Information-Based Candidate Strategy: Data Constraints and Voter Engagement

Political campaigns spend months ahead of an election contacting voters. Through voter contact, politicians build coalitions, make campaign promises, and engage citizens in the electoral process. How do campaigns decide which voters to communicate with and which voters to ignore? Campaigns seek out supporters to mobilize and ambivalent voters to persuade, but how do they know who is likely to be supportive or persuadable? The theory of informational resources I develop posits that candidate strategy is highly dependent on available data. Political campaigns have a limited set of resources with which they can sort the electorate into likely supporters, persuadables, and opponents. The information that enables them to sort the electorate comes primarily from public records, namely voter registration files. Because the laws that govern data collection vary by jurisdiction, political campaign strategy varies geographically as a function of available information.;To understand the role of information in strategic decision-making, I investigate a database containing all registered voters in the United States that is used by actual campaigns for the purpose of voter contact. Three essays relay the findings from this database and from interviews with campaign operatives. The first essay explores strategies for identifying likely partisan supporters. I find that in states that do not collect party data in the public record, political campaigns cannot easily identify their own supporters. The second essay explores strategies for identifying persuadable voters. On account of data limitations, the voters that campaigns typically target with persuasion messages are a completely different set of individuals from those who would appear to be undecided, independent, or cross-pressured according to survey measures. The third essay explores the role of racial identifiers that are listed on the public record in eight southern states. When racial data is available, candidates sort the electorate by race, leading to the mobilization of voters whose races are identified and to racial polarization of voters into different parties. The role of information in guiding campaign strategy challenges extant models of political mobilization and identifies important political consequences of the recent and dramatic developments in data availability.