Hi thanks so much my name is Quentin
Palfrey i'm the executive director of
JPAL north america and as we draw to the
close of of a historic election it's
real honor to be here with the man who
literally wrote the book on
get-out-the-vote efforts to help us
understand the science of what we know
about what works and what doesn't in
elections
he's a professor of political science at
Columbia and his research interests let
him describe but they include voting
behavior and political participation
he's written a number of books including
the seminal book on what works and get
out the vote operations and he's also
really fun and interesting guy who's
really interested in designing board
games and woodworking and raising
seeing-eye dogs and all sorts of things
so without further ado I'm going to turn
it over to Don the such a pleasure and
an honor to be good i have a lot of
material to run through 35 minutes but
i'll have plenty of time for questions
and happy to stay way after to talk
about anything you care to talk about
louisiana to the light-hearted talk that
I haven't planned today is kind of a
romp through a vast literature on what
works and doesn't work in campaign craft
but also kind of a send-up of the kind
of phony claims that you're likely to
encounter if you like me to get about
three emails a day from campaign
consultants Hawking their their wares of
all sorts in fact that I literally got
three on the train ride here for
last-minute things I can do with phone
calls i thought i would share some of
those with you today I know that most
people who talk about voting we're
talking about no damn exciting talk
about the big picture you know how would
turnout rates be affected by fundamental
changes in our constitutional system you
know what if we add up what if we had
proportional representation or what if
we had a very different kind of voting
environment what if we didn't have the
electoral college i'm going to have to
talk about those questions of Abkhazia
perhaps but we're going to ditch them
for today because we're going to go down
to a very very narrow set of tactical
questions you know imagine the election
is going to happen say in a week say and
and now you have to decide how you're
going to allocate your campaign
resources so imagine you're running one
of the campaign's literally one of the
Hamptons and its really too late to
change the tenor of your campaign boy is
it too late for that and and and and now
it's time to figure out you know what
specific things you're going to do so
which voters in particular will you be
targeting and how how in particular will
you be communicating with them and i
would say that you know the way to sort
of think about the trajectory of
American presidential elections over the
past two decades is that a prior to 2000
for most of the campaign strategy and
tactics was focused on persuasion and
then from 2004 through 2012 the focus
was on mobilization and 2016 to really
felt so what is the distinction in the
world of mobilization you're trying to
bring a bigger army
the battlefield or simply trying to get
more of your supporters to vote not
really necessarily could change any
Minds you're simply going to to get the
people who already support you or your
candidate and and get them to vote in
the United States that's a very real
strategic option because our turnout
rates are famously we have the second
lowest turnout rate of any Western
democracy did used to all be that way as
I'll describe it later on but it is that
way now
the alternative is persuasion to try to
change minds not necessarily change
who's going to vote but change what
people do when they cast about and those
two different approaches have very very
different strategic implications for
targeting and outreach
so what do you think about you know
mobilization you've got to be careful
because if you're going to be mobilizing
someone who ultimately is like a coin
toss between voting for your voting
against you on average you're going to
get nothing out of it right so you so
that is why on the right you're trying
to figure out who your conservative
christians are your gun rights advocates
are your home schoolers the kinds of
people who will vote disproportionately
for the right as opposed to the left
where you would would focus
disproportionately for example of
african-americans are environmentalists
or people who have signed petitions for
a minimum wages increases and things
like that so targeting your your your
particular partisans is super important
if you're going to be doing mobilization
now on the persuasion side targeting is
a little bit different because they're
you typically want to focus if you're
doing a persuasion oriented campaign
that people who are so-called high
propensity voters and that it's this is
jaipal has important distributive
implications
why because of if you're going to focus
your efforts on high propensity voters
that typically means that you're going
to focus your efforts on older voters
more residential lease table voters and
more after
involves and people who are outside the
scope of that kind of mobilization
channel will receive very little
campaign communication directly from
campaigns and if voting is a habit
forming activity they're essentially
going to be forming a habit of not
voting so the the implications for the
kind of bifurcation of the electorate of
of campaign tactics that focus in on
this kind of targeting strategy are
often profound ok and and by the way
because campaigns are are definitely
afraid of mobilizing their opponents the
very often say nothing to their
opponents so if I'm a Republican and I
know I've targeted you as are tagged you
as a Democrat i'll make sure not to say
anything to you
lest i get you all riled up get you to
vote when I when i'm probably going to
bear the brunt of your your anger so
then what is micro-targeting well this
is a good topic for people at MIT you
know because some of you have had a
semester or two of regression and I just
want to say that it's a big world out
there and you can make a lot of money
fast without having to know that third
semester stuff pretty much two semesters
it's good you're good to go
so what do you do the idea of micro
targeting is you're going to sell a
product and the product you're going to
sell is a database and how are going to
create that database you're going to do
