According to Sabato:

“Conditions have deteriorated badly for Democrats over the summer. The economy appears rotten, with little chance of a substantial comeback by November 2nd. Unemployment is very high, income growth sluggish, and public confidence quite low. To most voters–fair or not–it seems that President Obama has over-promised and under-delivered.”

While the Democrats can now add the pundit class to the list of subgroups they are currently losing, we are still 61 days out from Election Day and have a long way yet to go to make a GOP Majority a reality. While the polling data remains favorable and the Majority appears within our grasps, we still have work to do. We have had another good week. Now, we need to string together a few more.

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The forecasts are based on a program designed to evaluate current polling and demographic data, and to compare these present-day conditions to outcomes in United States Senate races over the past six election cycles.

The Democratic majority is in increasing jeopardy in the Senate, according to the latest FiveThirtyEight forecasting model. The Democrats now have an approximately 20 percent chance of losing 10 or more seats in the Senate, according to the model, which would cost them control of the chamber unless Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, who is running for the Senate as an independent, both wins his race and decides to caucus with them.

In addition, there is an 11 percent chance that Democrats will lose a total of nine seats, which would leave them with 50 votes, making  them vulnerable to a defection to the Republican Party by a centrist like  Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut or Ben Nelson of Nebraska. On average, over the model’s 100,000 simulation runs, the Democrats are projected to lose a net of six and a half Senate seats, which would leave them with  52 or  53 senators. (Even though the G.O.P. primary in Alaska remains too close to call, that outcome is unlikely to alter the model.)

The forecasts are based on a program designed to evaluate current polling and demographic data, and to compare these present-day conditions to outcomes in United States Senate races over the past six election cycles. For instance, in recent  cycles, a Senate candidate with a 7-point lead in the polls 10 weeks before  the election won about 80 percent of the time, and a candidate with a 12-point lead won about 95 percent of the time. Although the model, which correctly predicted the outcome of all 35 Senate elections in 2008, is not quite this cut-and-dried, it is this recent  track record that forms the backbone of its projections.

Of late, the source of the Democrats’ problems has not necessarily been in high-profile Senate races where the Republicans have nominated inexperienced but headline-grabbing candidates, like  Sharron Angle in Nevada and Rand Paul in Kentucky (although the model regards both Ms. Angle and Mr. Paul as slight favorites). Instead, it has been in traditional swing states like  Missouri, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The last time the Democratic nominee in Ohio, Lee Fisher, held the lead in any state poll, for example, was in June. Representative Joe Sestak, the Democratic nominee in Pennsylvania, has not led any poll there since May, and Robin Carnahan of Missouri has not held a lead since January. The Democratic nominee in New Hampshire, Representative Paul W. Hodes, has not led in any of 17 public polls in New Hampshire against his likely Republican opponent, Kelly Ayotte.

The Democratic candidate lags by single digits in each of these states, and victories there remain entirely possible (perhaps especially so in New Hampshire, where the Republicans have yet to hold their primary). But, at a time when they need to be drawing closer to their opponents as the clock ticks toward Nov. 2, these Democrats instead find themselves falling somewhat further behind. We are now close enough to Election Day that a deficit of as few as 5 percentage points may be difficult to overcome, especially in races where relatively few undecided voters remain.

Particularly vexing to the Democrats might be their standing in Missouri and Ohio, where the Republican incumbents —  Christopher S. Bond and George V. Voinovich — are retiring and identifiable members of the G.O.P.’s establishment have been nominated to replace them: Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, the former Republican Minority Whip, and in Ohio, Rob Portman, the former congressman who served as trade representative and budget director in the Bush administration. And so far, the Democrats’ strategy of Bush-bashing does not seem to be resonating in these states. Mr. Fisher has only about a 20 percent chance of prevailing in Ohio, according to the model, and Mrs. Carnahan – once considered  a  strong nominee – has about a 1-in-10 chance of doing so in Missouri.

