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Rhode Island will become a case study in the effectiveness of the Republicans’ 72 Hour Program. Behind the curtain, Chafee’s campaign spent $500,000 to squeeze out every conceivable voter from neighborhoods across the state. They searched for independents who voted Democrat in municipal elections but who had once upon a time voted for a Republican for president or governor or senator. There were a few of those. They looked for non-affiliated voters in Republican neighborhoods. Using microtargeting techniques, they even tried to figure out which committed Democrats might be tempted to vote for Chafee.
By the end of the summer, Chafee’s campaign had identified 42,000 potential supporters. Then the second part of the program kicked in. Message, here, is a verb. The campaign “messaged” these voters, often individually. Chafee himself called more than 100 of them who were identified as being capable of swinging the votes of colleagues and friends. The standard complement of robocalls, mailings and personal visits were employed. In the twelve days of September, Chafee, the RNC and NRSC made more than 198,000 phone calls to the voters on their list. Many voters received one every two days.
On election day, the Chafee campaign stationed poll watchers at 100 key precincts across the state. By 10:00 am, the RNC and the NRSC were confident that Chafee would win.
2 comments:
The Chafee victory, or more precisely, how the RNC saved Chafee's ass with negative ads and its GOTV machine, has helped change the CW for the election. Now Cillizza and other political analysts are starting to say thet the RNC's GOTV operation, coupled with the $60 million in negative ads it's going to run in the next 30 days, is going to help them hold onto a narrow majority in the House.
And yet, when I see all the updates on poll numbers at Political Wire, they nearly all seem to be still heading in the Dems direction. Cantwell is up big in the last poll, Stabenow is up big in her latest poll, Ford is leading Corker within the MOE, Santorium hasn't caught up yet, the three Indiana races in contention are all going the Dems way - and that's just the updates from the last 24 hours or so.
I guess the assumption is that the GOTV machine and the negative ads will change enough of these races to help the GOP maintain enough control. But can they pull off what they did in RI in enough states to hold power?
The polling data is good news, but getting bodies to vote (the finish line) is the bottom line. And the fear/smear messages still can hurt. Your final question is right on.
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