a survey about say 2,500 or 3,000 people
and you're going to ask them every
question under the Sun but those people
are going to be sampled from an existing
voter file public file that you can
pretty much purchase in any state so
you're going to survey people and you're
going to get their survey responses and
you can you can ask you know who prefers
trumpet who prefers Clinton you're going
to build a regression model to forecast
that support and then you're going to
use those very same background
attributes that you find in the voter
file to get predicted values for all the
millions of people who are not in your
survey and then you're going to try to
sell that for about a hundred thousand
dollars pop and that's that's
micro-targeting and it's it's a big
business in a very lucrative business i
guess one of the questions then is
doesn't work out this is too small for
you to read perhaps but um
I don't I am kind of addicted to reading
the advertisements of that are
associated with the emails that I
received it i just i get such a kick out
of it because it's a totally unregulated
business and you can say anything you
want it's it's the Wild West so so you
can find lots of testimonials like this
one if you want to know whether
micro-targeting works you could ask the
experts and they're happy to give you
lots of examples of things that work so
here's it
here's one particular website it says
you know what does micro-targeting do it
it utilizes advance the information ie
the predictions in your regression and
uses all of that data and much much more
to develop a custom and proprietary
segmentation the keywords proprietary
because they're gonna sell it to you and
now they're going to tell you a story
about a campaign that fell just short of
victory until they figured out how to
micro target their Republican base while
not annoying the people are going to
vote against them by targeting them
inadvertently and that it's proof
positive because although they lost
narrowly by only 525 votes in the last
time out this time they want by 30,000
votes
QED that their product works so so
interestingly you know I read this
before i was doing some randomized
trials and collaboration with the Rick
Perry campaign and i justjust say that
you know I i work with both sides of the
aisle in the middle you know basically
anybody wants to run a randomized trial
and wants to to do public science I
can't be buried in some proprietary you
know embargo thing forever but it wants
to go to contribute to knowledge i'm
happy to do an RCT with them so we did a
series of rcts with the Perry campaign
and one of the interesting things was it
we gathered a whole lot of survey data
and you could compare the micro targeted
Perry supporters to the actual people
who were surveyed and said whether they
were Perry supporters and here's a cross
tabulation of that so if you look on
this side you see that the most pro GOP
predicted people well about 60-percent
of them in fact predicted the
in fact supported Rick Perry but on the
other side you know if you said well i'm
a democrat i wanna i want to target the
people who are going to be pro Democrat
well actually thirty-nine percent of
them are going to support the Republican
anyway so you know you paid a hundred
thousand dollars in the middle person
you're actually contacting is not
somebody sympathetic to you so it's a
it's a big industry so the most
hilarious claims are in the world that
is now at the forefront of fun you know
getting you to spend your funds on them
and that's that's phone calls for the
end of a campaign the phone call vendors
basically like extend the bushel and
money just pours in because it's too
late to orchestrate things like direct
mail which require a few weeks of lead
time you could maybe orchestrated
canvassing operation if you're really
quick about it but that window is going
to close pretty pretty soon too but
phone calls happen in abundance in the
next few days so what then is this is
all about it's about a testimonials and
the testimonials are hilarious
so we had dick van dyke you're probably
too young to remember dick van dyke kind
of he was he was kind of like the Disney
actor of his ERA record a message so
it's a robocall ok robocall which is
i'll demonstrate a minute using several
rcts never works as a perfect record of
never working on a referendum that was
expecting a close vote and less than
forty percent turnout had record turnout
we want by fifty percent of vote
say no more that's that's quite
impressive proof to me
so this one came to like three days ago
figures don't have to open that one with
figures don't lie let's see whether
figures don't lie
so this is their evaluation of the
effectiveness of their own phone calling
operation and the outcome is whether or
not people turn out to vote so what are
these bars let's take a closer look
this is good okay so so what is the idea
here they're going to show you a bar
graph of people who had no completed
call so these are the people they may or
may not have called but whatever they
they didn't reach them and with one
completed call turnout goes up by about
six percentage points notice that they
say twelve percent
lift because they're going to use the
biggest numbers they can so they're
going to use percentages rather than
percentage points that's okay and
they're gonna go to complete three
complete for completing your interrupt
the mid-sixties so these calls are
enormously influential and if these
costs roughly a dollar per completed
call that would be rather cost-effective
by the standards of campaign craft but
now we have to ask yourself if you were
in a research design class what kind of
grade would you give this comparison
probably enough right because you would
say are the people who get a call to
complete a call comparable to the people
who don't complete call well in order to
adjudicate that and this is
foreshadowing the second half of the
talk maybe we should do a randomized
trial where we randomly assign people to
either get a call or not and then
compare how different the voting rates
are those of those people have been
randomly assigned and this is an
experiment we did in 2004 in in in
illinois right before the hotly
contested presidential race it's you
know it's it's kind of a timeless thing
it doesn't really matter when you do it
but that the basic idea here is 64.4
percent of the treatment group ends up