At a superficial level, states like  Missouri,  New Hampshire and Ohio might seem of  least concern to Democrats, since  the races there are for seats now held by retiring Republicans. But the Democrats need to keep some of these races in play to preserve a reasonably level playing field, especially since they appear to be almost certain to lose several seats they now hold. Foremost among these are North Dakota, where the popular Republican governor, John Hoeven, should romp to victory in a seat being vacated by Byron L. Dorgan, and Arkansas, where Senator Blanche Lincoln’s deficit in the polls exceeds 20 points (no recent Senate candidate, incumbent or challenger, has come back from such a significant margin so late in the race). Indiana, where Evan Bayh is retiring, is also more than 95 percent likely to flip to Republicans, according to the model. The outcome in Delaware, where there has been little polling, is more uncertain, but the model has established   Representative Michael N. Castle, the Republican nominee, as a 90 percent favorite.

Less clear are the Republicans’ prospects in California, Washington and Wisconsin,  traditional blue states where  incumbent Democrats are running for re-election. Although Barbara Boxer’s approval ratings in California have turned negative in many polls, the same ratings have remained decent for Patty Murray in Washington and Russ Feingold in Wisconsin. The forecast model in Wisconsin is somewhat skeptical of Republican chances there, particularly against Mr. Feingold, an idiosyncratic senator who has broken from his party’s position on many issues. It is these states – along with Illinois, where voters seem unwilling to commit to either the Democratic nominee, Alexi Giannoulias, or the Republican, Mark Kirk – that may determine whether Republicans indeed have a chance of taking over the Senate.

In one sense, the Republicans’ math remains quite daunting. There are 29 Senate contests in which the Republicans have at least a 5 percent chance of winning, according to the forecast: Republicans would need to win at least 28 of these in order to head into the 112th Congress with an outright majority. They must not only sweep essentially all of the Democratic-held seats, but also successfully defend all or almost all of their own. And in some of those, like Florida, Kentucky and perhaps North Carolina, Republicans remain quite vulnerable. Their chances would improve, of course, if  they are able to put in play a state like Connecticut, which falls just below that 5 percent threshold but where the Democratic nominee, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, has sacrificed some of a once-formidable lead.

At the same time, the outcomes in individual Senate races are not uncorrelated: if Republicans tend to overachieve in some states, they will probably also overachieve in others. Certainly, if Democrats were to have another month as bad as the one they endured in August – one characterized by poor economic news and ethics scandals – the possibilities for a Senate takeover would rise further. But the reverse could also be true. It is not out of the question that the polling could shift back toward the Democrats: many voters do not begin paying attention in earnest to Congressional campaigns until after Labor Day, and the parties’ messaging strategies have yet to solidify. The Democrats retain long-shot chances – about 3 percent – of actually gaining one or more Senate seats and restoring a 60-seat majority.

It could also be that the polling somewhat overstates the degree of danger that Democrats face. Many of their poorer results, for example, come from polling companies like Rasmussen Reports that use automated scripts to conduct their surveys, rather than live operators, and which often poll in a blitzkrieg fashion, with all of their polling completed within a few hours. Although FiveThirtyEight has not found these “robo polls” to be less accurate than live-operator ones in recent elections, they are generally associated with lower response rates, and they may not be getting a representative sample of voters on the phone.

Nevertheless, the forecast model is carefully calibrated to account for these contingencies. No one pollster is allowed to dominate the ratings, for instance, no matter how widely or indiscriminately it polls, and pollsters whose surveys consistently lean toward one party have their results adjusted to bring them back toward the norm. The model is also careful about determining the extent to which the outcomes in different states are correlated with each other, and in estimating the degree of uncertainty associated with its forecasts.

A fuller description of the methodology behind the forecast model can be found on the methodology page; we also expect to convey certain facets of the model in more detail in coming posts. In the meantime, we invite readers to explore the interactive displays that  contain the model’s forecasts not just under current conditions but also at semimonthly intervals dating to Feb. 1. For the time being, we expect that our Republican readers will take more pleasure in doing so than our Democratic ones.

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The reports of the death of the Democratic Party have been greatly exaggerated.  The day after the election there will be a Democratic majority in the House and a Democratic majority in the Senate. If it wasn’t illegal, I would make book on it.

Gallup points out that Republicans are much more enthusiastic, hold a 3-point lead on the generic ballot, and the Presidential approval rating is below 50%, all indicative of double-digit loses for Democrats in November.

