Congressional Campaign Manager Analyzes Micro-targeting

Campaign Manager Bill Evans On Micro-targeting And Other Strategies

By Scott Benjamin

Congressional campaign manager Bill Evans says that the micro-targeting of a candidate has become such a science that specific television commercials designed to hit particular audiences can be placed in voters’ cable television boxes.

“You can put in a different commercial for a person that supports gun rights and is pro-life than for people supporting gun control,” said Mr. Evans of Wolcott, who managed Republican challenger Mark Greenberg’s 2014 campaign in Connecticut’s Fifth Congressional District. Mr. Greenberg lost to first-term Democratic incumbent Elizabeth Esty in the sprawling 41-municipality district, which covers most of the northwest part of the state.

The micro-targeting of campaigns has become more sophisticated with the emergence of the social media and was the topic of “The Victory Lab,” the 2012 book by Sasha Issenberg of Slate.

“There is all kinds of consumer data,” Mr. Evans said in a November 25, 2014 interview. “There are the voting patterns. There are levels of incomes. You have magazine subscriptions and even cable television viewing habits. You can get everything that big companies get to sell their products.”

“It’s a science,” he said. Reports have stated that President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign was able to identify which bus routes would yield the best advertising and what video games were frequented by potential supporters.

Mr. Evans quotes Mr. Greenberg’s campaign consultant as saying that he was able to pre-determine in a Pennsylvania state Senate race that “bike riders would be a key constituency for his candidate” and they put campaign signs on bus routes and sent campaign literature to bike riding teams.

Television has been the most important form of advertising for decades in congressional races. Jason Linde, who managed three of Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Maloney’s (CT-5) campaigns, said in a Nov. 2000 interview that “a 30-second commercial on [CBS’] 60 Minutes will do more for us than if we dropped 48,000 pieces of literature at that moment.”

Former state Sen. Mark Nielsen of Danbury, who lost to Mr. Maloney in the 1998 and 2000 races in Connecticut’s Fifth District said in a June 2002 interview that media consultants will always tell you if you have to reduce your advertising budget do it in areas other than your television commercials.

Mr. Evans said Mr. Greenberg’s consultants delivered the same message in 2014, but that he believes “television is going to be less important as you go forward.”

During the 2000 campaign in the Fifth Congressional District, Mr. Linde, the campaign manager for Mr. Maloney, used the logs from the statewide television stations to indicate that their campaign was buying more television advertising in general and on major broadcast outlets than Mr. Nielsen, their opponent. That apparently was a way of convincing voters that Mr. Maloney had the lead.

However, Mr. Evans said campaigns are now devoting more resources to Internet advertising, including Facebook and other social media outlets.

“A lot of the younger people on our campaign were always on their Smart Phones,” he added. “I don’t think they watched television very much.”

Mr. Evans, who was a candidate for the Republican nomination in the Fifth Congressional District in 2010 and later served as the deputy campaign manager later that year and in 2012 for Mr. Greenberg, said campaigns can now recognize trends from monitoring Twitter feeds.

Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton, who is known as “Big Poppa” on Twitter, said in a May 2014 interview that he has 15,000 followers on Twitter and that many of them are 25 years of age or younger. He added that it is powerful tool, for example, in encouraging young people to register to vote.

Mr. Evans said targeted door-knocking will continue to grow in importance since campaigns can intelligently use their consumer data in approaching potential supporters through personal contact.

“If you know that they are a Yankees fan or pro-life, you can approach them in a certain way,” he said. ”You don’t want someone from a hunting club going to visit someone who is pro-gun control,” Mr. Evans said.

Mr. Evans said that appearances at shopping centers and high school football games take on greater importance through the social media since photographs of the candidate at those venues can be distributed through Facebook and other online systems to underscore that he is visible in the community. He added that those photos also can be micro-targeted through direct mail to show that the candidate was at the supermarket in a voter’s neighborhood.

He said that “lawn signs provide a great psychological boost to the person winning that battle and their supporters. I heard from supporters how good it was that we had so many more signs than our opponent and the candidate liked seeing them as you traveled around the district the last two weeks.”