voting according to public records and
63.4 in the control group that's about
one percentage point gained about half
those people were actually contacted so
if you take one and / point five you get
about a 2 percentage-point gain on the
people who are contacted that's a lot
less than six percentage points so
where's the six come from
well no again just kind of skipping
ahead for for fun let's compare the
people who get a call that is absolutely
nothing to do about part with politics
these were people who were encouraged to
buckle up for safety
I mean maybe that makes vote but i kinda
doubt about it and notice that the day
to vote at a rate of about five
percentage points higher when they're
contacted and notice that the people who
are uncontacted voted a lower rate and
it's not because they're just
disappointed that no one called them
it's it's all got to add up to 0 right
so so the whole point is that people who
are contacted our are different now why
would they be different
well they're not dead for one thing and
another thing is they haven't moved away
and they might have been contacted by
other campaigns but probably most
importantly they're sufficiently
interested in what you're saying to
actually answer the phone and and you
know complete the call so it's probably
not surprising that you could find the
spurious relationship even when you know
greatly exaggerated the truth now you
could say well alright we're not gonna
listen to campaign consultants and let
them do the evaluations let's let
card-carrying professors do the
evaluations but for a long time and even
to this day a lot of the evaluations
that are done of campaign crafts are
done based on survey research and in
those cases you ask people whether they
were contacted by a campaign so for
example the american national election
study famously asks people did someone
call you up or comment come around to
encourage you to vote for a particular
candidate or party and you're giving
them them a self-report of what you've
done and that may or may not be accurate
to do the vagaries of of memory but also
your yeah i'm interested in politics you
know they'd be the kind of person i do
the kind of person they would contact
and so you're you're kind of giving a
characterization of yourself and then of
course the contacting and the targeting
is not done at random especially if
they're trying to target high propensity
voters so even if these contacts had no
effect you would see a strong
correlation between saying you were
contacted and saying that you voted so
that's unfortunately all a lot of the
political science literature on this
question from you know roughly the
nineteen fifties through the nineteen
nineties so since the 1990s late
nineteen nineties a burgeoning new field
has been generated which one really uses
randomized trials in a kind of jaipal
sort of way to get the question of what
works and so how did these trials work
well they're very much like
pharmaceutical trials you take groups of
voters and they could be individuals
that could be household they could be
media markets or precincts you randomly
assign them to treatment control and
then you see using public records how
votes actually came and the idea is
you're going to treat the treatment
group and try not to treat the control
group
diff there there's crossover you have to
make statistical adjustments which
you're gonna have to take classes to
hear about um but the the key thing is
that we're not going to ask people with
a vote we're just going to use public
records because we don't want any
cross-contamination between you're
getting the treatment in room and you
know thinking that you voted
ok so how does a typical experiment
look you know just for fun i I'll pick
one that we did in 2014 this was Carly
fiorina's super PAC was in New Hampshire
and here's a client kind of classic case
of a two-factor experiment they either
get a phone call or they don't they
either get 0 1 3 5 or 10 pieces of
direct mail encouraging them to vote
ok and particularly the voting the
courage being encouraged to vote for
conservatives and you know just kind of
put this in perspective
after a campaign consultant takes a take
of of the of the production costs and
what not mean that sending 10 pieces of
mail cost something like four dollars
and fifty cents that's like four dollars
and fifty Cent brick that you're sending
somebody and the question is you know
what you get for that amount of money
and the answer is well you know this is
the phone effect if you didn't send an
email and you you did a phone call well
that control group looks a lot like the
treatment group in terms of the the
actual outcome if you look across the
the columns though you see that the
turnout rate for ten pieces of mail 67.3
vs 67 point out he got three tenths of a
percent percentage point which is to say
you know if you said a thousand pieces
of mail you get three additional votes
in each one of those chunks of 10 cost
four dollars and fifty cents so that's
that fails what i would call the trail
of dollar bills test you know you'd be
better off just leaving a trail of
dollar bills leading the person to the
polls because this is this is just not
it's not working
no that's going to be typical of a lot
of a lot of these kinds of tactics and
so that's why rcts are very important
because if you didn't do an evaluation
everybody has a war story about how they
won or lost to give an election and what
they did or didn't do
ok so what what then what do we say
about all of these experiments you know
you see that you know if there's there's
a book that I i co-authored alber
republished by 3rd edition last year and
the Ivy League joke is the distinction
between books you've read in books
you've read yourself so this can be kind
of like a book you've read and and so
i'll just give the kind of quick summary
here there's basically a distilled into
one sentence you would say quality
matters the the quality the kind of
authentic personal interaction
associated with campaign communication
makes a big difference when it's
impersonal when it's a robo call when
it's a male reminder it tends to be
either ignored or forgotten or whatever
but it but if it's a if it's an actual
heartfelt appeal like it's very very
important you know Ben that you come out
to vote you know Ben can I count on you
to vote you know average you know this