While Biden may be overstating the Democrats’ strength, it is important that Republicans realize that this election is not yet “in the bag.”  Voters are clearly upset with Obama and Democrats, but recent polling suggests (pdf) that voters hold a very negative opinion of the Republican Party - worse than what they think about the Democratic Party.

Democratic Party
Positive   32%
Neutral  22%
Negative  44%

Republican Party
Positive  24%
Neutral  28%
Negative  46%

This means that voters aren’t going to be casting a vote for Republican candidates because they like the GOP.  Actually, swing and Independent voters will have to hold their nose to vote for a Republican.  The fact is that the GOP has done little to positively re-brand the Republican Party in a way that makes it attractive.  This makes our candidates just as vulnerable as the Democrats.  And we shouldn’t forget that no matter how many seats we win (or lose).

While many pundits think that the takeover of the US House is eminent, I am a bit more cautious.  We are seeing a lot of data that shows Republicans competitive in Dem-held seats.  But, with voters as upset with Republicans, we can’t take anything for granted.  We still have to run a superior race.  The seats that we are out-campaigned in, we will no doubt lose.

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Internet killed the video star

Robert Putnam wrote in his book Bowling Alonethat Americans were living in a “weak ties” nation, where they were becoming isolated from their communities and apathetic towards politics. The last few years has brought a resurgence of a “strong ties” nation among millennial voters, however, largely as a result of the growth of the Internet and social networking. Facebook, MySpace and other similar websites have connected people, especially the younger generations, in an unprecedented fashion that IMs, telephones and emails could never achieve. Most campaigns have picked up on this, and have created Facebook profiles for them to disseminate information to the voters and create a community of volunteers to rely upon for grassroots efforts. The Pew Research Center reported in its February 2010 study on millennials that one in three (32%) have posted a message of some type on a social network in the past 24 hours and more than half (56%) have sent an email during that same timeframe. These numbers only further the case that the Internet is the best tool for reaching out to Millennial voters and will continue to be so as time passes, as the study found that the older voters got, the less likely they were to use the Internet and social networking sites.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

Millennial voters tend to be much more socially liberal than older voters. Just over half (52%) of them are pro-choice and 50% support gay marriage according to the same Pew study. The number of millennials who are pro-choice, however, is only slightly higher than that of older adults, as 48% of people between the ages of 30 and 64 are pro-choice. MIllennials are more liberal with respect to their support for gay marriage, as only 43% of Generation X-ers (ages 30-49) and 32% of Baby Boomers (ages 50-64) support gay marriage. A possible explanation for the fact that millennials are more open to gay marriage is that two-thirds (65%)of them say they have at least one friend or family member who is gay. Millennials are also much less religious overall, as only 37% of them actively participate in religious activities (including daily prayer) and one in three (31%) consider themselves to be unaffiliated with any religion.

It’s the economy, stupid

Overall, millennial voters tend to vote Democratic in general elections. The Pew study found that 51% plan to vote for the Democratic Congressional candidate in their district in November while only 37% plan to vote Republican. The number of who identify themselves as Republican/Lean Republican has also risen since 2007 from 30% to 35%, while the number of who identify themselves as Democrats/Lean Democrat has dropped by the same amount. Yet these voters are trending Republican, as only one in three (33%) planned to vote Republican in 2006.

A large part of this can be attributed to their preference for fiscal conservatism and the current state of the economy. In a study conducted by USA Todayin October of 2008, 50% of all Millennial voters said that the most important issue in deciding who to vote for that November was the economic crisis, and four in ten (39%) were most worried about the rise in unemployment. WRS polling over the past year has found that this is still true, as nearly all of our federal and statewide polls have demonstrated that this is the most important issue to them as well. This also explains to some degree why made up the largest chuck of “Paulites”—supporters of Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul in 2008 and potentially in 2012. Paul, and subsequently his son Rand—who is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Kentucky this year—made a name for himself as being a libertarian Republican who advocates for a smaller government and less government regulation of the financial markets. They are also the most likely (44%) out of all generations to believe that the private businesses make a fair amount of profits and are not too powerful, further proving their capitalistic nature.

So what really matters to millennial voters?

