Campaigns have different ways of looking at voters that can also change over time. But a basic way of looking at a voter is to look at their voting history. For our purposes here, forget about people who were too young to vote in 2008 or 2010. Take the universe of people who were registered to vote in 2008 and are still registered today. They had the opportunity to vote in the 2008, 2010, and 2012 primaries, and they had the opportunity to vote in the 2008 and 2010 general elections. So, that’s a maximum of five elections and a minimum of zero. Let’s forget about zero because they might have even been dropped off the active roll. Each voter in this universe can be assigned a number between 1 and 5. Five would be for someone who has voted in all five elections and one would be someone who voted in just one of those five elections (probably for president in 2008).
The next step is to look at one of two things. If the state has partisan registration, which party is the voter registered with? If the state doesn’t have partisan registration, which party primaries (if any) did they vote in?
Armed with this data, the campaigns can identify their strong supporters, their weak supporters, and those that fall somewhere in between. These days, the campaigns have much more information about us like what magazines we subscribe to and god knows what else. But we don’t need to make this too complicated.
When it comes to the fours and the fives, those voters will get themselves to the polls on their own without cajoling from the campaigns. They are the lowest priority. It’s the ones, twos, and threes that need attention. If you haven’t voted since November 2008, it is not a safe bet that you will vote next Tuesday. If you never vote in primaries, you are not a totally committed voter. So, the main focus of the campaigns should be to focus on these “unlikely” voters first. This is much easier to do in states with early voting. You start with the ones, two, and threes, plus the new registrants who have never voted before, and you try to get them to the polls. Then, by Election Day, you can focus on making sure the fours and fives didn’t get a flat-tire or wind up with a sick child or an overflowing toilet.
In this way, you winnow down the list until you have wrung every last vote out of the registered voter pool.
Let’s look at this in action in Florida:
A trusted Democratic operative sent us some data on the early and absentee ballot vote in Florida so far to make the point that Barack Obama is crushing Mitt Romney when it comes to banking the votes of sporadic and infrequent voters before election day. So far more than 3 million Floridians have cast a ballot by absentee, mail-in ballot or in-person early vote ballot. Democrats lead by more than 60,000 votes, but it’s the unlikely voter numbers that jump out:
Of the nearly 414,000 Floridians who did not vote in the last three general elections, Democrats have an advantage of more than 53,000 votes. Of the more than 482,000 Floridians who have only voted in one of the last three general elections, Democrats lead by more than 77,000 – a total of more than 132,000.
This measure is slightly different. It measures voters by whether they voted in the general elections of 2010, 2008, and 2006. I don’t understand why they did it that way because it adds two years beyond what is necessary and ignores primary voting which is very informative. But, whatever, the principles are the same.
The Democrats are aggressively banking the hardest to get votes. They are whittling down their list to make it more manageable on Election Day. The advantage is not just that they got a vote that they might have otherwise lost, but that they can focus on a smaller universe of people who are easier to persuade to go out and vote because they are used to voting.
When people talk about the ground game, this is how it manifests itself. The Republicans are slapping themselves on the back because they have succeeded in limiting the Democrats’ overall early voting advantage by curtailing the hours. They think they are doing better than 2008 as a result. But the Democrats aren’t focusing on getting their reliable voters to the polls, yet.
To put it another way, that 132,000 vote advantage the Florida Dems have wracked up among sporadic voters cannot be replicated in Pennsylvania because we don’t have early voting. Would the Republicans like to spot us that advantage in Pennsylvania? Would they argue that they’re doing better than in 2008 if they did?
Smart is better than dumb and organized is better than disorganized. Obama has a big ground advantage, and it will show up in states with early voting more than in states without it.