Exam 9: Campaigns and Elections

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Today,the ability to make effective use of social media and the Internet is essential to a candidate.Internet fund-raising grew out of an earlier technique: the direct-mail campaign.In direct mailings,campaigns send solicitations to large numbers of likely prospects,typically seeking contributions.Developing good lists of prospects is central to an effective direct-mail operation,because postage,printing,and the rental of address lists make the costs of each mailing high.In many direct mail campaigns,most of the funds raised are used up by the costs of the campaign itself.In contrast to the costs,response rates are low-a 1 percent response rate is a tremendous success.To understand the old system is to recognize the superiority of the new one.The cost of e-mailing is very low.Lists of prospects need not be prepared as carefully,because e-mail sent to unlikely prospects does not waste resources.E-mail fund-raising did face one problem when it was new-many people were not yet online.Today,the extent of online participation is no longer a concern.The new technology brought with it a change in the groups that benefited the most.Conservatives were no longer the most effective fund-raisers.Instead,liberal and libertarian organizations enjoyed some of the greatest successes.Barack Obama took Internet fund-raising to a new level.One of the defining characteristics of his fund-raising was its decentralization.The Obama campaign attempted to recruit as many supporters as possible to act as fund-raisers who would solicit contributions from their friends and neighbors.As a result,Obama was spared much personal fund-raising effort during campaigns.In 2004,President George W.Bush's chief political adviser,Karl Rove,pioneered a new campaign technique known as microtargeting.The process involves collecting as much information as possible about voters in a gigantic database and then filtering out various groups for special attention.Through microtargeting,for example,the Bush campaign could identify Republican prospects living in heavily Democratic neighborhoods-potential supporters whom the campaign might otherwise have neglected because the neighborhood as a whole seemed so unpromising.In 2004,the Democrats had nothing to match Republican efforts.In 2012,however,Obama's microtargeting operation vastly outperformed Romney's.