You’d think that Tyler Volesky, 27-year-old Huron native, would be all about hammering away at the keyboard and smartphone to boost his District 22 House campaign online. At Thursday’s District 22 Democratic Forum, Volesky said, think again:
He said while he may use Facebook and Instagram if they can effectively expand his message, he’s not a big fan of social media. He calls it self-promotion, not leadership.
“We’re going to be out in the community knocking on doors, going to the coffee shops, going to the businesses, getting back to our grassroots message, face-to-face, person-to-person communication,” Volesky said [Roger Larsen, “Young Candidate Touts Need to Return to Traditional Issues at Democratic Forum,” Huron Plainsman, 2018.05.18].
Volesky takes an interesting and contrarian position here. Many candidates, myself included, assume that we can’t pass up having an online presence. In 2016, my online contribution page for District 3 Senate, which I promoted on Facebook and Twitter, generated more than a quarter of my campaign funds. It’s producing similar good results for my 2018 campaign.
Nonetheless, I find online contacts don’t translate into action at the same rate as in-person contacts. Lots of online “engagement” goes no deeper than a glance at the headline or the cute image and a tap on the Like button. Glances and Likes don’t fill the campaign coffer or the bubble on the ballot. And as I go around town in campaign mode, I seem to bump into more people who say they remember my coming to their door, my chat with them at the Brown County Fair, my ad in the paper, or my billboard than people who say they remember my really snappy post on my campaign Facebook page.
That said (I know, back and forth), even if online promotion has less impact per person, it also costs less and reaches them faster. For instance, I can spend about $400 to print and insert a single-page newsletter in my local paper to reach about 4,200 subscribers. For $300, I can boost a Facebook post with the same information to a targeted group of possibly 9,000 viewers a day. For $340, I can distribute the same information via a proprietary e-mail list to four times as many subscribers. And even if I keep printing newsletters and sending them out in the paper and handing them out at doors, I can post the same material online for little to no additional cost and reach some additional chunk of voters who don’t get the paper, who aren’t home when I knock, or who live outside the district but like my newsletter and my ideas enough to send my campaign $10. On straight cost-benefit analysis (wait: mathematically, that should be benefit-per-cost analysis), campaigning online is at least a super-efficient complement to campaigning on shoe leather.
Then again, maybe no campaigning matters. California professors Joshua Kalla and David Broockman studied 49 campaigns across the country and found that general election campaigns for candidates have negligible impact on how people vote:
Kalla and Broockman found that, if the campaign action (canvass, phone call, etc.) happens within two months of election day, the average effect on voter preferences was effectively zero. About one in 800 people reached were persuaded, they estimate.
By contrast, when the campaign action happens well before election day, and the effects are measured quickly thereafter, there’s a real impact on opinions — but it disappears before election day. The sooner you get to the election, the more voters get set in their ways and choose candidates by their partisan alignment, and aren’t persuadable by additional campaigning [Dylan Matthews, “A Massive New Study Reviews the Evidence on Whether Campaigning Works. The Answer’s Bleak,” Vox, 2017.09.28].
Uff da. If that’s the case, then we could drop back to Volesky’s position: forget self-promotion; just use leadership to make sure everyone who’s already made up their minds for you to get out and vote!
Volesky’s comment about preferring leadership to self-promotion is worth discussion. While I understand that self-promotion sounds like a dirty word, it’s one of candidates’ basic imperatives. I agree that leadership is also a basic imperative: candidates should lead the public to conversations about important issues and to practical civic action to address those issues, including voting. But self-promotion doesn’t oppose leadership; the two go hand in hand. People will notice, remember, and vote for a good leader.
I agree that candidates can lead and self-promote more effectively in person. Door-to-door, face-to-face is the meat and potatoes of effective campaigning, and when you have a handsome face, a winning smile, and an overall impressive, charismatic presence like Volesky’s, you want to meet every voter in person. Even if the Kalla/Broockman study is correct and we’re not going to persuade anyone to change his or her vote come November, making that good impression at the door or the coffee shop will still remind voters that they have someone worth voting for.
But meat and potatoes go better with ketchup and butter, and even if the Internet only puts a small plop of ketchup and butter on the plate, when it costs so little, I have a hard time passing that bargain up.
This post isn’t a hard critique. The Internet is a tool, but all candidates, just like all businesses, use it differently. Tyler Volesky is working hard, meeting voters, and getting press. As he says, if he sees an opportunity to boost his campaign with online outreach, he’ll use it. But Volesky has good priorities—the point is to meet the voters, not to have busy Instagram. And it’s not like his opponents, incumbent Republicans Roger Chase and Bob Glanzer, are burning up the Internet with brilliant viral videos. Volesky can stick with his traditional campaign plan and outrun Chase and Glanzer on the literal ground.
This is so interesting. Its not only the thoughts about efficiency and bang for the buck, but the value of campaigning at all! If the CA profs are correct, should candidates simply put out a position sheet and then campaign a couple weeks before the vote and thats it?
I don’t think I can buy that thesis. I do think those in person meetings are effective, regardless of when they happen. For example, I think pres Animal Sh*thole’s campaigning was quite effective.
Thanks Debbo for confirming the hypocrisy.
Advertising doesn’t matter when the majority of Americans disagree with the Democrat values and ideas.
That’s a fact.
Remember when Obama was against gay marriage Debbo?
I’m guessing Debbo will not answer that question.
It’s not a partisan conclusion, Jason. Debbo doesn’t have to answer your question, because you’re trying to drag us back to some argument you want to have rather than the topic at hand. Please stop trying to pigeonhole evidence into your preferred punching points.
Debbo, maybe further research will find gaps. But the CA researchers found no form of canvassing or outreach, in-person or otherwise, making a dent in partisan preferences in general elections. Campaigning did show impact on primary contests and ballot questions, where partisan labels don’t affect the outcome as much. I don’t know if the CA research made this clear, but I’d be curious to see if campaigning is thus more persuasive in non-partisan contests like our city council and school board elections and thus if campaigning would make a greater difference in general elections if we had non-partisan ballots. (If the CA research results are solid, then I doubt it, because then “non-partisan” races would jus devolve into efforts like TenHaken’s campaign for Sioux Falls mayor to brand himself as a Republican and his opponent, Jolene Loetscher, as a Democrat, and the persuasion contest simply becomes an effort to see who can rouse the greatest party loyalty.)
If the CA research is valid, then the most efficient campaign might involve name-and-party/brand recognition, followed by intense GOTV. That might still look like conventional campaigning: go to doors, put up yard signs, get in the paper and on the radio, earn some free press with awesome debate appearances and public events. But the point isn’t persuasion; the point is top-of-mind-awareness of the candidate and the date and location of voting.
But whether the effective result of campaigning is persuasion or mere TOMA/GOTV, the question remains whether its worth investing in social media to complement those efforts? I think TOMA is easy and cheap online, but I’m concerned that TOMA online does not translate as efficiently into GOTV as does TOMA earned through face-to-face meetings or other media. I’d be curious to see research on that point.