Once the campaign team has decided how many votes it needs to win and, therefore how many voters it will need to persuade to support their candidate, they need to determine what makes these voters different from other voters who will not support their candidate.
This process is called “targeting the voters” or simply “targeting.” Voter targeting is the concept of focusing campaign activities on those individuals who are most likely to support their candidate or party. Targeting requires campaign managers to choose, in advance, which voters to contact and devoting time and money to increasing the quality and quantity of that contact. This targeted approach applies to every facet of the campaign’s voter contact plan. To be effective, targeting must be carried out based on research and according to a strategy.
The Benefits of Targeting
Once the campaign has determined the vote goal for the constituency, the next task is to figure out where to get these votes. Because the campaign does not have enough time, people, or money to sit down and target every single voter in the constituency, targeting is used to see where these resources can be spent most efficiently. Targeting is an exercise in resource management.
Targeting is important for two reasons. Firstly, to conserve those precious campaign resources of time, money and people, and secondly, to develop a message that will best persuade those voters who still need to be convinced to vote for the campaign’s candidate.
Conserving Campaign Resources
All individuals in a country can be divided into two categories: those eligible to vote, and those ineligible to vote.
During an election, there is no reason for a campaign to waste any of a party’s limited resources (time, money, people) trying to convince those who are ineligible to vote to support their candidate.
If a campaign team develops literature for everyone in the constituency and tries to meet every voter, then it is wasting a lot of money and a lot of time on people who will not vote for their candidate no matter what the campaign says or does.
If, on the other hand, the campaign team can identify a smaller but significant group of voters who are most likely to be persuaded by its campaign message, it will then be able to concentrate its efforts on them and it will have more resources to repeat its message over and over again to those voters who will most likely be persuaded by the campaign’s message.
For example, if a campaign team calculates that it needs to communicate with 33% of the voters in order to win (this would be based on the number of votes it needs), then it would be more effective to focus on those 33% who are most likely to be persuaded. Contrast this with if they tried to target every voter in their constituency. In that case, they would be communicating with many voters who have either already decided to vote for another candidate or who are already convinced and will for sure vote for the campaign team’s candidate. This is a waste of time and resources.
This would mean that if the campaign had the resources to reach every voter in the district one time, it could instead target it efforts to reach its most likely supporters three times. This would increase the likelihood that those voters would be persuaded because they were given three times more attention by the campaign team (NDI 2009: 16).
By targeting voters before beginning a campaign and incorporating this targeting into every facet of the campaign plan, campaign teams will be able to stretch their resources much further than if they campaign without any priorities in the kinds of voters they focus on. Targeting allows a campaign to maintain control by making sure that the only voters that it is spending time and money on are those voters that are likely to vote for their candidate after hearing their message (Garecht n.d.).
Target groups
A party has to investigate where its voters are located, what its electorate is. It can subsequently identify separate target groups within that electorate, like young people, elderly people or ethnic minorities, and develop specific messages for each of them, all based on the central campaign message. There is practically no limit to the extent to which the electorate can be broken up into smaller target groups – according to age, ethnic origin or religious affiliation, town or region etc.
Developing micro messages for micro target groups can be very useful and valuable. The extent to which a campaign team can do this and to which it will be effective, however, does depend on the means it has at its disposal to reach those micro target groups. This will involve (expensive) communication channels like direct mail, and advertising in specific journals or at cultural events. For example, a campaign can reach out to students via student papers, the internet, student associations and unions, events at universities, student media, etc. (van den Boomen 2009: 17).
Persuading Target Voters
An important rule to remember is that as a party or candidate tries to reach a broader and broader audience, then that party’s or candidate’s message becomes diffused and weaker for each part of that audience. Ultimately, the party or candidate that promises everything to everybody has an empty message that no voter will find credible or compelling.
The goal of targeting, therefore, should be to focus the campaign’s effort on a range of voters that can deliver approximately the same number of votes that are needed to win the seat in a constituency. If the target audience is too narrow, it will not attract enough votes to win. If the target audience is too broad, the message will become spread too thinly, and candidates with better focus will steal parts of the message and the electorate (NDI 2009: 17).
Dividing the Electorate
The first step when a campaign team is starting to target the voters is to divide the entire electorate (all the voters) into three groups:
• The people who will vote for their party or candidate
• The people who are considering voting for you/are undecided
• The people who have already decided to vote for another party or candidate
The third group is a lost cause, as the campaign will never be able to win them over. All efforts to do so are a waste of energy. The election battle is going to focus on the group of voters who are undecided, the so-called swing voters or “floating voters”. To win them over, the campaign will need a flexible approach directed at very specific target groups, each needing a message that is adapted and addressed to them specifically.
The party’s electorate can further be divided into three groups:
- Potential voters who need to be won over because they are considering voting for another party.
- Weak voters who might not vote at all. It is not that they are considering voting for another party, they just have to be convinced to actually get up and vote at all.
- Strong voters who will vote for the party’s candidate no matter what and who can be mobilized for the campaign.
