Direct Voter Contact (Still) the Future for Campaigns

In 64 B.C., Roman Statesman Quintus Cicero laid out a pathway to a successful election campaign, claiming, “the most important part of your campaign is to bring hope to people and a feeling of goodwill toward you.”

While politicians have come and gone, inventions have changed the way elections are administered, and political parties and ideologies have waxed and waned across generational gaps, the pillar of hope remains central to campaigning. As behavioral scientists have consistently proven the value of face-to-face communication, campaigns continue to invest in massive field operations, including the Biden 2020 organizing effort which saw volunteers making upwards of 50,000,000 voter contacts per weekend during the final stages of the campaign, to bring hope to voters.

In Maine, where I organized in 2018 for the Maine Democratic Party in Cumberland and Androscoggin counties, we followed the philosophy (under the leadership of Lisa Roberts) of ‘meeting people where they were at’ and building a campaign that focused on ‘Mainers talking to Mainers.’

Essentially, let’s focus on engaging our neighbors to build robust and inclusive volunteer teams to have conversations with voters one-on-one, at their doors, about the issues they care about. And it worked.

In 2020, the pandemic forced campaigns to adapt, moving to remote volunteer offices on Zoom and centering phone and text conversations with voters.

New developments in artificial intelligence are transforming campaigns, and the way humans interact.

While we can’t be certain of how development of artificial intelligence will continue to play out, a few near-certainties of coming changes to communication include:

• Humans are and will continue to develop deeply emotional conversations and connections with machines

• Virtual reality meetings are in development and here to stay

• The ability to accurately generate video communications of anyone synthetically saying anything, like these scammers have done with loved ones of their targets

So, what is the implication for political campaigns? Phone calls, which people answer at a far lower rate than they used to, are likely to be less reliable, as robo-dials become increasingly prevalent. Online communications and texts, too, are ripe for personalized chatbots, removing certainty that one is interacting with a human.

Face-to-face communication, however, — canvassing a neighborhood and meeting a voter in-person — is likely to gain relevant importance and effectiveness. 

In some time, maybe technology developments will undercut our trust with in-person communication, too, but for 2,000 years Cicero’s campaign advice has stayed valuable, with evidence suggesting that in-person voter contact stays a key tenet of modern campaigns.

At Campaign Brain, we’re working on democratizing artificial intelligence for progressive political campaigns.
To learn more about how artificial intelligence can help your campaign, visit us at campaignbrain.ai.