Princeton Election Consortium

From the mailbag:

Noted the thread from Lara Putnam about the Georgia runoffs. I think​ I understand her point that sending 50 or so postcards to random voters in a state with 5 million voters is pointless and serves only to make the postcarder feel useful. That if you want to do something to actually help, donate to Fair Fight or a similar group instead. Do you think postcards are ever effective? Or is it like choosing a Christmas gift for college-aged cousins–just send money?

This is basically correct. To mobilize one additional voter, it would take anywhere from 80 to 500 postcards*. To achieve even that, it assumes that the voters aren’t already being bombarded. That might be the case in a sleepy state house race. The situation is far worse in Georgia, where all eyes are on the two special Senate elections on January 5, 2021. These races will determine control of the U.S. Senate and the fate of President-elect Biden’s agenda.

It used to be that you had to vote in November first, but the law has changed. Anyone who is registered to vote by December 7th can vote in the runoff. If you will be 18 by then, register to vote!

Everyone outside Georgia: if you want to make a difference, give money to register voters by December 7 and to turn out voters. For Democrats, you can give to Stacey Abrams’s Fair Fight or other organizations listed in the ActBlue link in the left sidebar. Republicans can give at the WinRed link.

*Update: I’m told that letters are said to be 2 to 3 times more effective than postcards at mobilizing votes. It’s not known why that is, though note that opening a letter requires active engagement by the recipient. Anyway, that improvement might get the amount of necessary effort down to a few dozen letters per vote, which is an improvement.

Here’s a recent report on per-voter effects for other interventions: in-person canvassing (7 percentage points increase) is best, followed by text messages (4 points). There’s one final unknown: does it cost more to send a letter, or to make an in-person contact? If sending letters is a lot faster, then letters may still be a cost-effective approach. So if you really want to do something yourself (which is part of the social and emotional benefit), then write letters.

In today’s Washington Post, my take on the sources of polling errors in Senate races – and the consequences for resource allocation when we don’t take those errors into account.

I have more to say to PEC readers on this, since it was a major feature of what we did. If we knew then what we know now, North Carolina and Georgia Senate races would have gotten more emphasis. I will dissect that soon.

The polling errors for Senate candidates were quite large this year. In 13 races with final-ish results, the margin of the outcome was a median of 7.9 points more Republican than the last week of polling. That’s an amazingly large difference. In the past, the median error was no more than 3 points or so.

A big reason seems to be voters who were “undecided” about their Senate choice came home to their party. The other day I showed a graph that showed this effect (click to enlarge):

However, this didn’t show up for Democrats. [Read more →]