Monday morning, after the breaking of the story about Republican robocalls being misattributed to Democrats, our campaign was trying to run through that day's list of 4500 get-out-the-vote calls. Phone banking, as Ezra described earlier, is among the less fun jobs that a volunteer has to do -- you're basically an annoying telemarketer and lots of people get irritated and hang up on you. That day it was especially unpleasant, because I was doing something fairly similar to what Republicans were paying money for. As soon as the opportunity arose, I ran away to do some door-to-door canvassing.
Experiences like this have given me a keen interest in how a campaign can develop a good field operation, and now I'm poring over the academic research on the issue. The big study on this issue comes from Donald Green at Yale. From the abstract: "We find that personal canvassing increased voter turnout substantially; direct mail, slightly; and phone calls, not at all." Green's hypothesis is that a decline in the amount of face-to-face contact between people and campaigns is responsible for the historical decline in voter turnout.
