“Ground Wars” published

Posted on February 6, 2012 | Leave a comment

My book Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns is now officially out. At the most basic level, the book is about the role of people in political communication in the early 21st century.

It has sort of leaked on to Amazon and other sites over the last few weeks, but yesterday was the official publication date and hard copies should now be available.

The book provides a close ethnographic account of how American campaigns have responded to a shifting media environment, the rise of new digital and networked technologies, and a changed political scene by re-inventing what I call “personalized  political communication”—the use of people as media—and are again deploying large teams of staffers, volunteers, and paid part-timers to work the phones and canvass block by block, house by house, voter by voter. You can read the first chapter here. The book is available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (and I’m sure every decent rail road station kiosk and airport bookstore will have the paperback edition prominently displayed next to James Patterson’s latest…).

I’ll be writing occassionally about the 2012 U.S. elections on this site and on on Politics in Spires on the basis of the issues I analyze in the book, such as personalized contacts, volunteer mobilization, and the targeting of voters.

Leave a comment

Posted in Ground wars, Political campaigns

Tagged , ,

“Hi, I’m a volunteer with the Mitt Romney campaign, calling you from my computer…”

Posted on February 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

So Mitt Romney won what the Washington Post calls a “decisive victory” in Florida yesterday, and while the Republican presidential primary isn’t quite over (a majority of the votes still went to his three remaining rivals, donations keep coming in to Newt Gingrich especially), the former Massachusetts governor is now well-positioned to lock up the nomination on “Super Tuesday,” March 6, where people in eleven states cast their votes.

If Romney becomes the candidate, a closer look at his current campaign can help us understand how he will fight the general election. In past cycles, most recently of course in 2008, the way candidates fought their primary gave many clues to how they ended up fighting the general election—in terms of their stage persona and their main message, yes, but also in terms of how their effort was organized in a more practical sense.

Building a campaign organization, mobilizing allies around it, and recruiting thousands of low-level staffers and volunteers is not something that is easily done overnight, and the wider campaign build around a particular candidacy will have its own internal inertia and idiosyncrasies, traits that often reflect decisions made months or even years before Election Day on the basis of a combination of received wisdom and the priorities of individual people involved. Once things are done in a particular way, unless something is clearly dysfunctional, intense time pressure and the multiple concerns always calling for the attention of the candidate and senior staff generally mean they continue to be done that way.

Take the 2008 Obama campaign as an example—the kernel was assembled from early 2007 onwards, with staffers plotting strategy and tactics, technologists developing the tools and infrastructures for an extensive, nation-wide effort, and organizers connecting with the multitudes of willing volunteers who helped power Obama to victory in both the primary and the general election. As for example David Plouffe, the campaign manager, has made clear, even as the campaign (both the formal organization and the wider network of allies and volunteers around it) grew and grew, senior staffers were working hard to maintain a basic set of organizing principles and a certain internal ethos that had worked well in the primary. (Sometimes dealing with enthusiastic groundswells of support from people unaccustomed to how campaigns are usually run in a pretty top-down fashion was in fact something of a challenge, as David Axelrod himself has noted.) As my friend Daniel Kreiss shows in his very interesting forthcoming book on the development of the campaign and the technologies and tools it relied on, many of the innovations we today associate with the 2008 Obama campaign where in fact pioneered, tested, and refined in the years before. (Just as the 2000 and 2004 Bush campaigns built on years of experimentation in local and state-level races, orchestrated by Karl Rove.)

On this basis, let’s have a look at just two features of the Romney primary campaign that it will be interesting to follow as we move forward—