election coming up don't you know we
can't lose this one it's a little like
going to a social event like a party you
know you could get a card and it could
save the RSVP or an email but if
somebody actually calls you up or or
buttonholes you in person it's a lot
more effective
that said there's very little evidence
of synergy when you talk to campaign
consultants the very often will talk
about the number of touches of voters
you gotta start off with a mail piece of
mail that maybe a phone call that maybe
three more pieces of mail and then you
know the program can do the program
continues with a door knock and blah
blah blah and i'm not saying that you
know more isn't necessarily better but
it's just you reach you typically reach
diminishing returns
where's the way they characterize it is
you know it's the magic of the whole
package where we're having an ongoing
conversation with the voters well
probably not
so so what then do the do the RCTs
randomized control trials suggest about
the effectiveness of these kinds of
tactics well it's a polyglot you know
group of randomized trials many of them
are but not all are done in Los alien
selection so you got to be careful about
reading these things you know closely
but you know basically you know these
the the characterization i'm going to
give you is probably about about right
even further for high ceilings selection
like the one we're in typically for
people who are canvas at their doorstep
the people who answered the door and
talk to a canvasser and see a bump of of
something like four percentage points
sometimes it's more like seven
percentage points when they're low
propensity voters or when the canvassers
are especially good but Canvassers may
not be especially good you know it all
it all sort of depends but in typically
a high ceilings election like a
presidential election the people were
influenced by canvassing are the people
whose base rate of voting are you know
somewhere between 25 and fifty percent
something so that when the base rates
are low you tend to get more impact if
they're already you know up there with a
ninety-five percent chance of voting you
know you're not gonna move that much and
so you have to kind of keep in mind that
you know typically in a presidential
election where turnout rates are in the
roughly sixty percent rate and roughly
seventy to eighty percent of the
eligible public is registered you know
most people have a very high probability
of turning out and so if you want to be
effective
you've got to focus on young people are
people who have recently moved or people
who have been registered but to vote and
only intermittently and so on
okay so I'm gonna I'm gonna really move
fast as I got the 10-minute warning so i
really gonna go fast so the one dirty
secret about canvassing is very often
campaigns are incentivized to do door
knocks rather than to actually have
conversations and that runs afoul of the
quality versus quantity trade-off
robotic calls almost never work except
with special exceptions having social
pressure which I might talk about later
volunteer phone banks however seem to be
pretty effective you know if you can go
off to a battleground state calling the
people you know or could talk
it and having a heartfelt conversation
it's probably pretty darn effectiveness
as a as a campaign tactic and certainly
cost effective on the other hand
delegating that to a commercial phone
bank that's going to do a lot of
perfunctory calls cranked out a 13-hour
that's going to be fully minimally
effective
interestingly there's lots of political
science theory that say it's the heat of
the election that matters you know kind
of getting a sense that there's really
some contestation going on
actually there's no evidence for that
whatsoever when you send people a
truckload of advocacy mail about the
importance of the elections the issues
that are steak
blah blah blah blah has no effect on on
turnout and all that will be amplified
when we look at a quasi experiments on
presidential advertising which almost
never say the word vote by the way and
have no effect on turnout so that's kind
of interesting but non-partisan you know
encouragement to vote you know they're
not super effective but they're they're
mildly effective an email is a perfect 0
or even worse with the exception of
person-to-person email but you might
work because again it's more personal
this is just kind of quick snapshot of
several experiments that send up to 12
pieces of mail the red line is a is
advocacy mail four Republican candidates
in 2012 done by Cubbison finds nothing
or less than nothing
this Virginia thing was done in 2005 by
a democratic operation they find nothing
this one was the Carly Fiorina super PAC
which is more encouraging than just
purely advocacy encouraging turnout and
it finds a little something-something
and this is a pure kind of non-partisan
do your civic duty type thing but you
can see in all cases you reach
diminishing returns so would kind of a
kind of interesting that you five is
about the number that people can stand
before the backslide
ok so so just because we only have a few
minutes i'm just gonna talk a little bit
about what's on tap for 2016 or what's
going to happen next few weeks
much of what we are thinking about now
draws its inspiration from 19th century
America one of the interesting things
about United States Army has famously
low turnout right but it wasn't always
that way we used to have very high
turnout turnout rates in the eighty
percent or
or above rate and we were positively you
know northern European in those days and
um and what was different well you know
it was you it was different in many ways
one of the things that was different if
you can sort of see in this picture the
guy in red
he's voting in public right is there's
nope no secret ballot
the other thing is that all men the
other thing is that this guy here is is
he's really drunk about the keel over
this guy's pouring whiskey right um it
was it was a whiskey sadaf Eric that's
part of the reason why i was so hard for
women to get the vote because so many
polling places where in saloons
Victorian women that was not you know
beauty is an appropriate thing for women
to do so
so what would change once progressive
reforms came in the late eighteen
eighties the the ballot was secret there
was the 50-footer 75-foot rule that