Clearly, most of a campaign’s energy and funds ought to be spent on the “potential” and the “weak” votes. It is of vital importance that weak voters are motivated to go and vote, and that potential voters are persuaded to vote for the party’s candidate. In a modern democracy parties are generally dependent on their own support base plus whatever portion of the ‘swing’ votes they can get. So (weak) supporters and potential supporters are the groups to target.
This does carry one risk, which is that a party or campaign neglects its own support base (the “strong” voters). This should be prevented at all costs. If it loses this support base the whole campaign is unlikely to be successful. The best way to prevent this is involving these grassroots supporters in the campaign to help spread its message. This means investing a lot of time in an early stage to convince them of the central message, so that they in turn can become messengers in the campaign (van den Boomen 2009: 19).
Often these different categories will be differentiated by age, geography, gender, employment and so on. By understanding which voters are most likely to support a party or candidate, can help make campaign activities more efficient. Voter targeting is important for recruiting volunteers, carrying out voter education, campaigning; and engaging in get out the vote (GOTV) activities. In each case, parties have very limited resources (time, money and people). Voter targeting helps parties maximise their resources (NDI 2004: 32).
Targeting voters
Before starting the campaign, the staff should research past elections, previous voter turnout numbers and constituency information (both geographic and demographic).
The first step is to determine how many votes are needed to win the election. Once this has been determined, the campaign team needs to figure out what makes its potential voters different from the others.
Key questions include:
• What types of voters is the campaign are looking for?
• What groups do does it need to focus on?
• Which organizations or demographics will it get to support its candidate?
• Where do those voters live?
There are two ways to determine this: geographic targeting and demographic targeting. Most campaigns will use some combination of both methods.
Geographic Targeting
Geographic targeting refers to determining which voters will vote for a candidate based on where they live. For example, if candidate “A” lives in town “A” and is well known and liked by her neighbors. Candidate “B” lives in town “B” and is well known and liked by his neighbors. Most of candidate “A’s” supporters are going to come from town “A” and she needs to go to town “C” to persuade those residents who are not already committed to a candidate in the race that she is the best candidate. She would be foolish and wasting her time to go to town “B” and try to persuade those residents and neighbors of candidate “B” to vote for her.
Calculating vote goals at the constituency level assists political parties in identifying the amount of people, time and money that should be allocated to each region. Certain geographic areas have specific voting rates and partisan splits again and again over many election cycles.
Constituencies can generally be divided into three categories: village tracts and/or wards where the majority of the people will vote for your party, village tracts and/ or wards where the majority of the people will vote for a different party, and village tracts and/or wards where it is unsure which party the majority of voters will vote for.
An analysis of the constituency’s village tracts and/or wards will show us if a campaign can win just by turning out those village tracts and/or wards that support their candidate, or if it needs to target swing or even opposition village tracts and/or wards.
The persuadability of voters is the percentage of voters in a constituency that does not vote in a consistent way. It is the difference in percentage of votes for similar candidates either in the same election or two consecutive elections. Voters either “split” their vote (vote for candidates of different orientations in the same election) or “shift” their vote (vote for candidates of different orientations over the course of two or more elections). For example, and example of vote splitting would be half of the voters in a constituency vote for Party A (a left wing party focusing on rural issues) and half vote for Party B (a left wing party focusing on rural issues) in the same election. While an example of vote shifting would be if the majority of voters vote for Party A in an election in 2015 and the majority of voters vote for Party B in 2020. (NDI 2009: 17-18).
It is generally considered that “vote splitters” and the “vote shifters” are the voters most likely to be persuaded by a campaign’s efforts. Because of this, most campaigns spend the majority of their effort posters, door to door, etc. in constituencies with high persuadability. For example, in the 2005 elections in the United Kingdom, about 100 of over 600 constituencies were marginal seats. Consequently it was on these 100 constituencies that most energy was spent. In their campaign the British Labour Party set itself the goal of sending seven personal messages to all the swing voters in crucial constituencies, by phone, text messaging, e-mail or direct mail (van den Boomen 2009: 18).
Expected turnout can be determined by the percentage of voters who turned out in the most recent similar election. It makes no sense to spend campaign resources on people who will not vote, so campaigns should spend more resources on areas with a likelihood of higher turnout.
Demographic Targeting
Demographic targeting is splitting the voting population into various groups or subsets of the population. These groups can be based on age, gender, income, level of education, occupation, ethnic background or any other distinct grouping. The point of breaking the population down like this is that similar people are likely to have similar concerns and vote for the same candidate.
Within the group of voters that could be persuaded to vote for a party or candidate, it is also possible to identify specific target groups and adapt messages specifically for them. Target groups for political parties are those parts of society with which they have a special bond (material or ideological) and whom they expect to yield the largest number of votes. An important part of targeting is that political parties have to relate to the concerns of their target groups. In order to do that, they have to decide which groups they want to target even as they create the election programme.
For example, a political party wants to fight for a better (financial) position of health care employees. This party’s target group will then consist of health care employees and people who are dependent on health care. Knowing this, the party can plan visits to health care facilities, focus its marketing on this target group, decide which media to use, and maybe also recruit people belonging to this target group as candidates (van den Boomen 2009: 19).
