Polls and Elections The Ground War 2000‐2004: Strategic Targeting in Grassroots Campaigns

Following the epitaphs written for American political parties in the wake of political and legal changes during the post-World War II era, a resurgence of sorts has occurred that would make George Washington Plunkitt proud. The political parties have long shown themselves to be adaptable in an uncertain political environment, making and remaking themselves as conditions permit or demand. They have, in a sense, seen opportunities and taken advantage of them. The emphasis on grassroots politics that once was the bread and butter of the local political parties described by the preeminent scholar V. O. Key gave way in the 1980s to technocentric parties that seemed to have forgotten the party-in-the-electorate. Political scientists were quick to ascribe all manner of political pathologies to the decline of political mobilization by entities such as parties, and, truth be told, there was something to the argument. By the late 1990s, however, evidence pointed to the rediscovery of the mass base of political decision making. Grassroots mobilization efforts, by all accounts, were making a comeback. The virtually unfettered ability of individuals and organizations to disseminate information and facilitate mobilization efforts in the first few years of the twenty-first century was but one indicator of the trend. The political parties, too, expanded anew their personal contact campaigning efforts, particularly in light of ambiguous evidence regarding the effects of mass media advertising on turnout, but particularly helpful and precise evidence on the efficacy of a more personal approach to politics (e.g., Gerber and Green 2000). We examine the elections of 2000 and 2004, two years that saw the highest levels of personal contact campaigning since the American National Election Studies began asking about such tactics in the 1950s, Our goals are twofold. First, we test hypotheses, derived from statements of top campaign operatives from the presidential election campaigns in those years, that the parties shifted their grassroots campaign strategies from largely swing-voter-focused operations to more mixed-base and swing strategies. Our results present a modest degree of support that the parties accomplished such goals. Second, we examine personal contact campaigning in a way that, to our knowledge, has not been possible to this point. Because of the rather low levels of respondents in national surveys who reported campaign contacts, the ability to rigorously assess their correlates has been hindered. The much greater degree of such reports in the last two cycles enables us to examine the determinants of unique Democrat and Republican contacts--those people who report either Democrat or Republican party contacts but not both. It is our contention that the kinds of people each party seeks out as part of a base-centered strategy are likely to be quite different from the kinds of people that both parties seek to influence in efforts to expand their electoral coalitions in search of political victory. In this case, our results are interesting. Political Parties and the Resurgence of Grassroots Politicking Conventional conceptions of political parties view them as multidimensional linkage institutions between the mass electorate and elected officials in the government (Baer and Bositis 1993; Eldersveld 1982; Sorauf 1967), Parties exist as organizations, with some degree of structure, varying divisions of labor, and some number of full-time employees and, in the government, with officials (actual and potential) standing for election under party labels. Eldersveld noted that political parties are a central type of linkage structure in the modern American political system. As "intermediary organizations," they "help produce positive action and effective decisions in the face of fragmentation, conflict, and mass involvement. These structures are groups that engage in activities and organize initiatives that make cooperative behavior possible" (1982, 4). …