By Popular Demand, the Politiqs Essays Return
We appreciate all our clients and other political professionals who have inquired recently about our PolitIQs series that we had suspended in 2019 under the load of the fall campaign season. Today we renew this regular email series with a summary of some interesting scholarly journal pieces of the last six months.
Here’re some light reading to get you going hmmmm…..we don’t want anyone pulling a mental hamstring this early in the season.
ATMS & GOTV
The nation of Portugal experimented with ways to increase voter turnout in their 2017 elections and used a three day window to run messages on ATM machines urging people to do their civic duty and go vote. It seems to have had a modest impact. Click here to read the report.
WHO ANSWERS THE PHONE?
A study published in Science Direct looked at phonebanks in California in 2016 and found voters with cell phones are much more likely to answer than those with land lines and that, regardless of who answered, people who come to the phone are about six to seven percent more likely to vote than those who do not.
DEMOCRATIC CAMPAIGNS AND VOTER SUPPRESSION LAWS
A piece in the Election Law Journal from last fall looks at Voter ID laws and other GOP sponsored efforts to reduce voter turnout and concludes that three recent Democratic Presidential Campaigns have had enough resources to essentially offset the GOP intended consequences of base voter drop off. It does not address mitigation in midterm or local election years.
