Yale professor cautions against valuing voter conversion over mobilization

    Exactly one week before Election Day, Yale Professor of Political Science Donald Green highlighted what he sees as a disconnect in presidential campaigns, which focus more on swaying voters than on the simpler task of increasing turnout among solid supporters.
   In the year's second Frank C. Colcord Lecture, entitled "The Science and Pseudoscience of Winning Elections," Green argued that the success of mobilization techniques depends on adding a personal touch and communicating directly with people.
    "Sustained, high-quality, heartfelt communication often leads to success," he said.
    Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser said in introductory remarks that Green, the author of "Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout," is known as "one of the most creative and provocative social scientists in the country."
    Green described his Alumnae Lounge lecture as the "kind of advice you'd get from … campaign consultants," and went on to describe the tactics of mobilization and persuasion.
    Mobilization focuses on getting people who have already expressed support in a candidate to vote. Persuasion, Green said, involves "trying to win people over to your side."
    Drawing on a number of studies, Green said that mobilization is more cost-effective than trying to sway people across party lines, especially when the candidates are familiar and recognizable. Still, in the "heat of the campaign," candidates are more likely to create ads that focus on their platforms rather than on voting in general, he said.
    "With a relatively well-known candidate, it's hard to change people's minds. Nevertheless, persuasion still attracts the vast majority of presidential campaign resources," he said.
    Of the variety of mobilization strategies available to campaigns, Green said that volunteer phone banks and door-to-door canvassing are most effective because they provide an engaging and informative conversation with voters.
    He also described the unreliability of microtargeting, a technique in which analysts seek to determine distinct demographics' voting patterns by doing specific, directed research in each group. Microtargeting tends to involve impersonal forms of communication, including mass e-mails, online surveys and prerecorded telephone calls.
    "I put no stock in this style of research," Green said. "It has a perfect record of never working."
    Green concluded his lecture with his hopes for the future of voter research. Ideally, he said, he would like to create a federally funded 527 organization that would help political scientists test the effectiveness of different mobilization tactics in actual campaigns. The only limitation, he said, is that campaigns could be unwilling to risk losing in the name of research.
    "After this election, we're going to hang out our shingle. If you're an aspiring candidate who is preparing to lose, we'll run a pro-bono campaign for you," he said.
    After the lecture, an intrigued audience picked Green's brain in a question-and-answer session.
    Freshman Emma Oppenheim said that Green's points were in line with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign's success in mobilizing supporters. "Obama has been doing pretty well [in] trying to get out the vote," she told the Daily, saying that his campaign has focused more on personal interaction than on media communications.
    Jon Svenningsen, a freshman who heard about the lecture from the Tufts Democrats, found the lecture interesting in light of the presidential campaign. "I think it's really interesting, especially with the election right away, [that] mobilizing your supporters is really more important than trying to persuade them," he said.
    The lecture marked the second in this lecture series, which is sponsored by the Department of Political Science. The first lecture, held last week, featured political analyst Norman Ornstein.