SWING SET

Independent voters are increasingly important to politicians, but it takes good data mining skills to reach them.

A generation ago, reaching out to independent voters was considered a wasted effort by political campaigns. Conventional wisdom held that “get out the vote” expenditures aimed at party faithful yielded the most efficient results.

With the rise of independent voters as a political force, campaigns now have to identify and appeal to independent or independent-minded voters, a task that will require more and better data mining.

“When I started doing this in the early ’70s, you could identify a loyal Democrat fairly easily through geography and ethnicity, and you could give them marching orders,” says Ross G. Bates of Washington-based political consultancy Bates Neimand.

Today, says Bates, the lines have been blurred. Union members belong to the National Rifle Association, and retired machinists have pensions affected by the stock market’s performance. “There is more cross-pressuring. People are living more complicated lives.”

The increase in power of the independent voters – and the need to market to them – is a phenomenon of the past 20 to 30 years, says Bates. The balance of how much a campaign spends on swing voters vs. maximizing a candidate’s base is a source of ongoing tension within campaigns. “I have seen, in one circumstance, a fistfight break out over that.”

(Independent voters are unaffiliated with a party. Swing voters are generally defined as crossover voters, who vote the candidate and not the party – and thus can swing an election.)

How are independent voters identified, given that they often don’t contribute to parties and are therefore not included on fundraiser lists?

According to Walter D. Clinton of The Clinton Group Inc., Washington, campaigns have access to voter records, which can include registration, race, gender, average length of time a voter has been at a specific residence, and voting patterns such as primary and general election participation.

Voter lists are made available by companies like Aristotle Communications, which can break down voters by the demographic information they volunteer when they register. Many also provide lists with analytics overlaid, such as the likelihood of participation. Voters who do not have a propensity for regular participation can be viewed as receptive to pitches skewed toward “independent voters.”

While information regarding how an individual voted is not available, data about whether the individual voted in a party’s primary is, and can indicate the level of commitment to a given party. Clinton also uses overlay information such as presence of credit cards as a key element, especially for fundraising solicitations. But he also looks at the types of magazines they read to better understand their political bent. “These are all-important indices,” he says.

Another route is to conduct polls and focus groups. This can help identify areas of constituent strength, as well as those that need some shoring up.

Clinton estimates that any given race will have a swing vote of between 20% and 30%. (By contrast, polls show that some of the tighter races of 2000, such as New York’s Senate contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani, have undecided levels of around 12%. “They’ll be fighting hammer and tong for those swing voters,” says Aristotle Communications CEO John Aristotle Phillips.

Polling can also help settle the question of whether a candidate should shore up core voters or go after the swing vote. Jon McHenry, vice president of Roswell, GA-based public affairs research firm Ayers, McHenry & Associates, offers the example of a pro-life Republican: If, during a primary season, such a candidate is not pulling at least two-thirds of the party faithful, campaign managers can invest in Christian Coalition mailing lists.

Once the primary season is over, McHenry sets the threshold for party loyalists support at 80%. If it goes below that, the party needs to work on shoring up the faithful; above that figure, it must court swing and/or independent voters.

While traditional mail will likely continue its dominance, the 1998 elections saw online marketing begin to gain traction as a political tool, and it has continued to do so during the 2000 cycles. Anyone who disagrees should sit down with either Hubert H. Humphrey III or Norm Coleman, both of whom are out of office while Jesse “The Body” Ventura governs the state of Minnesota.

In fact, despite the much-ballyhooed presidential candidacy of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Ventura’s campaign is still held as the paradigm of independent voter outreach success, and the cornerstone of the effort was its Web presence.

The mind behind The Body was Bill Hillsman, president of North Woods Advertising, a Minneapolis-based agency. Hillsman was no stranger to North Star State politics, having coordinated Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone’s victory in 1990 and re-election in 1996.

Hillsman’s work on the Wellstone campaign stood him in good stead for Ventura’s candidacy. Although Ventura was running on the Reform Party line, the party did not supply Hillsman with state data from presidential candidate Ross Perot’s 1992 and 1996 runs.

Hillsman realized voters who supported Wellstone were largely either self-identified independents or those who did not participate in every preceding election. These individuals also made up the core of Ventura’s support. This meant they would not be counted among “likely” voters, and would be discounted in polls and not targeted as heavily in DM efforts.

“The true independent does not accept the `wasted vote’ argument,” says Hillsman. “They don’t want to vote against someone, they want to vote for someone.”

The final piece of the puzzle in Ventura’s campaign came from Democratic primary voter information. The field had been crowded, and after Humphrey was chosen as the party’s candidate, Hillsman isolated those precincts within Minnesota where other candidates had run strongly.

“I had a gut feeling that Ventura was a second choice,” Hillsman explained. “With five candidates in the primary, you knew that four out of five voters would be disappointed.”

Voter data also enabled Hillsman to situate his candidate in areas that had traditionally low turnout levels. “We chose to look at those as opportunity votes,” he says. Ventura spent more time on college campuses than either of his opponents, and coordinated media buys to reflect the demographic of these under-targeted audiences.

In 1998, Internet users were still disproportionately young. The Web was also in its nascent stage as a political tool, although it played a significant role in the Ventura campaign. The lightly financed campaign had virtually no money for direct mail, and instead relied on its Web site to generate and maintain supporter interest.

Rather than ape the static sites of other candidates, Ventura’s campaign set up e-mail exchange systems, message boards and chat rooms.

There also was an electronic outreach program, JesseNet, which distributed e-mail bulletins to subscribers. This, along with updates on the site itself, allowed the effort to mobilize followers at a moment’s notice, accounting for many of the last-minute highly attended events of the campaign.

Buoyed by the ability to register on the spot, 61% of Minnesota’s 3.5 million voters turned out on Election Day, a figure nearly 8 points higher than the forecast 53%. Many of the additional votes came from “unlikely” voters, and a majority of those were cast for Ventura.

At the close of the 1998 elections, JesseNet boasted 3,500 subscribers; it currently holds just under 9,000, providing a ready-made backbone should Ventura run for re-election in 2002.

Ventura’s was not the only campaign to break the mold of Internet politicking in 1998. Eschewing traditional names such as the Committee to Re-elect the President, during the 1998 Georgia governor’s election, Democrat Roy Barnes registered www.barnesgovernor.org Inc. with the Federal Election Commission as his campaign’s official moniker. FEC law requires that the name of a candidate’s organization appear on all organization-sponsored advertisements, ensuring that Barnes’ URL would be ubiquitous throughout the process.

Barnes captured the open seat by more than 150,000 votes out of nearly 1.8 million cast. In the 1994 Georgia gubernatorial contest, the vote counts totaled 1.55 million; arguably, the victory margin was provided by “non-likely” voters.

Hillsman, however, does not see the Ventura campaign generating any immediate changes in political advertising, but for one. Following the example set by his creative staff, political commercials are starting to be shot on film again.

“Prior to the last election cycle, most were shot on videotape,” he says. “It made the candidates look like they were being arrested on `Cops.'”