  • How much volunteer support does Romney actually have? Many commentators have made much of how parts of the Republican base have yet to warm to his candidacy, but beyond a general “mood” amongst the party faithful, can he draw substantial numbers of people to his campaign? Beyond the raw numbers, can his campaign work constructively with these people to make sure that they feel involved and continue to contribute their time and effort?  Volunteers have generally been found to be more effective ambassadors for campaigns on the doorstep and over the phone than paid casual workers, so whoever builds the best volunteer operation will have an edge over his rival. (Turnout in US presidential elections has been increasing every cycle since 1996, in part due to increased emphasis on field campaigns. Given the current economic climate and a certain sense of disillusionment, in the absence of major get-out-the-vote efforts on both sides, 2012 may see the first fall in popular participation in sixteen years.)
  • How will his campaign work with the volunteers who do come? Throughout the primary, Romney’s campaign has made a priority of having a physical presence on the ground, opening campaign offices and posting contact details in relevant states to make sure people have somewhere to go. His campaign has also embraced the various online-enabled forms of “distributed phone banking” pioneered by MoveOn and others, where supporters can log on via a campaign website and make calls directly to target voters in relevant states from their own smart phone or computer. In both cases, the campaign has quite sensibly been platform agnostic, deciding to make as many different forms of engagement possible and to meet potential volunteers where ever they may come from. In both cases, the campaign has also prioritized channelling people’s time and energy into phone banking, a demonstrably effective way of trying to sway people and turn out voters.

At a general level, coverage of the primary will often stress how Romney’s campaign is well-funded and professionally run. But money and hard-nosed expertise is not all an effective campaign needs. The interface between campaign staffers in it to win it and volunteers with a much wider and mixed set of motivations can generate considerable friction and requires mutual empathy and a practical sense for making people work together that is sometimes lacking from political campaigns. And it matters. Volunteer mobilization and the translation of volunteers’ time and effort into instrumentally useful activities may sound dry and dull in comparison to the more immediately exciting speculation about what the next campaign advertisement will highlight or how the candidate will perform in the next debate. But both are crucial parts of a competitive campaign and shape how it is possible for ordinary people to take part in the electoral process beyond casting their vote. That’s why it will be interesting to see how the eventual Republican nominee ends up organizing his effort to challenge Obama’s re-election campaign.

My book, Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns, deals with how American political campaigns mobilize, organize, and target their field operations, using large numbers of volunteers and paid part-timer workers to contact voters at home at the door or over the phone. It has just been published by Princeton University Press and is available on Amazon.

(cross-posted on Politics in Spires)

Leave a comment

Posted in 2012 Republican primaries, 2012 US elections, Ground wars, Political campaigns

Tagged , , ,

Gingrich needs an organization (and fast)

Posted on January 22, 2012 | Leave a comment

Newt Gingrich’s clear come-from-behind victory in the January 21 South Carolina primary has made the Republican Presidential Primary a lot more exciting than it looked after Iowa and New Hampshire.

Clearly, many Republicans remain reluctant to embrace Romney. If the opposition coalesce around Gingrich, the not-Romney of the moment, the party is in for a long grind of a primary.

One question right now is whether Gingrich has the organization to make the most of his momentum.

Florida, January 31, is the first test. Romney has been ahead in the polls there lately, but his support is eroding and as recently as December, Gingrich had a solid lead. The political climate in the sunshine state can be fickle and is prone to dramatic changes. It serves one well to be well prepared.

In South Carolina, Gingrich was able to build on his strong debate performances, “earned media”, i.e. news coverage playing up alternatives to the front-runner, and the self-reinforcing momentum generated as more and more people came to see him as the most credible challenger to rally a plurality of the non-Romney vote around him. If Santorum drops out now or his supporters begin to think that a vote for him is a vote wasted, Gingrich has the potential to be a considerable challenge for Romney.

But “the Mitt” seems better equipped for the tough grind ahead. While he continues to have a “base problem”, he does better than anyone else in hypothetical match-ups against President Obama, lending credence to his argument he is best positioned to do well in the November general election.

Romney also has a much stronger operation in place to fight for the margins in every upcoming state. Consider just money, organization, and organized support–

Money. A long multi-state primary is expensive. Romney has raised much more money than Gingrich. In the last quarter of 2011, he raised $24 million, compared to Gingrich’s $9 million.

Organization. A long multi-state primary is also complicated to coordinate and involves a lot of hard work on the ground. Romney has his organization, data infrastructure, web presence etc in place nationally. He is very active in states like Florida, where his campaign has been working for months, both on the air and on the ground (Gingrich opened his office there January  13). Romney also already has an office in Nevada (caucuses February 4). It is not clear that the Gingrich campaign has any real presence there. In December, a local operative working with his campaign told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that there were no immediate plans to open an office in the state. (That is bound to change after his South Carolina win.)

