Yet, his op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal does provide an opportunity for overlap.
Rove discusses Obama's 2008 campaign strategy...
"For starters, Barack Obama's manager admitted to the New York Times that he wanted an "army of persuasion" modeled explicitly on the massive Bush neighbor-to-neighbor[emphasis mine] "Victory Committee" of '00 and '04. Those efforts deployed millions of volunteers to register, persuade and get-out-the-vote.
Sen. Obama's organizational emphasis wisely avoids the Democratic mistake of 2000, when Donna Brazille's plea for a stronger grassroots focus was ignored by the Gore high command."
Yes, all politics is local... and social. This is what I discussed in the white paper & book chapter: "It's the Conversations, Stupid!"
"...more than 45,000 canvassers – many hired from temp agencies – to register and turn out voters. It was the wrong model: Undecideds are more likely to be influenced by those in their social network than an anonymous, low-wage campaign worker [emphasis mine]."
Right on, Karl. The strategy of friends talking to friends beats the strategy of strangers talking to strangers — as I described in an earlier blog post from the 2008 presidential primary.
"The Obama campaign is trying to catch up with the GOP's 'microtargeting' program, which uses powerful analytical tools and extensive household consumer information to focus on prospects for conversion and extra turnout help."
And with warrantless wiretapping, the Bush Administration now has very good social network link data on all those "microtargets"! I jest, of course — there have been NO documented cases of counter-terrorism data or methods being used in political campaigns, but... that day is coming.
The bottom line is: the better you know both the nodes and links in the network, the better you can devise a strategy for one local voter to influence another. Help your avid supporters influence their local network.
The map below shows a social network. The grey links show: who talks to whom about politics. The nodes are colored by who they are leaning towards: red = Republicans, blue = Democrats, grey = Undecided. We are ignoring independent candidates in this simple example. How might the Undecideds tip based on the social ties illustrated?
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3 comments:
Conservatives have been savvy about using social networks for some time. Consider how they promote political positions and candidates through the social networks of evangelical Christian churches and through NRA clubs. Those organizations are conglomerations of "cells" of like-minded people who share not only religion or gun-ownership, but also lifestyle similarities such as moms-with-kids, motorcycle ownership, middle-aged businessmen, etc. Within the cells, the ties to the religion or NRA goals are strengthened, and also the political positions that are promoted.
He can't take all the credit -- it sounds like he read this:
Steven J. Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1993)
They write that social embeddedness determines who participates and when. Leaders mobilize opinion by identifying strategic issues and opportunities, and by propagating that information through their networks. (Incidentally, that's also the model that describes the uproar over the Prophet Muhammad cartoons.) So, temps or out-of-towners are not the best way to reach people.
One of the biggest reasons Kerry lost was reliance on people making $7.50 / hr to knock on doors instead of the friend to friend method.
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