distance party workers from the actual
act of voting and you know no no whiskey
so all of those things come diminished
turn out so that by the
nineteen-twenties people were concerned
about low turnout are our kind of
flipping out because turnout has
declined at roughly by 40 percentage
points so we actually did some
experiments in not particularly good
experiment we did them 2005-2006 where
he took match pairs of precincts and
flip coins and put one of them into the
Election Day Festival where we had kind
of a 21st century festival with no
whiskey was you know family-friendly we
were making cotton candy and flipping
burgers and so in each case we would
flip a coin and one of the precincts
would be in the festival case the other
in the control case and we got about a
two and a half percentage point increase
in precinct level turnout but it was it
was it was considerable but you know
these were lame professorial parties
that we could do better so so the idea
is finally get around to 2016 been
trying to plug this for years but now we
actually are going to have a serious
later part is you can actually see where
they are at this website and they're
going to have you know Univision parties
all kinds of things you know food
entertainment
who knows and they will feature puppies
no no whiskey but there will be puppies
and then
that sounds like a big draw to me so we
will see
ok so so to wrap up if you're not going
to talk to people face-to-face and
you're not going to have these kinds of
social events you know what are you
going to do
well one of the things that is often
done especially in the wake of some
recent research which I'm connected to
is to enforce social norms pre-scripted
social norms norms about how people
should behave and even when people are
not voting in vast numbers they still
Harbor a strong sense that voting is
inappropriate activity and it's a matter
of their civic duty
the problem is that if you use
heavy-handed tactics like scolding
people there's going to be a public
outcry and backlash and possibly
reactants this tactic it turns out is
incredibly old the very first
get-out-the-vote experiments done in the
nineteen twenties but were were done
using exactly this tactic this cartoon
compares the slackers who won't defend
their country and times of war with the
slackers who won't take time out to vote
ok so you know you're basically shaving
people have noticed they were saying
hello brother and this guy is reacting
negatively so so that the old days in
that now this has become quite current
so campaigns routinely send out shaming
male that has that has changed however
in recent years and I think that a
growing literature has suggested that
you can get many of the same effects
without the reactants if you express
gratitude
if you think people for their past
participation and you can still let it
be known that voting is a matter of
civic duty without necessarily going to
the point of being creepy and scolding
meant enforcing social norms um what are
the effects of these kinds of tactics
well they're not as big as they were in
the low salience elections that we
originally test them in typically there
are much much smaller but there's still
probably cost effective
so what then about TV commercials with
this is a very interesting feature of
the American electoral college map that
for example is the 2,000 map but it's
basically the same idea every election
there are media markets in our country
that straddle state borders and
sometimes one part of the
media market for example Pittsburgh
beams it's commercials into Western
Maryland right so Western Maryland is
never compare alone is never competitive
but you know if they're in the
Pittsburgh market they're going to see
10,000 adds a typical election this time
with only one side advertising agency
5,000 out so what's interesting is you
might ask well is there any evidence of
the places at the kind of fringes of
battleground states for voted higher
rates the answer interestingly is now
which I think it's theoretically quite
quite relevant of course many things are
untested so there's been about 25
experiments on persuasion in the basic
bottom line is it's really hard to do
it's hard to do the studies and it's
hard to find effects that are doing
studies because you can no longer use
public records in the same way to gauge
outcomes if you want to do it in a kind
of large-scale way you typically have to
treat an entire precinct and that's
expensive to do
alternatively you have to do a survey at
the end to figure out whether the
effects of the effects are expressed in
terms of post-treatment surveys in the
treatment control what we know is that
you know these effects tend to be fairly
small and often transitory we did a
series of experiments basically exposing
people to real newspapers that there was
sort of like the New York Post they were
basically scandal sheets only left
thinner than the New York Post Christina
for folded pages and the treatment
effects on the right are fairly large on
the left there fairly small one the
right this is the share of people who
don't know about the candidates in the
control group so they have no idea
so when people are hearing about people
for the first time in these candle
sheets when you interview them weeks
later you know
unbeknownst to them there's connection
between the surveillance in the
newspapers
there's a substantial effect but for
better-known candidates there's actually
no effect and when you look at actual
field experiments that try to persuade
very often they came up they come up
short so you know for example this is
that covers an experiment where they did
kind of standard Republican direct mail
in three legislative races this is micro
targeted mail and as you can see it had
zippo effect we did some
TV experiments whoops time's up well
you'll never hear about them sorry
the bottom line is this is the effect
within the week that the advertisements
were deployed and that was the effect
that week after and so the the concern
is you might move opinion but you're not
going to move opinion in an enduring way
and that was one experiment and we
obviously need to do more but it's a
little hard to do more because campaign
consultants are not so eager to do
experiments on television because the
the mark-up for them it's really quite
considerable okay so why don't we just
kind of cut to the end