Organized support. A long multi-state primary is not something you want to fight on your own. Romney is not only racking up endorsements, fundraising contacts, inside advice etc from establishment Republicans afraid Gingrich just might win and wreck the party in the process. He also enjoys greater Super PAC/ “outside” support. Even after Sheldon Adelson’s headline-grabbing $5 million donation to the pro-Gingrich-though-in-no-way-coordinating-with-his-campaign “Winning Our Future” super PAC, Romney continues to enjoy more support. The pro-Romney group “Restore Our Future,” run by two key staffers from his 2008 campaign, has spent more than double the amount of “Winning our Future” so far. It will provide a handy vehicle for people keen to stop Gingrich but reluctant to back Romney directly.

Where does that leave Gingrich? Can he build on yesterday’s result? Here is what Mac Stipanovich, a GOP strategist in Florida, had to say to the LA Times:

“Romney has worked the state continuously, one way or another, for the last six years. …  Gingrich lacks both the organization and the financial resources to capitalize on a win in South Carolina.”

That may just be true of the February states Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, and Michigan too.

Good organization does not guarantee victory, but it sure helps. If Gingrich is to compete in the long run, he and his supporters need to build a stronger and more resourceful campaign now to capitalize on the anti-Romney sentiment. Otherwise, “the Mitt” will grind them down.

My book, Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns, deals with how American political campaigns mobilize, organize, and target their field operations, using large numbers of volunteers and paid part-timer workers to contact voters at home at the door or over the phone. It will be published in February 2012 by Princeton University Press and is available for pre-order on Amazon.

(cross-posted on Politics in Spires)

Leave a comment

Posted in 2012 Republican primaries, 2012 US elections, Ground wars, Political campaigns

Tagged , , , ,

Mitt Romney–ahead in the data race?

Posted on January 11, 2012 | 1 comment

Mitt Romney won an unsurprising victory in New Hampshire January 10. The question now is, can he tighten his grip on the Republican nomination before the month is over with two more wins in South Carolina (January 21) and Florida (January 31)?

If more races end up as close as Iowa—8 votes separating Romney and Rick Santorum—quality targeting of voter contact could be decisive.

When it comes to this, Romney has an advantage over most rivals, beyond his money, his momentum, and his lead in the polls—he has a well-developed, functioning, and battle-tested targeting infrastructure in place. He seems to be ahead in the GOP data race.

Writing on Slate, Sasha Issenberg (I’m eagerly awaiting his forthcoming book, The Victory Lab) has a nice piece reviewing how the campaign has been combining detailed individual-level data from consumer companies, voter files, and campaign-collected ID-data from both 2007-2008 and the current cycle to develop a detailed picture of solid and likely supporters and who might be persuaded if approached in the right fashion with the right message.

The point of targeting is very simple—if you know who to talk to and what to talk about, you get more bang for your buck (or out of your volunteers’ efforts).

Rommey’s campaign is still working with TargetPoint Consulting and Alex Gage, who pioneered the use of predictive modelling for voter contacts back in 2002 when Romney was running for Governor of Massachusetts and successfully branded it as “microtargeting.” Though some say Ron Paul also has a sophisticated targeting operation going (I’d be interested to read more on this, so send any links you have my way), Romney seems a step ahead of most of the other Republican candidates in this respect, a considerable advantage in the coming primaries. Newt Gingrich may know roughly how many percent of the electorate supports him in a given state. The Romney campaign will have an analytically-based sense of which individuals in the electorate in a given state support their guy. That makes persuasion and get-out-the-vote efforts a good deal easier and more effective.

Here is how one Republican strategist, speaking to the LA Times, describes the situation after New Hampshire:

“The larger the state is, the harder it is to do effective voter contact — because there’s more people to contact, identify and recontact,” said Charlie Black, a strategist for 2008 GOP nominee John McCain who has informally offered advice to Romney from time to time this cycle. “The underdog candidates, even if they got hot and won a primary, don’t have time to develop and install this kind of system in a matter of weeks. “It’s expensive. It’s part of having a sophisticated national campaign that’s well-funded,” Black said, “and they’re really the only such campaign out there this time.”

