Identify Voters

Why Identify voters?

To actually have a targeted conversation with both base voters and persuadable voters, your campaign needs to specifically identify them. Identifying voters as supporting, opposing, or not decided on your issue or candidate helps to focus your resources and find areas of support (where you focus on developing leaders and turning out the vote) and areas that need work (where you focus on persuasion utilizing your local precinct leaders). This is known as voter ID, and it is done in various ways.

It starts by obtaining the list of all registered voters in the district. In some states, voters register according to party preference, which makes targeting considerably easier for campaigns. Campaigns in these states can obtain voter registration lists from their secretary of state's office, so they know whether a person is a registered Republican, Democrat, Green, Independent, or other party member. This information can then be passed on precinct-by-precinct to each of your Precinct Captains.

Campaigns that have voter preference information from the start are at an advantage: they have a general idea of who their base voters are and who the conservative voters are. But of course, the best way to identify voters in a precinct is to do it directly: by asking them in a phone call or at their door who they are supporting and what issues are important to them. Precinct Captains can be critical resources in helping your candidate or campaign gather this information for their local community.

The purpose of identifying voters is to gain a clear picture of your base (those voters you can rely on to support you) and persuadable (those voters who are undecided on the race) universes.

Your goal is to categorize them either as supporters, opponents, or undecided voters. Based on this identification, the types of conversations you will have with that voter will differ. For a clear supporter, you will want to thank them for their support, and ask them to do more to help the campaign than just offer their vote. Ask them to volunteer, sign a petition, put a sign in their yard, donate to your campaign, or participate in your campaign any other way. For a clear opponent, you will want to politely disengage from the conversation. It is a waste of volunteer energy to continue in conversations with opponents, but volunteers doing voter contact are the face of the campaign, and therefore it is critical to remain polite. Particularly when working on the precinct level with neighbors and members of the same community, collegiality is critical.  For the undecided voter, your Precinct Captains should persuade the voter to support your candidate or issue by communicating the message of the campaign.

 

Types of Identification:

There are generally two types of ID on a campaign - a candidate ID and an issue ID.

The most direct way of identifying voters is to call them or knock on their doors and ask, "If the election were today, which candidate would you be likely to support?"  It is also helpful to do an "issue ID," by finding out what issues matter most to these voters.  This is particularly useful for people who say they are undecided; if the campaign knows that an undecided voter cares a lot about education, for example, it can tailor its message to them. 

Here is an example of an ID script:

"Hello, my name is (give first name), and we're out here today to talk about the upcoming presidential election.  May I ask you two quick questions?"

If "no": "Okay, thank you for your time."

If "yes": "Great.  Which of the following is the most important issue in this election: jobs, homeland security, the environment, health care, the war in Iraq, or other?"

(record information)

"If the election were held today, which presidential candidate would you support:  John Kerry, George W. Bush, or Ralph Nader?"

(Record information.  Let them volunteer "undecided".)

"Thank you for your time today!"

Based on their response to the candidate preference question, voters are broken down into five groups (and given a number in your database):

  1. = Strong Supporter
  2. = Soft Supporter
  3. = Undecided
  4. = Soft Opponent
  5. = Strong Opponent

"Ones" are your core base voters.  They should be recruited to volunteer and play an active role on the campaign.  Precinct Captains can call these voters to volunteer in the precinct.  The "twos", "threes", and "fours" are considered the persuadable universe.  They are going to decide the election, and they will be subject to an aggressive voter persuasion program.  "Fives" are peole the campaign should waste no time or resources on.  At the end of the campaign, ones and twos are the universe used for the GOTV program (see Step 5).

Once the persuadable universe is identified, the core work of the voter contact program begins.