Political Ground Game - What it Is and Why You Need It?
Political campaigns are fought on two fronts:
- "Air war" - consisting of speaking tours and advertising. The air war is to persuade voters.
- “The ground game” - boots on the ground consisting of door-knocking and canvassing. The ground game is to identify voters. This is where elections are won or lost.
Combined, these two components are known as GOTV – get out the vote. The GOTV strategy is designed to get campaign supporters into the voting booth.
Today’s political ground game is heavily supported by microtargeting and extensive voter data collection and analysis.
Tools Used
Software and social media help to support the tools below. Campaigns use various software programs to capture and analyze the data, while Facebook profiles are used to gain additional insight into the voters’ position on certain issues. The primary tools used in the Ground Game are:
- Mailers - sending out leaflets (least effective)
- Phone banks - (moderately effective)
- Door-to-door contact (most effective)
Designing a good ground game calls for politicians and their campaign teams to step out of their offices and go into communities; knocking on doors to meet with constituents, staging rallies, addressing various interest groups, calling homes, establishing field offices and other similar activities. The underlying aim of this tactic is to identify and document supporters.
The Trump campaign, enjoying an avalanche of free media and promoting large-audience rallies, appeared to be eschewing conventional ground game activities. The Clinton campaign seemed to place less emphasis on the ground game as well - opening considerably fewer field offices; the key coordinator of grassroots contacts, than the Obama campaign had done four and especially eight years before (Gunther 2012).
Benefits of an effective ground game strategy
The impact of a good ground game should never be underestimated.
- Puts you in close, personal proximity to the people you need to convert and is often the most effective form of persuasion.
- Platforms such as field offices provide an opportunity for voters to ask questions, speak about the issues that directly affect them and provide honest feedback - it helps you to understand your audience.
- On election night, your campaign team may just know more than half of the voters personally - what time they plan on voting, and most importantly, who they plan on voting for.
Results of a study conducted on the 2012 French Elections, showed that the knock on door effect changed voters preference for a particular candidate. Additionally, political scientists; Anthony Fowler of the University of Chicago and Ryan Enos of Harvard conducted a study on USA’s 2008 and 2012 elections and discovered that good ground game efforts increased the likelihood of voter turnout by 7% (Last, 2016).
According to Blanding, 2016, “only 11% of eligible Democrats voted in the primaries, and the record number of Republicans only translates to about 17% of those eligible.” To bring it closer to home, voter turnout for the Grenadian elections in 2018 was 73.61% of eligible voters (Caribbean Elections, 2018). It is important to note here that the Ground Game strategy is consistently used on smaller islands such as Grenada.
What these figures tell us is that while many political campaigns have utilised ground game, due to the size of some countries its impact becomes even more effective making the pitfalls of omitting the strategy more severe.
Pitfalls of an ineffective ground game strategy
- You run the risk of lacking a deep understanding of voter issues and concerns. This may mean that the issues you are strongly advocating for may not be the ones the voters are most passionate about.
- You miss opportunities to convince non-supporters to support your cause - and in turn vote for you as face to face discussions allow for constructive criticism where persons can delve deeper into conversations.
- The missed opportunity to cultivate fruitful and long-lasting relationships with voters.
Now that you know a bit more about the political ground game, it's time to craft your strategy.