Here at WRS we use a proprietary tool called the “Values Centered Issue Analysis” (or VCIA for short) that helps us have a better idea of the motivations and thought process of voters as they consider the most important issues to them in the upcoming elections. Looking specifically at the responses of voters 18-34 from studies conducted in a variety of Congressional Districts throughout the United States, we discovered that the economy and unemployment is still the largest concern to them and what they would like to see fixed first. Millennial voters want to see the economy improve because they are worried about their friends (and in some cases, themselves) who are unemployed and struggling to make ends meet, and how this is having a negative impact on their communities. They would like to see the economy improve so that they can have better financial futures as they start their families and enter middle-age. Millennial voters are also very concerned with the fact that they believe the Federal Government has failed them in recent years, and helped contribute to the current economic situation. Again this impacts their communities and thus, in their minds, having a government that works for them will not only improve the economy but restore prosperity to the country both in their minds and in the minds of the rest of the world.

What to say to Millennial Voters this Fall

Winning over Millennial voters in the polls is possible if campaigns focus on a few different things. First, the more a campaign connects with millennial voters through the Internet, the more likely they are to turn these voters into both supporters and volunteers. One note of caution is that they should not push a large focus on fundraising with these voters—considering the economic state of the country and the high numbers of unemployment among, the last thing a Millennial voter wants to hear from a candidate is “Would you be willing to donate to my campaign?” Republican candidates should also target the younger voter with a message about improving the economy and working to decrease the unemployment rate nationwide, as that is by far their biggest concern and the issue that will likely make or break their support for you in November. Reminding these voters that you would like to see the economy improve will also help them become more optimistic about their own individual lives and the lives of their families, friends and communities. And if all these steps are followed, the millennial vote should be winnable by the GOP in November.

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These means that television is still king when placing political ads.

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If you didn’t know it already, the internet is catching on. While that isn’t news, sometimes it takes dramatic figures like the above to drive how the point that an online strategy is essential for winning campaigns in a world where 80% of adults use the internet and two-thirds have broadband in their home.

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The consistent Republican advantages are also notable from a historical perspective. In Gallup’s 60-year history of asking the generic ballot question, it is rare for the Republicans to be ahead among all registered voters. In fact, last week’s seven-point lead is the largest Gallup has measured for the Republican Party at any point in a midterm election year.

Even in two of the strongest Republican years — 1994 and 2002 — Democrats led or were tied in the final pre-election poll among registered voters. Republicans, however, led in those polls once turnout was factored in using Gallup’s likely voter model, which correctly forecasted that more voters would cast ballots for Republican than Democratic candidates. (Gallup will begin to provide likely voter estimates for the 2010 vote in October.)

Republicans usually make gains in their share of the vote after the likely voter model is applied, and generally hold an advantage in actual voter turnout in midterm elections, so a Republican advantage among all registered voters is an ominous sign for the Democrats’ prospects.

There are signs voter turnout in 2010 is not likely to go against historical patterns, with 46% of Republicans and 23% of Democrats saying they are “very enthusiastic” about voting this year. Republicans have led in reported enthusiasm throughout the year, and the current figures are tied for the largest enthusiasm gap by party this year.

Republicans’ relatively stronger showing on the generic ballot throughout August is due in part to Republican gains in party affiliation and a slightly higher level of support for Republican candidates among independent voters, as detailed in last week’s update.

In addition, though party loyalty in terms of voting is high on both sides, in August there are signs of slight but notable changes. So far this month, 96% of Republican registered voters say they would vote for the Republican candidate, exceeding Republicans’ party loyalty for any prior month. At the same time, the percentage of Democratic registered voters preferring the Democratic candidate — 91% — matches the monthly low for either party to date.

Bottom Line

Gallup’s generic ballot for Congress, which has been an accurate predictor of the national vote for the U.S. House in past midterm elections, continues to suggest 2010 will be a good year for the Republicans. The consistent Republican advantages among all registered voters in recent weeks are unusual from a historical perspective. Though a swing in the Democratic Party’s favor cannot be ruled out, voting patterns observed in the generic ballot in a given midterm election year generally hold throughout that year

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C&E: Let’s start with where things are now. What are some of the capabilities you all are developing now?

