Today's WaPo (
On Nov. 2, GOP Got More Bang For Its Billion, Analysis Shows)
discusses differences in the Bush and Kerry campaigns' spending:
- 'Pinpoint' targeting of likely Bush voters (not
undecided voters, but unregistered eligibles or voters unlikely to
go to the polls) through data mining and crafting targeted
messages;
- Feedback from the 2002 elections and 2003 Mississippi and
Kentucky gubernatorial campaigns;
- Cleaning the databases of inaccurate entries (the next step
perhaps being self-cleaning databases).
The result was Bush increased his national vote by 10.5 million
over 2000. Kerry's increased by 6.8 million over Gore's, but a lot
of that increase was perhaps 2000 Nader voters who went Dem in
2004. (Nader's 2.9 million 2000 votes dropped to 400,000 in
2004.)
The Bush effort was at the counterintuitive margin: increase
turnout. (It's counterintuitive because for, probably decades, the
presumption has been that higher turnout means more Dem
votes.)
The article discusses the uncoordinated, blunderbuss effort by
pro-Kerry 527s, which prevented feedback to the Kerry campaign:
Kerry was unable to determine the
marginal
utility of the 527s' efforts.
Effectiveness at the margin can't be ascertained in a marketing or
a political campaign until the results are in, of course. But Bush
had some experience to go on, and his campaign's working the margin
proved better in the end.
Much of liberals' history has been increasing program spending,
building new bureaucracies, and defending turf, without regard for
the marginal utility or the marginal cost of those tactics. Will
Dems wise up to looking at marginal utility in political campaigns,
or will they continue to be true to their mascot?