Too Much Voter Contact???

Recently, at campaign training seminars, I've been fielding lots of questions on the danger of "overwhelming" voters with too much info -- or too many contacts. As such, I thought I would put my thoughts in writing.

First of all, I find it ironic that candidates and activists are concerned about the dangers of too much voter contact. The vast majority of the time, the real problem campaigns face is that they don't have enough resources to reach voters.

Nevertheless, students are perpetually worried about the dangers of "turning voters off" or annoying people.

The first thing to know about voter contact is that everything effective political campaigns do could be considered "annoying."

If you don't like being annoying, then politics is probably not the best business for you to be in.

As Morton Blackwell says, "Nothing moves in politics unless it's pushed." Being in politics means being a bit pushy. Door-to-Door, voter mail, email spam, telemarketing calls ... etc. The list goes on and on. Of course, you and I know that the candidates who do these things tend to win. Nobody is going to reward you with a vote for not bothering them.

According to Phillip Stutts, who ran the RNC's 72-Hour Task Force for the Bush/Cheney '04 campaign, the RNC did a test with this in Michigan in 2002. The test clearly showed that at nine contacts it starts to level off-- but up to nine, voter turnout increases after every contact.

Nine times is a lot of contact. And it is important to note that these nine contacts are defined as personal contacts. This doesn't count the number of times voters see you on TV or hear your radio ad, etc. I would venture to say that there is little danger your campaign will have to worry about having more than 9 personal contacts with a voter.

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. There is always the outside possibility that too much voter contact could backfire. In a small population state with a big race (like South Dakota a few years ago), there is the danger of over-saturation.

Still, I think the real culprit isn't too much contact, but rather ineffective or inappropriate contact. If your voter contact is targeted toward the right audience -- and is well produced -- you have little to worry about.

Again, for most candidates, worrying about too much voter contact is a happy dilemma. It's like having "too much money." Most candidates ought to worry about not having enough money to contact voters a minimum number of times.

But I wanted to address it. The next time someone asks, I'll just direct them to this little rant...