Getting Out the Vote in Texas

Political scientist James Gimpel writes that Texas Governor Rick Perry relied on political science in his successful 2010 primary campaign.

Dave Carney, the campaign’s general consultant, for example, is confident enough to be a skeptic of the claims and traditions of the consulting world. He values hard-headed research over guesswork, having digested Alan Gerber and Donald Green’s Get Out the Vote prior to the 2006 campaign. Intrigued by their randomized experiments on the efficacy of campaign tactics, but wanting more, he called the Yale professors, along with Daron Shaw (University of Texas) and myself, to Austin in 2005. Over a series of months, he called for a series of experiments on messaging, campaign fundraising and various modes of campaign outreach, including direct mail and phone banks. The series of tests generally revealed that impersonal modes of contact, such as direct mail and automated calls, while seemingly inexpensive, were worthless.

Early television ad buys, even multi-million dollar ones, were a waste because they simply didn’t stick given that people were not yet in the market for political information. The returns from direct-mail fundraising efforts, at least in 2006, were modest, at best. Carney and other Perry advisers reasoned that many conventional campaign tactics were being used out of force of habit — because that’s the way campaigns have always been done — but not because they worked. Vendors and media buyers were mostly interested in making money, not in winning campaigns.

Taking these lessons to heart, in 2009 and 2010 they trimmed some of these ineffective strategies out of their campaign toolkit, and moved in a different direction. Based on the mounting evidence for the effectiveness of personal contact, they invested in building a field operation of unprecedented size that would eventually situate nearly 40,000 Perry Home Headquarters locations across the state, each charged with mobilizing a targeted number of voters. This was about ten times the number of volunteers they had activated during the 2006 campaign.