ok so what would you do so now what are
your your the audience and you might
think well greens kind of convince me
that maybe I like there are some things
that I can do to increase turnout but
I'm just a person I'm not a whole
campaign
what can I do in say the next 45 days
well you know i would say that if you
wanted to raise turnout appreciably and
I think we have to be realistic to to
produce a five percent in 4 percentage
point increase in turn out which is say
one extra vote for every 20 people you
you interact with that's a pretty big
effect in a presidential election if you
could do that that would be pretty
impressive what kinds of things could
you do well if you know some people in
battle ground States you could skype
with them or you could do something you
can go visit them home you could say I'm
not leaving until you vote early for
people that I perfect or you could get
others to pledge to vote and then you
can hold them to that pledge in places
like North Carolina believe that the the
voter file is actually online so you
could say to your your pals in North
Carolina
can I count on you to vote and then say
good because i'm going to be checking
every day to see whether you've done it
and and then there will be social norms
and accountability but I think maybe the
most fun thing to do would be to you
organize a house party you could
organize it i guess in somebody else's
house and milk let's clean up that way
and and and try to raise turn out that
way but that's essentially 19th century
version of a
the votech because you can still serve
whiskey ok so then just kinda end I
would say you know campaign
professionals are kinda interesting lot
because they're very very savvy very
smart they often have tremendous on the
ground knowledge of how politics works
they often are also very partisan so
it's not as though they don't want their
side to win they often do very very
badly but they're beset by conflict of
interest because they tend to have an
ownership stake in the mail house or in
the phone bank or whatever they're doing
and so it's very hard for them to kind
of take a detached view of the
effectiveness of their operation and you
almost never see homegrown randomized
trials by the vendors themselves for
political scientists or you know those
who do social science more generally you
know I think that that this line of
research has gradually transformed the
study of of campaign crabs and camp and
campaign crafted and also the study of
the electrical effects but it has also
opened up new avenues for theoretical
explanation such as interpersonal spill
overs or habit formation you know what
happens if you encourage somebody
randomly to vote in one election
what does that mean for their
participation in subsequent elections
you know in the united states where we
have arguably the most frequent
elections in the world sometimes our
electoral calendars like into a gateway
drug
where we give lots of people an
opportunity not to vote in and then
guess what they're voting out habits are
often severed as a result so one common
suggestions that we should consolidate
our electoral calendar but of course
it's not consolidated for political
reasons there are some things that we
don't know about and I think rather than
me ask the questions you can ask
questions when we pause and open it up
to the light
ok
that was terrific gone thank you so much
i'm going to take questions both from
the audience here and from the audience
online before you let me just ask one
question myself which is this has been
the strangest election I've ever seen
involved in a number of them what are
the things that surprised you about the
2016 election and what are the things
that you think we may learn from this
one sort of going forward that we didn't
know before this particular content
because it's a great question it's a big
question
there's so many surprises in this
election you know we've never seen a
presidential campaign operated this week
or a candidate when was the last time
that a presidential candidate routinely
did not use a teleprompter or or or
tweeted things himself right usually you
have circuits doing the dirty work but
the attack directly yourself is a bold
move and we will see whether it becomes
part of the routine playbook i would say
perhaps the most interesting thing
especially for the Trump campaign I mean
on day one he announced that he is worth
8.7 billion dollars but the amount of
capital intensive campaigning that he
has done has been relatively surprising
fairly small he apparently has only put
in something like 33 million dollars
into television advertising through
through the early part of of october and
that's less than many self funded
candidates put into their senatorial
campaigns so what we're in some sense
learning is what the electoral map
showed would look like in in this
weirdly asymmetric case where the
Clinton campaign more or less is
business as usual the usual amount of
spending on TV and usual amount of
spending on the ground and the Trump
campaign is doing something askew so
that so I i wish that he were more on
the regression line kind of candidates
that we get a more controlled experiment
that you know you get what you know
they're it all comes as a package
ok many many surprises i mean they have
been watched every presidential debate
tonight
I've never seen one where the candidates
didn't shake hands
so it was a new moment in some sense in
terms of the disability of presidential
interaction renuka we're going to take a
couple of questions from the from the
internet from folks who have that's
running okay to speak up already the
question
ok ok so let me let me just a second one
first because it's an easier question so
yes why are some people surveyed i
remember hearing many many funny
speeches about this because I sort of
grew up and I kind of survey environment
and the routine question was who you
pulling if you're not calling me who are
you bowling and and i think that the
fact is that there are lots of reasons
why somebody would be contacted for a
survey some having to do with just
random chance and some having to do with
the fact that their particular
demographic profile is rather abundant
and so there isn't much uncertainty
about what people like them are going to
do even if if their unique as can be
nobody cares about them because they're
in a boring group so that's a that's the