Rick Santorum’s surprise surge in Iowa shows that being in the right place at the right time can get you a good result, but anyone hoping to beat Romney to the nomination will have to prepare for the long haul, and that involves building the kind of ground war operation, with organizers, volunteers, and quality targeting, that few other Republican candidates seem to have at this time.

My book, Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns, deals with how American political campaigns mobilize, organize, and target their field operations, using large numbers of volunteers and paid part-timer workers to contact voters at home at the door or over the phone. It will be published in February 2012 by Princeton University Press and is available for pre-order on Amazon.

1 Comment

Posted in 2012 Republican primaries, 2012 US elections, Ground wars, Political campaigns

Tagged , , ,

After the debates, a turn to the ground?

Posted on December 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Now that the final debate before the Iowa caucus is over and till voting begins January 3, the candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination will have to rely on advertising, direct mail, and field operations more than the media coverage each debate has generated. Two more debates are crammed in in the few days between Iowa and the New Hampshire primary, and more are to come, but for a few weeks, there will be more action on the ground than in the television studios.

With Newt Gingrich’s having surged in recent weeks as the latest in a succession of “not-Mitt-Romney”-candidates, Romney, for a long time the front-runner and likely nominee, has a few decisive weeks ahead of him. Real Clear Politics’ poll averages suggest Gingrich could win both Iowa (January 3) and South Carolina (January 21) while Romney remain ahead in New Hampshire (January 10).

With the race still very fluid and Gingrich’s support in the polls showing some signs of weakness, things are still very much up in the air, but as he faces all the challenges ahead, Romney seems to have one clear operational advantage that is rarely mentioned in the news–his organization on the ground. The Financial Times is one of the few news organizations that have paid much attention to this side of the contest, and as their reporters note, “Mr Gingrich has little grassroots organisation to replace the platform the debates have given him.”

Especially in low-turnout, high-stakes contests like the early caucuses and primaries, literally every vote counts, and Romney, in contrast to the recently revived Gingrich, has for months been building an organization on the ground in several states to gather information about supporters and swing voters and to court voters in a personal fashion.

Here is how one Romney adviser is spinning the difference in New Hampshire (from the FT):

Staffers at Mr Romney’s office brush off Mr Gingrich’s recent gains in the polls, saying he has neither the ground operation to compete nor the volunteers who are the lifeblood of a state primary campaign. “In three days, we can turn out people for a big rally. Newt can’t do that stuff,” said one of Mr Romney’s advisers. “It’s not rocket science; it’s about old-fashioned shoe leather. We have identified 20,000 or 30,000 people who like Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich has no idea who likes Newt Gingrich.”

In a time of social media and 24/7 rolling news, canvassing and phone banking can seem hopelessly old-fashioned, frustratingly slow, and to small-scale to make much of a difference, but campaigns are increasingly orchestrating personalized contacts on a very large scale and research gives us good reason to think that a knock on the door or a call from an enthusiastic and/or well-trained person represent some of the most effective ways of swaying people politically.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out as the Republican primaries remain very much in flux. Especially in a potentially drawn-out and close contest, hard work by people on the ground may produce a surprise or two along the way as the nomination is decided over the next months–as it did in the Obama/Clinton contest in 2008.

My book, Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns, deals with how American political campaigns mobilize, organize, and target their field operations, using large numbers of volunteers and paid part-timer workers to contact voters at home at the door or over the phone. It will be published in February 2012 by Princeton University Press and is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Leave a comment

Posted in 2012 Republican primaries, 2012 US elections, Ground wars, Political campaigns

Tagged , , , ,

Twitter and mobilization–what mobilization?

Posted on December 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

A few people have emailed me about my last post on the 2011 England riots, arguing that I underplayed the role of social media like Twitter.

