Politicians Know Not Every Vote Matters

In the city of Los Angeles, there are 1.4 million people registered to vote for mayor on Tuesday. Yet the city clerk estimates that only 30% of registered voters will actually vote in the runoff.

Why? Well, conventional wisdom would have us believe that voter apathy is responsible for low voter turnout. But that tells only a part of the story. In many cases, it is not that people do not care enough to vote, but that they are oblivious of the election. The average Jane and Joe are too busy getting the kids to school, punching the clock, trying to make ends meet and maintaining some semblance of social order.

And often enough, that’s the way we like it.

Who are we? We are political strategists, political campaigners, elected officials and aspiring candidates. We are the people who have turned elections into a billion-dollar industry. We make a living off “voter apathy.” How? It’s easy, really. We use a nefarious little tool called targeting.

Targeting allows us to define a finite segment of voters who, based on their past voting habits, are considered to be the most likely to vote for our candidate or ballot measure. Once a target is selected, we employ the latest in communication and data manipulation technologies to pummel those voters with persuasive pitches at the door, in the mail, on television and over the phone. And frankly, those are the only voters we really care about.

Have you ever noticed during an election that you get political mail that is different from that sent to your spouse? Or that a campaign worker will knock on your door to pitch a candidate but not your neighbor’s door? These are examples of how targeting works.

The people who have a consistent, if not reliable, voting habit are what are referred to in the political industry as “high-propensity voters.” By and large, they are older, long-standing homeowners, educated, more non-ethnic than ethnic, and in Los Angeles city, registered Democrats. These are the people who have been courted by the candidates for months. These are the people who know that election day is Tuesday, May 17.

But targeting allows us to carve out smaller, niche groups of voters. A pro-choice candidate, for instance, might target his direct mail to Democratic women over 50. An anti-abortion candidate might have volunteers phoning the homes of elderly Republicans. Democratic candidates might run ads on African American radio stations, because black voters are loyal supporters of the party.

For political operatives working with limited resources in a city with over a million registered households, the benefits of targeting are obvious. But for people who favor a democratic political process, those benefits translate into the ugly political reality that not every vote matters.