survey question on the on the script
question i think one of the things that
has perplexed academic researchers who
would love love love to write articles
about how the message matters is very
often the message doesn't matter that
much in part because you know so much
that the people remember about a phone
conversation is about you know the
subtle things you know was the person
reading in a mechanical way did they
seem enthusiastic did they seemed as
though the candidate was their candidate
you know if they were to be asked the
question could they actually answer
knowledgeably do they have an accent
suggesting that there from way way out
of town and all these things are are are
not about the particular content of the
message but I think what's kind of
interesting about a lot of the
head-to-head matchups between messages
that make partisan advocacy appeals or
make ethnic group appeals or make
general civic duty appeals is that they
all work about the same and if anything
the civic duty appeal maybe works the
best because it's not immediately
challenging the
the listener great so now we're going to
take a few questions from the audience
great basic questions how does early
voting change the manner in which
campaigns do outreach for persuasion
mobilization early voting is a real boon
to any campaign that has a mobilization
strategy why because they can allocate
their resources much more efficiently
over a number of weeks as opposed to all
the final 72 hours
it's true that campaigns often even even
in places with traditional electrical
systems start weeks in advance just to
be able to cover as much of the voter
file as possible but they can do so much
more in a situation where they have
early voting because in it's typical for
people who are very very charged up
about voting to vote almost immediately
at the first opportunity this is
especially true for example in states
like Oregon Colorado that have all by
mail voting typically half the people
who are you know very high propensity
voters will vote immediately upon
receiving the ballot and when they do
the registrar notifies the the you know
the other part parties by by
communicating public lists and that
allows the parties describe those people
off the target list so it makes makes
their they're canvassing resources go
much much farther so that's good but
that in addition to the extent that
early voting involves say citywide
voting centers that are open on weekends
you get out from under the problem of
getting people to vote on a tuesday
which is ordinarily working day so you
can in principle orchestrate much more
effective mobilization strategies around
that using festivals or some other
gimmick or nothing at all in that proved
to be rather effective for the Obama
campaign apparently in 2012 getting
people from churches to go vote you know
it's a kind of routine social matter
that said i would say that in a non
battleground state where there is a
whole lot of mobilization don't expect
the the simple institutional fact of
early voting to make much difference I
think it's been kind of a disappointment
to reformers because it hasn't really
changed the composition of the
electorate as much as hoped because it's
essentially a a way for mobilizing
agents of parties and campaigns to
leverage their resources more
effectively not necessarily something
that would dramatically change the
cost-benefit calculation of individual
photos
the question is have they been get out
the vote attempts to that focus on the
homeless and other people who are gues
you said call the political dropouts but
really it sounds as though they're just
marginalized people of any description i
think the answer is typically know
typically no because for well for two
reasons
three reasons one is in places that have
voter registration systems that require
some advance planning typically those
systems require some kind of
documentation and almost people tend not
to have it another another issue is of
course you know you're not sure about
the partisan leadings of those people
and then very often campaigns think well
I'd rather go with a known quantity I'd
rather go with the person who has higher
vote vote propensity than such a person
because i have to allocate my resources
efficiently and rather than go to that
person maybe I'll go to a college campus
and find a 18 year old who's likely
devoted mobilize but not likely to vote
otherwise i would say the closest thing
to that kind of line of research is the
research on felon disenfranchisement and
the extent to which get-out-the-vote
efforts directed them increase turnout
and the answer seems to be the effects
are small faction
got that were associated with this
follow-up on that
just a couple dollars so which were
searching for it which one to my left
for that
yeah there was a there was a close
interest research in quotations the
there was an experiment but you know no
real outcome measure so the so the pair
of researchers David brockman at
Stanford and Josh Calla at Berkeley did
a follow-up experiment with the same
group this time in Miami and they
conducted a randomized trial using the
same general approach which was
intensive canvassing and they they
reported their results in science i
think back in May and interestingly they
were canvassing not on the issue of gay
marriage because marriage it no longer
become an issue but rather on the
transgender equality and they did find
effects so it's kind of a kind of
interesting postscript to that mess
get three months so the results from the
baseline hold my question what did he do
but you always let me know
that's a really good question so the
question is what does matter in
campaigns and I really don't want to
seem as though i'm arguing that nothing
matters what I'm suggesting is that you
know if you've got high quality and high
quantity that's going to matter i'm in
quite often
that's what you do have in an energized
campaign you're referring to the brakes
at vote that was a case where there
really was quite a lot of discussion in
social networks and otherwise about this
issue and so you could imagine cascades
of of influence going in all directions
and because it was so heavily covered i
can't imagine that it that all that
communication had no effect but whether
it was the kind of effect that can be
picked up in polls is a different story
right because the polling industry not
