If there is one thing I can’t stand, it is the Zombie reporting that makes up most political writing.

To wit: virtually any pre-election article discussed the great Clinton GOTV effort.  I posted here last year that what I saw was the opposite.  In fact volunteer enthusiasm in states that I knew about (CO, IA, FL and NH) was actually down significantly.

If you compare the exit poll data you find, in fact, that the number of people who reported being contacted by a campaign was down quite a bit from 2008 (the data on 2012 isn’t available).

John Parr of Boston College has written a paper about this.  His tweet promoting it is below:

I will talk about Florida since I know the counties well.  If you compare the graphic of 2016 to 2008 you find what is essentially a retreat from the redder parts of the state. The presence north and west of I-4, and the lack of resources focused on the Tampa ring counties is striking.

As I noted here after the election, Florida was lost in the Tampa ring counties.  There was little GOTV effort in some of these counties (Polk, Hernando for example).   But ceding large areas of the state also means you aren’t getting your vote out there.  This may account to some extent for the exploding Trump margins in the rural areas (though it is of course difficult to disentangle cause and effect).

0 0 votes
Article Rating