Some of them, like Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, are not just speaking on a hunch–she is the lead author of a recently published social network analysis of Twitter use during the mobilization that took place in the run-up to the 2011 Spanish local and regional elections, showing that a small group of people triggered a chain of messages that in due reached a large number of people and makes the argument digital media played an important role in the mobilization in the streets too, beyond the social media platform itself.

I did not mean to dismiss Twitter wholesale. It is always worth investigating. As the Guardian-LSE collaboration on “Reading the Riots” suggests, Twitter was used by people mobilizing to clean up after the London riots, and certain rumours about the riots spread and were quelled on Twitter.

The thing I found interesting about the Guardian-LSE analysis of the 2011 England riots was simply that it pretty clearly and convincingly dismantled the belief–seemingly widespread in some circles at the time–that social media were integral to organizing and driving the unrest. They may well have been more important for mobilizing people to clean up afterwards, so shutting them down could well have been not only unnecessary, invasive, and hugely problematic, but also, well, kinda counter-productive.

My point here is simple and in line with Sandra and her colleagues’ call for more empirical analysis of what they call “social influence” and “complex contagion” and the potential role of various social media. When strong causal claims are made about the direct relationship between for example Twitter and some large-scale mobilization, we shouldn’t accept the claim at face value, without empirical evidence for the connection (let’s avoid the phrase “Twitter Revolution”, shall we?).

Even when many different new technologies are clearly integral to different degrees and in different ways to different popular mobilizations today (such as the use of smart phones to document recent protests in Russia, while Twitter was being spammed), evidence that one particular tools was part of the mobilizing processes in one place does not necessarily mean that they worked the same way somewhere else. Mobilizing against Mubarak is not the same thing as protesting against dysfunctional politics in Spain or coordinating a looting in London or coming together to highlight election fraud in Moscow. External validity–the relevance of findings from one case for others–has to be established, not simply assumed.

As social scientists have long known, mobilization is driven by many different mechanisms and highly context-dependent. Only some of the mechanisms are directly affected by changes in our communications technologies, and many mobilizations will, I predict, even in an increasingly digital and networked age, upon closer scrutiny turn out to be organized by people who rely mostly on at-hand general purpose technologies and inherited organizing practices–despite the fact that glitzier technologies and newer tools often tend to catch our eyes and make for better headlines.

This does not mean that new technologies do not matter for activism and popular mobilizations–they do. But it means we sometimes misjudge which technologies matter and how–as was the case when people cast Twitter as central to the 2011 England riots. When faced with claims about the link between social media and mobilization, we always need to ask, “what mobilization?” And then go have a closer look.

Leave a comment

Posted in digital politics, digital protest

Tagged , ,

Good read – 12 11 11

Posted on December 11, 2011 | Leave a comment

For those really interested in understanding the Occupy Movement, check out Occupy Research, where people involved are trying to make sense of themselves and provide a counterweight to the ceaseless and often distant commentary. Here’s a brief piece about the effort from Shareable.

Leave a comment

Posted in digital protest, Good reads

Tagged

Sticking it to the man with the tool at hand

Posted on December 8, 2011 | 2 comments

The Guardian and the LSE have partnered up on an impressive journalistic-cum-sociological analysis called “reading the riots”, examining the unrest that rocked England this summer on the basis of interviews with people involved, massive social media datasets, and various forms of secondary sources. This is a very laudable attempt to make sense of what happened why in August, important questions at the heart of both journalism and social science.

The collaboration examines many different themes, today the role of different “social media” (and more generally, digital networked media) in the riots. The material released provides both qualitative and quantitative evidence for dismissing the claims—frequent in August, and spread by for example by an  Associated Press story still up on thousands of websites—that social media like Facebook and Twitter were central organizing tools for those involved. (The Huffington Post headline on the wire story was “Facebook, Twitter, used to spread London’s Riots”.)

It turns our they weren’t, really. But that the concerns over Facebook and Twitter were clearly overblown (Prime Minister David Cameron at the time considered “restricting” social media services) does not mean that digital technologies played no role—they are, after all, integral to much of what we do, legally or otherwise, today. Only, as it turns out, people who are sticking it to the man rely on the tools at hand, their cell phones, in particular Blackberries (what I’ve called “mundane tools” in a piece on political activism), as well as on, well, good old mass media, especially television.