just in the US or the UK but worldwide
this is kind of in disarray you know in
the old days it was about random
sampling and now it's I mean the non
statistical uncertainty overwhelms this
disco uncertainty because cell phones
and everything else not massive rates of
non-response make it very difficult to
22 guess properly as to who's going to
vote and and how they're going to vote
so in the United States we often have
the happy accident that are poles for
reasons that nobody understands not even
the pollsters are accurate because the
biases associate with the polls are
correlated with the biases associated
with turnout but in the UK where you had
famously inaccurate polls going back to
the nineteen nineties there doesn't seem
to be that happy accident so maybe you
shouldn't be so surprised
what
water
well i would say you know with respect
to voting days that are non-traditional
days of the week remember that Louisiana
for example typically in its own
elections both on saturday it's not
known as you know a spectacularly high
turnout state even under those
conditions and you can understand why
that might be that if you just have the
same old electrical system but on a
different day you know you haven't
really fundamentally altered the way in
which people relate to elections and I'm
not sure that people do or don't vote so
much based on the cost of elections that
was that was after all that patha sins
that was tested when there were so many
changes to make voting easier to make
you register later to make you vote by
mail
there are lots of things that would make
building more convenient that didn't
have a profound effect on on turnout
with respect to these broader
institutional questions you know it's
it's hard to say it's hard to say based
on the kind of rigorous evidence-based
you know foundation you can I think you
can speculate but very often when when
people who have waited on on questions
have speculated about big institutional
questions that kind of gotten wrong
apparently when countries have adopted
the you know the the method that was
recommended so you know New Zealand
being a kind of classic case of adopting
a new electoral system and not seeing a
surgeon in turn out so i think we're
going to do two more questions one from
the web and one from the room so
this mandatory believe actually um was i
think aloud initially into of the
state's constitution but it was never
actually enacted in one of the more
interesting things about mandatory
voting is we have other things other
specific things that are mandatory in
the case of jury duty for example
mandatory but we know they got a path
dependent thing we made jury duty
mandatory minute but not voting and now
of course it's it's highly unlikely
we'll ever see a change but one of the
interesting things that happen for
example in Australia is they that both
parties agreed to have mandatory voting
so they could take you off the table the
mobilizing aspects of campaign craft it
was a little bit like a an arm's
negotiation
I really can't see that happening now
because you know there seems to be a bit
of an asymmetry between the parties in
terms of what they think they would get
out of having more people vote I would
say however that political scientists
are very very divided on the question of
whether if everybody voted the election
outcomes would be different and they
typically conclude not very much not not
as much as people might imagine when
they think of a kind of progressive tilt
to the people who are not voting
routinely ok last question
very
and got it
that's the question that is a very big
question it'sit's question has many many
levels
do they feel beholden to do an office
what they say there's so many famous
examples of them doing or not doing it
for example george w bush declares that
he's not going to engage in that nation
building in that I think the second
debate with alcohol and that that you
know it's certainly led to surprising
results but there are many instances
where where candidates do for shadow
what they're going to do and they
actually take their their election has a
mandate so it's a it's kind of a mixed
bag i would say that I did the very
often the issue is can't campaigns have
a huge incentive to promise things to
their base to energize them to mobilize
them get them to work even when they
know that there's really very little
hope especially in a in a divided
Congress to get anything like that
look what they're dreaming about past
and so it seems as though they're really
trafficking on is sort of a vision that
will be the beginning of a evidence of
negotiating agreement but you don't say
that right now it would be be very
difficult to to say what what say the
the Trump administration would do based
on on the the specific policy position
that he's laid out either because he's
been vague or because they wouldn't
actually be tenable as his policy
proposals in Congress with Hillary
Clinton it you know because it's pretty
much kin to the status quo under the
Obama administration maybe there
wouldn't be that big a change but many
of her proposals probably are not
actionable in Congress given its current
configuration so in a way both of the
candidates have an incentive to say
things that would be appealing knowing
that if they don't really have to answer
to these promises down the road because
they'll be blocked by there
moments I will say some of these work to
move the White House and working on a
number of campaigns that the argument
that the office holder made of
particular commitment during a campaign
is often a trump card internal policy
conversations that people are really
very reluctant to suggest to somebody
that they go back on the campaign much
so that I think it does have a social
norm in that sense and i'm gonna give
you the last word are their final
thoughts
final thoughts i would say you here you
are at MIT home to you know great
departments in all the social sciences
and you know I think that taking some
time out for coursework that would
expose you to not just the big picture
but very often the little picture like
how do you know whether something
actually works that is a kind of i like
the big picture love the big picture but
i would say trying to understand how
you'd sort out good evidence from bad
it's probably a worthwhile venture at
least once in one class you to thank you
we're still