However Mr. Evans added, “I am not sure how much they influence voters who are truly undecided.”

Mr. Evans said that direct mail appears to continue to be a valuable source of outreach.

He noted, for example, that former Groton Mayor Heather Somers used direct mail extensively in scoring a photo-finish victory in the 2014 Connecticut Republican primary for the lieutenant governor nomination against state Rep. Penny Bacchiochi of Stafford and former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker of Bridgeport.

“David’s advertising was mostly tied to what John McKinney [his gubernatorial primary running mate] put out and Penny did a lot of television,” Mr. Evans said.

Additionally, he said state Rep. Rob Sampson (R-80) of Wolcott won election to a third term by a larger-than-anticipated margin this fall using a lot direct mail related to specific neighborhoods.

Mr. Evans said Mr. Greenberg phoned voters during the campaign in hopes of enlisting their support. He said robo-calls, by law, can’t be made to cellular phones.

Sarah Merriam, the campaign manager for Democrat Chris Murphy’s successful 2006 campaign in the Fifth Congressional District, has said their volunteers could pick up trends from their phone calls across the district. She said another advantage of using volunteers instead of an automated phone system was that if the voter were talking to a volunteer they might note that they were concerned about a particular issue and the volunteer could then send an issue paper to them explaining Mr. Murphy’s position.

Mr. Evans said polling has become more cumbersome due to the response rate from voters and the obstacles in getting an accurate percentage of people who primarily or exclusively use cellular phones.

Mr. Messina told the Christian Science Monitor in 2012 that in some polls there was only a 10 percent response rate.

Garrick Delzell, who briefly worked as the campaign manager for Dan Roberti of Kent, who sought the Democratic nomination in the Fifth Congressional District in 2012 said he still used his cellular phone from when he was living in Colorado, yet he was now a voter in the Fifth District. He said those kinds of circumstances were making it more difficult for pollsters to get a reliable sample of voters in congressional races.

In 2000 New York Times columnist William Safire wrote that pollsters had told him that voicemail and caller identification had dropped the response rate to about 35 percent which meant that more phone calls had to be made to get a representative sample.

Mr. Evans said that American Viewpoint, the pollster for Mr. Greenberg’s campaign, guaranteed that 40 percent of the respondents would be cellular phone users. Reports have indicated that the percentage of the voters exclusively using cellular phones has grown through the recent years.

Mark Penn, who did polling for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign told The Washington Post in 2010 that the 2012 presidential race would probably be the last one in which polling would primarily be done by phone, and that instead, online systems would be utilized.

Mr. Evans said that the use of online polling in the 2014 midterm elections by YouGov, which was partly operated by CBS News and The New York Times, has given that method some credibility, but there probably will be hybrid applications of polling combining conventional phones, cellular phones and online users before there is a large volume of polls using only responses from online surveys.

He said polling can particularly help a candidate craft his message.

For instance, Mr. Evans said it seemed that Obamacare “was off the charts” so they used it in their first television commercial. However, he said their first poll showed it ranked third, since jobs and the economy were the prime topics in voters’ minds.

“We didn’t do a lot of polling,” he said. “But it is important, because it is a listening device and a good candidate should be listening to the voters.”

Mr. Evans said Mr. Greenberg’s campaign did not hold focus group sessions, but added that he would likely utilize them if he managed a future congressional race.

“It’s a poll on steroids,” he explained. “You can see some of the visceral reactions.”

“I think you can determine the more emotional issues better in focus groups,” Mr. Evans said. “Verbatim you can better determine from people why gun control is important to certain people. You also can get a sense on how men and how women react to the candidate.”

Regarding video tracking, he said, “I find it personally disgusting, but it’s going to continue.”

Democratic consultant Patrick McGloin, who is based in New Britain, said in a Feb. 2013 phone interview video tracking is “insidious,” but if you do it for four or five months it will likely yield results.

You can’t have a Macaca moment,” Mr. Evans said, making reference to some of the inappropriate remarks that then-U.S. Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) made to a video tracker from his opponent’s campaign on tape during his 2006 re-election campaign, which he lost.

“The first thing you tell your candidate is that everything is being recorded,” Mr. Evans added.