Campaign Strategists Target the Occasional Voter

As a chief political strategist, your job is to search for a particular kind of voter--the ones who would like to support your candidate but, for one reason or another, just don’t make it to the polls every time.

Political tacticians call them the “persuadables.” And they are a relatively small group--sometimes fewer than 1 in 50 eligible adults in a legislative district.

Not too long ago, finding these voters meant long hours of poring over thousands of paper and microfilm records at the county elections office. But today, that high-stakes search is done by a small, high-tech industry of “campaign list makers.”

For about $20, their data-packed computers will spit out the custom-selected names and addresses of 1,000 of your candidate’s most likely supporters. GOP consultant Ray McNally figures the names and addresses are barely a nickel of the 45 cents each letter costs a campaign to produce and mail.

“Mostly, a campaign is a mechanical thing,” explained Parke Skelton, a veteran Democratic consultant in Los Angeles. “It’s finding people who are not in the habit of voting and reminding them.”

Targeting occasional voters is the fundamental strategy of every campaign from the smallest school district to the mammoth efforts for governor and U.S. Senate. It is those voters who will be bombarded with mail, phone calls and visits--far more attention than campaigns give to regular voters or nonvoters.

The difference in elections for which low turnout is anticipated is that the high-tech targeting is especially comprehensive and effective.

With more than a decade of voting records on file, the computers are pretty good at identifying the voters most likely to become disinterested and drop out.

And in districts where turnout is traditionally low, fewer voters means less work, often leaving the campaign with enough money to go after even more specific targets, such as female voters or gun activists or abortion rights supporters.

Democratic consultant Phil Giarizzo said he can slice the voter pool in a state Assembly district 177 ways. “I can tell you there are 47,000 voters who live in apartments,” he said. “I can tell you where they live, in what cities or group of precincts.”

The data is culled from the registration cards that all voters fill out with their name, address, date of birth and sometimes a telephone number. Most list makers will search phone directories to locate missing numbers.

Some of the analysis requires creative information processing. Giarizzo said he targets parents by looking for households with a man and woman between 28 and 45 years old.

When consultant Jim Hayes was looking for gun owners, he directed a letter to all of the pickup truck drivers in a district.

Sometimes campaigns target ethnic groups with issues that have special relevance to their communities. In those cases, the list of registered voters is combed through computerized dictionaries of Latino, Chinese, Korean, Jewish and other surnames.

Today, Hayes, whose company is Political Data Inc., is one of the state’s preeminent list makers, the keeper of perhaps the most extensive record of California voting.

Every ballot cast in every California election for the last 11 years is recorded on his computer files.

And each election year, hundreds of California campaigns buy lists of the voters they most want to reach from Hayes’ unassuming storefront on Victory Boulevard in Burbank.

Hayes is unusual in that he sells lists to both Republicans and Democrats--sometimes even to campaigns competing in a specific election. In the five most competitive state Senate races in 1996, Hayes supplied voter lists to the Republican and Democratic candidates in four of them.

“He is trusted,” McNally said. “It comes down to the fact that these are businesspeople, not partisans.”