Allen: Maybe it’s just because of where we are in the election cycle, but one of our biggest interests right now is a con­stant endeavor to push down the fun­damental insides of microtargeting and modeling to lower-level races. It’s always fascinating to look at where everybody’s coming from. The traditional pollster–media consultant relationship, in our opinion, needs to be just as strong, with pollster–mail, pollster phones, pollster direct voter contact, and that works well in a big race where you can afford your own microtargeting.

Rivlin: I get asked a lot, “How do you work with pollsters?” One of the sim­plest ways I like to answer is, we look through the other end of the telescope. The pollsters are more involved in mes­saging and working out exactly what the language is and what the landscape is. We’re more nuts and bolts, the people you need to speak to. We find that the data is not refined enough to get to the nuance of messaging, but the data can get to divisions that really speak to peo­ples’ big ideological breaks.

One of the big repercussions of the 2008 election is that more people want microtargeting. There are a whole lot of people who worked on the Obama campaign—their first-ever campaign—who are used to seeing a model score on the voter file. They’re surprised to open a voter file and not see a model score.

C&E: Maybe you could expand on that a little for those who don’t know what a model score is.

Rivlin: Model scores come in a lot of different guises. There are models that do the clustering and divide the popu­lation into different categories. Another way of doing a model score is to give a predicted probability or a ranking of someone having a particular attribute. How likely are they to vote, how likely are they to vote democratic, how likely are they to have a particular issue? You know the way that these things have been increasingly used, is that people do a select on a list of people from age 35 to 47; you can say, I want a list of people that are 35-47 who are likely to vote. So that would be how a lot of people on the ground interact with those scores, and it’s interesting. In 2008, I spent a lot of time trying to persuade peo­ple that this dark magic was actually not so scary and was accessible and they should trust it. Micro­targeters aren’t the wizard of Oz. [laughter]

Drechsler: As Joel alluded to, a lot of it is dispelling myths of what microtargeting is. Some out there see it as magic, and some see it as bullshit.

Allen: The truth lies somewhere in between.

Drechsler: The Obama campaign’s success with microtargeting has made everybody in some way want it. Some people have very high expectations [that they’ll have the same result Obama did], which isn’t necessarily true. The campaigns that embrace microtargeting and run with it will have success. Those campaigns where they say, “We don’t need it,” without having an understanding of what it is, can be frustrating.

C&E: When you approach a client, what are some of the things you impress upon them? What is the education process?

Drechsler: The approach is different depending on budgets. The reality is, we can do programs as small as $10,000 or up to a half million. It really depends on what your objectives are. I think one of the best selling points is that it pays for itself.

Meyers: We try to walk through with clients on this idea of, “Is my campaign big enough for mar­ket targeting, or is it too small?” And then we try to say that it doesn’t really have anything to do with how big a district you are in; it has to do with how big your direct contact budget is. If you have a $30 million budget, and you’re going to spend $29.9 million of that on TV and the rest on market targeting, that doesn’t make any sense. Our general rule is that if the project is going to cost you 10% or less of your direct contact budget, then this isn’t an easy decision for you. If you’re in the 30 to 35% range, you’re probably at the point that you should just be looking to put more mail in the mailboxes.

C&E: Does it make your job difficult, figuring out what the other side is doing?

Meyers: We all have some idea what each other does, but we’re probably missing half of it or mis­interpreting half of it. There are certainly a few people that claim to do microtargeting, but you can just tell by the way they talk about it that it isn’t the same thing.

Rivlin: Part of the arms race isn’t so much work­ing out what weapons each person has as assuming the other side has the arms and making sure you’re muscled up so that when you go to battle, you’re not at a disadvantage.

Allen: Nothing that anybody at this table does is reinventing the wheel in terms of analytics or modeling. The tools already exist. Building your analytical tool chest is fairly easy, especially since the user community always lags behind the state of the art in terms of what we can do with the data or the behavior of the data. We have to push the enve­lope incrementally, because if we try to throw three new tools at [clients], they will probably use none of them. When you do a big presidential level race or a top-tier senate race, you’ve got people who are presumably focusing a lot of time and energy on adoption.

