as executive director, often do before an election: reminding urban, working-class black voters of an upcoming vote and exhorting them to participate. Sasha Issenberg is the author of The Victory Lab about the new science of political campaigns. “Official records show that you are registered to vote. Only this time there was something new in the scripts that Baker’s canvassers had affixed to their clipboards.
Baker looked out on the scene. Baker was nonetheless approaching the voter ID question in a rather scholarly way. A legacy of that message endured in the GOTV script used in the Milwaukee experiment. Mitt Romney’s policies are really vague. But voters like vague. (Brian Snyder -- Reuters) One of the hard things about writing about Mitt Romney's tax plan is that no one really knows what it is. The cuts are well-specified, but they cost $480 billion in 2015 alone, or close to $5 trillion over 10 years.
Romney says he'll make up the difference by cutting tax breaks. It's not clear that's possible, but more to the point, Romney hasn't specified how he'd cut breaks. He flirted with a $17,000 cap on deduction, and, as Suzy reports, has now upped that number to $25,000 or $50,000, but has only said that's a possibility, not his actual plan. But that ambiguity could give him an electoral boost. Tomz and van Houweling conducted an experiment where they asked 1,001 people for their views on government services. They were then asked to choose between four pairs of candidates; half were given the candidates' parties, and the other half weren't.
The last two pairs were the same as the first two, but with the vague candidate's position made more precise.