Here is Professor Rob Procter, one of the Guardian’s academic collaborators on the project, in a University of Manchester press release:

Politicians and commentators were quick to claim that social media played an important role in inciting and organising riots, calling for sites such as Twitter to be closed should events of this nature happen again. But our study has found no evidence of significance in the available data that would justify such a course of action in respect to Twitter.

(Too bad for Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe, both serving four-year jail terms for “encouraging disorder” on Facebook, that this only comes out now…)

One rioter quoted in a Guardian article clearly has a more practical understanding of new media tools than many commentators, politicians, and judges:

The internet and that is a bit too bait, so no one really broadcasts it on the internet […] Like in Twitter there’s like a hashtag innit, like if someone hashtags riots you can go to that certain page and see what everyone has been saying about the riots. Police could easily go to that page there and see who’s been setting up or organising groups to come.

Wise man, that–organizing illegal action on public platforms might not be the smarest move in the world.

Another rioter quoted had a intuitively understood how what Andy Chadwick calls the “political information cycle” is not contained within any one media platform, but cross between offline communications, social media, and legacy media organizations:

I saw people well on Twitter following journalists’ reports,” he said. “So not even of their friends’ reports, they were following journalists’ reports to find out where to go.

The collaborative analysis of 2.6 million tweets suggests that six of the ten most retweeted accounts belonged to mainstream media organizations and personalities (and one to the greater Manchester police). (See some good data visualizations here of individual rumours spreading and/or being knocked down on Twitter.)

“Reading the riots” is an inspiring and important collaboration between journalists and researchers showing how, together and, incidentially, using new tools and publishing platforms, the two professions can help us understand the world–in this case, the role of new digital, networked technologies in collective action.

The data and analysis already published as a result of this collaboration (and much more is surely to come) represents a major step beyond the artificially polarized, polemical, and overtly moralizing debate between supposed techno-utopians and techno-pessimists and into a more nuanced substantial understanding of how people do things with things–including rebel and riot, when that is what they are up to.

(Cross-posted on Politics in Spires)

(Photo from Flickr, taken by Sabrina S)

2 Comments

Posted in digital protest

Tagged , , ,

Public support for the media–past, present, future?

Posted on December 8, 2011 | Leave a comment

Off to Edinburgh to give a talk about public sector support for the media at “New media, old values? Media freedom and independence in the era of convergence”, a workshop hosted by the SCRIPT Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the University of Edinburgh law school and the Open Rights Group and co-funded by the MediaDem project that I have drawn on in my own work.

My talk mix a bit of history taken from the work of Richard John and Paul Starr (the “past” part of the sub-title), the overview of current forms of public sector support for the media in six developed democracies based on my own work with Geert Linnebank (the “present” part) and some preliminary observations on the policy and political challenges any attempt at bringing public support for the media up to speed faces (the “future” part)–the kernel basically being that not only the politics, but also the policy, of media reform are so complex and full of veto points, vested interests, and uncertainties that the current combination of essentially unreformed support and policy drift is hard to overcome. (I’ve touched on some of this in a previous post.)

I’m looking forward to what will no doubt be a really interesting conversation, especially since the main organizer Rachael Craufurd Smith seems to have taken such care in getting together a really diverse line-up that includes both academics, professionals, and activists.

Leave a comment

Posted in Media policy, Talks and presentations

Tagged

Alternative onwership structures and support for news in New York

Posted on November 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

Making a dash across the Atlantic over the weekend for an event on alternative ownership structures and support for news hosted by the Oxford Alumni Association of New York on Monday.

Robert G. Picard and I will speak about recent RISJ research on the international business of journalism, charitable and trust ownership of news organizations, and public sector support for the media.

Bearing in mind cross-Atlantic differences on issues like subsidy, where proposals for various forms of intervention by people like Len Downie, Michael Schudson, and Lee Bollinger have met fierce resistance, I look forward to an interesting and robust discussion.

Leave a comment

Posted in Media policy, Talks and presentations

Tagged , ,