Rivlin: I find that this conversation has to happen on two levels—that you have to have buy-in from the people who are signing the checks and order­ing the projects, but increasingly you also have to have buy-in from the people who are implement­ing it on the ground. In 2008, we ran projects where people would spend a lot of money and we would be in contact with the campaign folks, and some of the people on the ground didn’t know the scores existed or didn’t know how to use them and didn’t trust them.
Field organizers are my favorite people in cam­paigns, but they have to know how to pull the list. They have to know what things are, what they can trust. It’s very tempting to see a score on a screen like it’s on tablets of stone. You know the reason those people have the jobs they have is that they get the local politics, they get where they should use the models blindly, where they should use the models straightforwardly. You should em­power people so that they don’t either distrust it or trust it so much that they turn off their politi­cal brains.

Drechsler: The worst thing that could happen is to have a model that sits on a shelf. You spend the time and the effort and the campaign spends the money, and nothing ever happens.

Rivlin: Or, they layer on things they shouldn’t be layering on. They say, “This is a model score, so I will use this within the universe that they would have already selected.” Sometimes they have good reasons to do that, but sometimes it defeats the whole purpose of the model.

Allen: That’s always the friction: How do you get what you can provide to that sweet spot of what can be used and what will be used? We could talk till we’re blue in the face about propensity groups, clusters, classes, all sorts of fun stuff. There are always three skill sets worth looking for in our firm: people who are smart and can do great analytics; people who can sell the stuff, be­cause we’re a for-profit industry; and then people who can help communicate it back to the users.

Drechsler: [You’re] educat­ing somebody who might be a regional field direc­tor on this cycle, but two cycles from now might be a campaign manager on a statewide level. That’s the investment.

C&E: We’ve talked a bit about going down ballot, where budgets get smaller and smaller. What’s the fur­thest down ballot you have seen microtargeting used effectively?

Allen: Well, if I start talk­ing about the state senate or state assembly races in California, those are spend­ing more money than half the congressional races in the country.

Rivlin: It’s not so much what level the race is, as much as what level it’s purchased at. So if you are working for a statewide entity, whether it’s a cau­cus or an interest group, the economies of scale are worthwhile for buying some modeling that isn’t going to be as precise for each individual race but will give them a lot of purchase across their races. If the cost is minimal or zero, then, unless you’re not doing any direct voter contact, you can still use it. The question is whether it’s worth investing in from the beginning if it’s a lot of money.

Allen: That’s the real challenge: The places where, intellectually, these kind of targeting and analytics tools would be most powerful and useful are the campaigns that are most reliant on door-knock­ing, phone-banking, and direct voter contact. For the New York City mayoral race, I’m sure they bought the whole world. So much of the move­ment of that race—and I didn’t poll it, so I have no idea what moved what—but presumably it was television. Everyone’s got a little bit of money to throw around to buy some TV. It’s when your only tool in your arsenal is direct voter contact, mail, phones, and doors that the quality and so­phistication of the targeting is going to be the most impactful in terms of real wins/losses, be­cause it’s the only way you’re communicating. The flip side of that is where budgets become smaller, because if you had a lot of money to buy TV you wouldn’t be relying so much on knock­ing on doors and phone banking. That’s the chal­lenge we all face.

Rivlin: The other place where it’s most beneficial is where you don’t have obvious cues to target. So, the places that can’t afford it are often the places that need it the most. The classic example of that would be in a primary election. You can target on who is likely to vote pretty easily by vote history. Knowing who is likely to support your candidate rather than the other candidate is crucial. You don’t have partisan registration, partisan primary history, and this is where it is most impactful. There are not that many places where primary candidates have enough money to really invest in it, and then the question is whether they have enough direct voter contact to make it worthwhile.

That’s where you can do more interesting stuff, in states where it is easier to identify the supporters and lack of supporters. That’s where the added val­ue is if you start modeling issues or subsets within. We tell people not to do projects if they can get 90% of the way there using what they’ve already got in the file. It’s a waste of their time.
Meyers: Ballot issues, too, are a huge area where this can be of benefit. Some of that isn’t even so much that they don’t have the money. They’re just this group of people that is used to ballot stuff. They are just completely not used to do­ing mail and phones because there was never really any value to it.

C&E: Then you run into the California problem again, where ballot issues are king.

