Paul Bass Photo
Lamont campaign manager Joe Abbey.
The gubernatorial campaign has gone mobile, with Ned Lamont turning to Barack Obama’s 2008 text-messaging guru for some mobile communication help.
In recent days the Lamont for governor campaign has ramped up requests to get voters to “Text Ned.” They hope to communicate with supporters through text messages and build a text-messaging get-out-the-vote operation for the Aug. 10 Democratic gubernatorial primary to augment the traditional telephone, email and door-to-door vote-pulling done on election days.
“As an organizing tool, it’s pretty amazing,” said Lamont campaign manager Joe Abbey (pictured in his New Haven office). “You’ve got to try everything. But you walk around New Haven, everybody’s got a phone on them all the time. Email’s easy to ignore.”
The campaign has hired Revolution Messaging, a firm run by Scott Goodstein, to craft its text-messaging strategy. Goodstein was in charge of developing the social-networking systems for Obama’s presidential run. Obama’s use of the internet and tech tools, including instant messaging, was credited with helping propel him to the White House.
Lamont’s opponent in the Aug. 10 primary, Dan Malloy, is taking a pass on texts. Malloy campaign manager Dan Kelly called it a waste of money.
“Our best guess is that our opponents will spend upwards of $20,000 on text messaging. That would pay for a 50,000 person mailing or 40,000 phones calls to likely primary voters,” Kelly said. “We thought that the latter was a smarter investment. We have done some smart and targeted efforts with ‘new media’ — a smart and targeted online advertising program, strong presence on social networking, and a website with over 30 pages of Dan’s policy positions. Relative to the cost, those were better investments to us in reaching our likely primary voters.”
Relying on different calculations, the Lamont campaign this week released a video featuring its fresh-faced young staffers urging people to “Text Ned” and get in the system. (Click on the play button to watch.)
They’ve been instructed to collect cell phone numbers while canvassing voters and to invite voters to text as well.
Campaign flyers include a section surveying voters about what issues they care about most — and instructing them to text-message in the answers.
Abbey said studies so far show that text-messaging brings more voters out to the polls than some more traditional techniques. Phone calls made to voters the day of or the day before an election increase likelihood of voting by 1 to 2 percent, he said. Door-to-door visits can increase the chances of luring a voter by up to 4 percent. People receiving texts, he claimed, are 7 percent more likely to turn out. Consultant Goodstein pointed to studies (including this one) showing turnout spikes of up to 4.6 percent among targeted groups. “In a close election, this is a huge difference,” Goodstein said.
“It’s the newest organizing tool that a campaign has,” Abbey said of texting. “It’s not just window-dressing. Text isn’t going to be the silver bullet that going to win the campaign. Nothing is going to be the silver bullet. If there is a new tool for organizing and reaching voters, it would be malpractice for us not to use it. Everybody’s got a phone in Connecticut.”
And many of them have just cell phones, not land lines, said Jonathan Smart, a 22-year-old Lamont staffer from Hamden who’s been making the text-messaging pitch during local canvassing.
“That’s the best way to reach me, especially when I’m busy and I’m not available to talk. I have family members who don’t even have house phones anymore.”
Spreading
Goodstein’s Revolution Messaging outfit is also advising the campaign of Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dan White. Its client list includes a slew of politically-oriented organizations, like the NAACP, Newspaper Guild, Sunlight Foundation, and state Democratic parties. He said his firm is currently involved in a “half-dozen of so of the top U.S. Senate races” on the Democratic side.
The emergence of an emphasis on political texting reflects the prevalence of text-messaging in everyday life, especially among younger and middle-aged people; as well as the success of texting as a marketing technique, especially in the music industry.
As with other electronic media techniques, texting caught on first with Democratic organizations but quickly found its way into Republican campaigns. “We were ahead of the curve with the Obama campaign becasue the McCain campaign did not embrace text messaging,” remarked Goodstein, who said Obama’s texting list well-exceeded one million. “But if you do something on a campaign, the other side will obviously try to catch up.”
In Connecticut this season, leading GOP U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon’s organization is using texting “to stay in touch with our network of grassroots volunteers, update them on the race, and keep them active in the campaign,” said spokesman Shawn McCoy.
Campaigns are using texting for more than just getting out the vote, agreed Goodstein, speaking in a live-voice cell phone conversation (not texting) from the Netroots Nation convention in Vegas. He advises campaigns to text in order to keep members of, say, a finance council up to date on when meetings are taking place, or connect field offices and canvassers.
“You have offices in different locations. Not everybody has a computer or Internet,” Goodstein observed. “You may be borrowing somebody’s law office at night to do phone banks. The one way you can keep everybody together is put them on a text message program. Even if you’re out canvassing, how do you get the canvassers to know where the staging location is, or if the canvas time has change? We couldn’t do [that] so easily 10 years ago. Not everybody’s going to be schlepping a laptop around with them or have internet capability.”