Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters by Eitan D. Hersh

Author:Eitan D. Hersh [Hersh, Eitan D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-06-29T22:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.1 Importance of Voters’ Race to Campaign Mobilizers in Different Data Environments.

Note: Data from Ground Campaign Project. Data generated from 187 campaign workers in states with racial registration and 344 respondents in states without racial registration. The difference of means between campaigners in racial registration and non-racial registration states is statistically significant (p-value 0.01). Virginia’s position is emphasized to show its contrasting position to other southern states.

As I argued in Chapter 4, the low-level staffers and volunteers engaging with voters on behalf of the Obama campaign do not need to know the details of the campaign strategy to discern that their daily efforts are focused more on one or another kind of voter. Evidently, workers in Florida and North Carolina recognized that they were engaging with voters more based on their race than did workers in other states. This suggests that the strategy was indeed different in these two states than elsewhere. Figure 6.1 implies that the public data environment causes campaigns to pay more attention to race-based canvassing than campaign would in the absence of public race records.

To develop this argument, consider the state of Virginia in Figure 6.1. Campaign workers in Virginia reported that race was as strategically important as did campaign workers in other nonracial registration states. But Virginia is a southern state, a VRA state with a history of racialized politics, much like its neighbor North Carolina. Virginia was also a battleground state in 2012; the Obama campaign exerted a similar effort in Virginia and North Carolina, in terms of expenditures. Virginia and North Carolina are also similar in the percentage of their populations that are African American; both are approximately 20 percent black. But Virginia is very different from North Carolina in the importance of race to direct contacting strategies. Figure 6.1 shows that only campaigners in states with race data, and not similar states like Virginia, considered race to be a particularly important informational resource for direct contact. Likewise, Ohio, a northern swing states with large pockets of African-American voters, does not show an unusually strong focus on race in campaign efforts. The unusual position is reserved for the two states in the data in which voters are listed in the public record with their racial identities.

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