Allen: Especially ballot issues that have non-standard constituents.

Meyer: Or where it is just sort of mud­dled. We did some joint stuff in Ohio, where one party might lean one way or the other, but it wasn’t so strong that you just wanted to get all the Demo­crats and leave all the Republicans and vice versa, that you were going to have to get some votes out of these guys. You know, we did this Obama initiative stuff in Ohio on primary day, and it was a little scary in this Tea Party age. Are we going to be able to thread this needle?

Drechsler: And even in party-rigged states, we sometimes find ourselves ask­ing, “Why do we need this?” You might have the advantage of 400,000 votes, but you’re down in the polls. You’re go­ing to need that crossover; you’re go­ing to need to figure out who you can reach out to, who your soft Dems are. A Democrat in one part of the state is very different in another part of the state, just like a Republican is different.

C&E: Something you would never have known had you not gone through this process.
Meyers: That can be a struggle too, when you find something that is counterin­tuitive. How do I validate this enough? I come out of the purely political world, even trying to convince myself that I’ve really found something. And then, do I have confidence enough to take this up the ladder?

Rivlin: That’s where we make our mon­ey; it’s why we have a mix of political backgrounds, rather than just stats class­es from MIT. Our job is to interpret the politics and see when something comes up that’s counterintuitive: Is it counter­intuitive because there’s a lot of coun­terintuitive things in the world that become perceived wisdom? Or because there’s something wrong with the data and the stats? Our job is to make that decision, and that’s where the art comes in. That is what’s fun about the gig.

Allen: If it were just plugging things into a computer and spitting out lists…ugh.

C&E: Let’s talk about looking ahead. What gets you excited about what you are going to be able to do? Some of the advancements you think are coming?

Meyers: I think in 2012 we’ll see the full integration of the digital side of cam­paigns. We’re seeing that more now, but it’s not fully there yet. By 2012, you’ll have the full integration of it—the Holy Grail we’ve been seeking since we start­ed. Every time someone has asked me this since 2004, “Where I can deliver my commercial to somebody,” is be­ginning to exist. We could do it if they would let us, there’s no technological impairment.

They don’t know how to put a bill­ing system together for an individual ad that goes out. They know how to bill the cable system, and they don’t know how to bill a household. The hard part of that is, how do you make people who aren’t partisan watch your stuff? Getting someone in the middle to watch something is so hard. Out­side of the presidential candidate, why would anybody opt to do that? It’s like, well, you have a website that people can go to get information, but what would you need this for?

Drechsler: You can take the approach of shooting fish in a barrel: You’ll hit somebody. Or you can do the scalpel or laser. I think that’s the greatest benefit of microtargeting for campaigns—it hones in on how to deliver the best, most pre­cise message to your voters. it complicated and hard is that you can’t simul­taneously run seventeen different messages in a campaign. When we talk about this stuff, you’ve got to take the micro out of microtargeting. No campaign, not even presidential, can run 17 niche message streams to 17 different groups of people. You can’t afford to do it, it’s impractical to do mail runs or phone strips, and the logistics are ridicu­lously important. At the end of the day, each of us has to get 50 + 1. You’ve got to be able to deliver narrow messages, but also not get so focused that you’re looking at your own navel. You have to find really nice clean universes that have 5% coverage of the population so that you end up winning big in the places you target and ignoring the rest of the population.

Meyers: We get frustrated, especially on big cam­paigns, with some of the laziness. There isn’t a real reason you can’t put together a dozen telephone scripts. There are some practical reasons why you can’t put together a dozen mail pieces every time you send mail out, but mail scripts aren’t hard.

Allen: No campaign is going to say, “Okay, I’ll be the experiment, we’ll mess around with something that might or might not work and see you on Elec­tion Day!” You get this nice field experiment thing because not everyone is going to implement what you are doing in the same way. Not everyone is going to adopt it to the same level. Not everyone is going to make the same choice based on the advice they’re given. Across multiple campaigns, you’re going to get this nice field experiment mode. Then you say, “All right, let’s see if we can learn anything, and hopefully we’ll learn something important and be able to adapt what we do.”

Meyers: And convince anybody that you’ve actu­ally learned anything.

