1. Each political advertising medium has its strengths and limitations – understanding them is key to deploying them smartly. Television’s strength is reaching large numbers of voters, especially less-engaged voters, but that doesn’t necessarily translate as well in low-turnout elections. David Perdue’s broadcast-focused Primary efforts may leave him with an engagement deficit to make up in the runoff election, which is expected to be even lower turnout.
Digital media can facilitate at least the appearance of direct personal engagement with voters and can be an important component of Get Out the Vote efforts, but it’s main strength may be the lower cost it allows a campaign to incur. Karen Handel’s campaign, which earned votes with significantly lower per vote spending than Perdue and Kingston shows both the advantage and the disadvantage of a digital-heavy campaign. Lower turnout in Metro Atlanta, where her margins were relatively high depressed her statewide vote total just enough to keep her out of the runoff.
2. Turnout and margin are vitally important in Primary elections. Jack Kingston’s margin of victory in his own Congressional District, where he took something like 75% of the vote while hot down-ballot races drove voters to the poll can be contrasted with anemic turnout in Metro Atlanta and probably provided the margin that put Kingston in the runoff election.
Turnout is often driven by personal interactions and reminders to vote, and one of the unfortunate truths of modern political campaigns is that field operations – a fancy term for volunteer activities like door-to-door and phone-banking — often get short shrift both in budgeting and in allocation of the candidate’s effort and campaign management. Winning politicians know the importance of fieldwork.
3. Voters — even Primary voters — are driven largely by habit. At coffee with a fellow political professional this week, my friend remarked after running a Congressional primary campaign this year, that no one seemed to know when the election was. This is largely a function of the change of primary date driven by a federal lawsuit and the disruption of voting habits.
Georgia may have an opportunity to follow the lead of other states like Mississippi and Alabama who have preserved their traditional political primary calendars by allowing different forms of runoff ballots for overseas voters to comply with federal law. Georgia can either maintain the current calendar with an early primary election and very long runoff, or consider other ways of runoff voting for overseas voters.
