Massive turnout on the Dem side
Matt Stoller has a fascinating article in the Nation about how the massive turnout in this Democratic primary season is aided by new organizing techniques and technologies.
Adam Mordecai, a Dean staffer who helped run the Perfect Storm [Dean's 2004 effort to blanket Iowa with volunteer door knockers], described the problem as follows: “The one major issue that really foiled the perfect storm…was the completely dysfunctional voter-file system. The company we contracted the voter file to was way out of their league. Their system would crash perpetually, field organizers would be lucky if they could ever access the system to download lists and said lists were usually way out-of-date or incorrect because no one could get access to the system to update them. Iowans would get repeated calls from different volunteers within the same hour. It was a disaster. It alienated a lot of Iowans who were simply tired of hearing from Deaniacs over and over again.”
The voter file in political campaigns is really just CRM, if used correctly:
The new crop of campaign software tools sends data back instantly to a centralized database, so effort isn’t wasted on voters who have moved or died. And campaign knowledge is accretive, with voting history, political identification and contact history retained every cycle.
Doesn’t this sound like CRM to you? It’s really great to see Democratic campaigns getting CRM and understanding that to get that right they have to tackle the problem of having many, many volunteers utilizing that CRM in a coherent way. It sure looks like campaigns are doing that very well this cycle.
It doesn’t hurt Democratic turnout to have Mr. 27% still in the White House, but if you don’t actually get people out to the polls, that doesn’t matter. CRM can help in building the relationship and getting people’s support, just like it can in so many other arenas.