Rivlin: I think that the testing question, this is one of the advantages of being in a firm that does other stuff. We have a research and development budget that is mixed between the mail side and the analyt­ics side, and we do a fair bit of it. Even earlier this cycle, we did tests and some of it was subsidized through legalities that allowed us to learn what works and what doesn’t work. I think modeling has gotten to a place where people are comfort­able. The thing that’s dragging us back a little bit is the quality of the data. We can improve the model­ing. I think the next step is working out the effec­tiveness of programs.

Allen: Persuasion and GOTV is tough to test.

Rivlin: Yes.

Meyers: I don’t know how you guys feel, but I’m frustrated trying to extend these tests that get done to all campaigns for all times. Somebody had touched on this earlier. “I’m going to run this cam­paign like a business.” There’s no business in the world that would spend $20 million to go from 47% market share in California guaranteed to 51% market share! There’s sort of this silliness to it.

C&E: Is there a concern that there isn’t enough po­licing of the industry? That’s why there is always such a thing with polling—when something goes wrong, everyone goes nuts because everything’s accepted as legitimate.

Rivlin: I think your reputation matters; it matters in everything in politics. It’s the same reason we down-sell a huge amount of time. The clients will come to us and ask us for x, y, and z. We’ll sell them x, and tell them to spend their y and z for voter contact, because they need to come back for more and for your reputation. They’ll see pretty quickly that certain things are harder to test, but if they are running any kind of ID program, they’re running things again. There is policing almost af­ter the fact, and, as with everything in this busi­ness, reputation and the people giving you recom­mendations are key.

Drechsler: Training that regional field director, who might be way down on the totem pole today but could rise above down the line—that’s where you’re building your reputation. Its standard prac­tice to be nice to people, to take their calls and walk them through it. There are times where some people get it better than others, and it’s frustrating and you want to beat your head against the wall.

On the flip side, occasionally you have people who come in and question everything, and it’s just one of the things you have to deal with. In some ways we police our­selves. There are some who claim they do microtarget­ing, and they don’t do mi­crotargeting! I think that’s the most frustrating thing. You sit there and you pull your hair out, trying to go around and dispel that, but is it always the best use of your time? You think, “They won’t be around next cycle; we will be, because we’ve been doing this and we have a track record.”

Allen: There is enough mon­ey chasing things in politics that even people who aren’t very good at what they do manage to make a de­cent living sometimes. But there are hierarchies, and if you are successful and win things, people sort it out pretty quickly.

Meyers: Oddly, the lousy competitor is the one who scares us most—going out and selling real cut-rate stuff.

Drechsler: It’s tricky because you don’t want to outright trash them, because then you are trashing the people who hired them for making a bad decision. It’s a delicate walk through that minefield.

Meyers: Right, when we lost Bloomberg to you it was a little difficult; it was the only time we ever lost to another democratic firm. Had to can­cel the summer home!

Andrew Drechsler works for Strategic Telemetry, one of the premier Democratic microtargeting firms.

Joel Rivlin is director of analytics at MSHC Partners.

Michael Meyers is a partner and president of Target Point Consulting, one of the first Republican microtargeting shops.

Bryon Allen is the chief operating officer at Wilson Research Strategy, a Republican polling and targeting firm.

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This isn’t the first time that protests have broken out about religious encroachment into a sacred area:

Jewish protests against Christian symbols were increasing in 1998, and there was a new demand that the Catholic Church in the former SS administration building at Birkenau (Auschwitz) be removed because it is not appropriate at the place where over a million Jews perished in the gas chambers.

The Time Poll indicates that 61% “oppose the building of the Muslim community center and mosque near where the World Trade Center stood.”  This is the number referenced by numerous pundits and journalists for the past several days.  But, if any had bothered to look at the rest of the survey, they would see this:

What if the [muslim] religious group proposed building a community center and place of worship two blocks from your home?  Would you favor or oppose it…?
Favor        55%
Oppose    34%
Unsure     10%

The data above helps us connect the dots to the true motivation of opposition of the “ground zero” Mosque.  Overall, most of the people opposing the mosque believe that the area should be shown greater respect, but generally have no problem with the same complex being built elsewhere - including two blocks from their own home.

–Tyler Harber

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