Targeting can also be sued to determine groups within groups. For example, working women would be a smaller subset of women. Working women with children would be an even smaller subset of working women. Working women with children are likely to have very particular concerns about childcare that, if a candidate addresses them, is likely to persuade a large percentage of them to vote for them.
While geographic targeting looks specifically at where people live and their past voting results, demographic targeting also includes a discussion of where these people who have similar demographics can be found. For example, information can reveal where working women with children gather; where they get their information or where campaign staff would need to go to communicate their message to them. Equally important in identifying which demographic groups to target is the discussion of where those groups can be found (NDI 2009: 19).
Standard Target Groups
Young people, elderly people, ethnic minorities and women are common target groups in election campaigns. For each of these a campaign team will have to develop a message (within the framework of their overall central message) that will appeal to this specific group. The team should also make lists of the media it can use for each target group and the issues that concern them most, communicate those messages to those groups using a kind of language and style that will be effective with them. Common target groups are:
Young people
If a campaign team wants to appeal to young people it is very important to show that the party takes them seriously as a group. This can be done by addressing their interests in the election message, by finding issues that appeal to them and by nominating young candidates for parliamentary seats. In this way parties can make it clear that politics, and the party especially, does take young people’s interests seriously.
Young people are a very diverse group. There are a lot of different subcultures and huge differences in educational level: university students require a different approach from young labourers. Many young people are interested in sports, music, dance, theatre and everything to do with new media. One idea could be to put together a flyer about these issues especially written for a specific group of young people. Because few young people go to political meetings of their own volition, it is important to visit places where they do meet.
Women
Women can be specifically targeted by addressing specific issues and by putting forward female politicians. In many countries there is a huge discrepancy between the number of male and female politicians, so parties can urge them to vote for a woman in order to get more women in parliament (of course this only works if a party does have female candidates.) Issues that are of concern to women include: how to combine work with childcare, safety, domestic violence, and health care. Parties should make sure that the female candidates are as prominent in their campaigns as the party’s male candidates.
Parents
Parents are concerned about issues like access to education and safety in and around schools. Campaigns could organize a meeting with parents about hazardous traffic situations on the way to school, in order to find out where the major problems lie. This meeting will then provide an opportunity to put forward the views expressed in the party programme (van den Boomen 2009: 20).
Problems With Targeting
Demographic targeting is not a precise science; definitions of demographic subsets overlap with one another. They can be made more difficult by three factors:
- A large number of candidates in each race
- The lack of accurate demographic data.
- The fact that voters might not have clear ideas about who they will or will not vote for.
Nevertheless, it is important to do this exercise and look at these issues. Many candidates in the past have lost largely due to a failure to define a target audience. Candidates, when asked to identify their audience tended to respond either with a group that is either too broad (everyone) or too narrow (a small or specific group).
The following chart provides one model of how to relate targeting to campaign efforts:
Explanations
Box A: People who are most likely to vote and are most likely to support the candidate are a campaign’s base of support. Campaigns should, first of all, plan activities to solidify this support.
Box B: Likely voters who are potential supporters are the number one target for a campaign’s persuasion efforts.
Box C: Do not spend too much time on people who aren’t likely to support you. In fact, campaign activities may make it more likely that they will go to the polls and vote for opponents.
Box D: Likely supporters who are only potential voters must be persuaded to vote. Target these people with motivational messages and a strong Election Day push to make sure as many of them as possible vote.
Box E: Potential voters and supporters are important but not crucial. Focus on them only after you’ve communicated with Boxes A and B.
Box G: Possible target for motivational efforts. But do not spend scarce campaign resources here until you’ve thoroughly covered the boxes above or if a campaign needs these votes to win. Time, money and people would be better spent above.
Boxes F, H, and I: Do not waste efforts on these voters (DFA 2006: 77).
Voter Analysis
Having determined a target audience for a campaign, the campaign team should make an effort to understand the members of this target audience. The four areas that should be analyzed are values, attitudes, issues and desire for leadership qualities.
Values
The campaign team should try to find out the core values that unite the voters in the target audience. Determining which values (such as economic opportunity, law and order or personal freedom) target groups share with the rest of the population and which values set those groups apart is very valuable for campaign staff when they are crafting a message to appeal to those target groups.
Attitudes
The campaign team should try to be aware about the voters’ attitudes about politics and about their current situation. For example, whether voters are optimistic or pessimistic about the future or whether they fear or accept change. Knowing what their attitudes about the government and other social institutions (i.e. do they trust them or not) and whether they feel better off or worse off now than in the past can help the campaign team create a message that addresses those attitudes.
Issues
Campaign teams should have a good understanding of the important issues that voters will be concerned about during an election. Generally, the campaign team should know whether voters are more concerned about economic issues, social issues, or foreign policy issues. Knowing these issues will help the campaign team to identify those issues that the campaign should focus on in order to get the attention of the voters and address their concerns.
Leadership Qualities
Campaign teams should try to identify those qualities that voters most want to see in their leaders. This could include stability and experience, on the one hand, or youth and dynamism on the other. Other issues that might be relevant could be what class a leader comes from, or the kinds of relationships that they have with the government or other powerful groups (NDI 2009:21).