It’s the TECHNOLOGY, stupid

The title of this post is obviously hearkening back to the oft-quoted line of famed Democratic political consultant James Carville: “It’s the economy, stupid!” And today, just one week away from the election, it seems that it is the economy that has center-stage as the issue of the day. Global financial meltdown, the credit crunch, etc. has all favored Obama since McCain is as reliable as G train in the summer. (Not very.)

Amid all of the punditry on TV and the Web, I was once again pleased by the insight of Slate’s tech critic Farhad Manjoo, who has written a post on the dispositif of the Obama campaign’s tech strategy to win the election, specifically on the advantage of text messages employed by Obama over the traditional robo-call employed by McCain.  (Sooooo close. Let’s hope it happens.)

So why is the text message so much more effective than the robocall? Don’t they both serve the same function?

On the surface, these texts don’t seem that different from robo-calls—they’re both automated messages and both easy to ignore. But for reasons that aren’t completely understood, text messaging is different: We pay attention to short messages that pop up on our phones.

Political scientists have run dozens of such studies during the past few years, and the work has led to what you might call the central tenet of voter mobilization: Personal appeals work better than impersonal ones. Having campaign volunteers visit voters door-to-door is the “gold standard” of voter mobilization efforts, Green and Gerber write. On average, the tactic produces one vote for every 14 people contacted. The next-most-effective way to reach voters is to have live, human volunteers call them on the phone to chat: This tactic produces one new vote for every 38 people contacted. Other efforts are nearly worthless.

So here is where the genius of text-messaging comes in. It’s much cheaper.

It’s expensive and time-consuming to run the kind of personal mobilization efforts that science shows work best. Green and Gerber [political scientists that Manjoo cites for this research] estimate that a door-canvassing operation costs $16 per hour, with six voters contacted each hour; if you convince one of every 14 voters you canvass, you’re paying $29 for each new voter. A volunteer phone bank operation will run you even more—$38 per acquired voter. This is the wondrous thing about text-messaging: Studies show that text-based get-out-the-vote appeals win one voter for every 25 people contacted. That’s nearly as effective as door-canvassing, but it’s much, much cheaper. Text messages cost about 6 cents per contact—only $1.50 per new voter.

Wow. So not only do you get a cheaper means of connecting to potential voters but also a more successful one.

Okay, you may be wondering, any Joe Schmoe can try to campaign using texts, why is Manjoo convinced that Obama’s effort is so damn good?

The beauty of text messaging is that it is both automated and personalized. This is true of e-mail, too, but given the flood of messages you get each day (no small amount from Obama), you’re probably more attuned to ignoring e-mail. Text messages show up on a device that you carry with you all day long—and because you probably get only a handful of them each day, you’re likely to read each one.

This is especially true when the message seems to have been tailored to you specifically—Obama’s often are. The campaign knows a lot about me: At the least, it knows that I live in California, and because I joined the text-message list in order to learn the V.P. pick, that I’m fairly interested in politics (and therefore likely to vote). It’s possible that they might know even more; given my ZIP code and my phone number, they could potentially have tied my text-message account to my voter registration file, allowing the campaign to send me messages based on my party registration, whether I usually vote by mail, and whether I sometimes forget to vote. (It doesn’t appear that the campaign knows what’s in my registration file, though; I’m registered as a permanent absentee voter, but the campaign hasn’t asked me to mail in my ballot yet.)

And it is this ability to “microtarget,” as Manjoo puts it, a political campaign that is usually sprawling with various messages and themes to the small pockets of individuals that gives Obama such a technological advantage. It is the ability to technologically create a pocket of dialogic (as opposed to disseminatory) intimacy with voters, among many other things, that Obama has been so successful. Let’s see what happens in a week.

X-posted at Human Potential.