Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout

by Donald P Green, Alan S. Gerber

The most important element in every election is getting voters to the polls-these get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts make the difference between winning and losing office. With the first three editions of Get Out the Vote, Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber broke ground by introducing a new scientific approach to the challenge of voter mobilization and profoundly transformed how campaigns operate. Get Out the Vote has become the reference text for those who manage campaigns and study voter mobilization.

In this expanded and updated edition, Green and Gerber incorporate data from a trove of recent studies that shed new light on the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of various campaign tactics, including door-to-door canvassing, e-mail, direct mail, and telephone calls. The new edition gives special attention to “relational organizing” through friend-to-friend communication and events.

Available in time for the 2020 presidential campaign, this practical guide to voter mobilization will again be a must-read for consultants, candidates, and grassroots organizations.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

239 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 27, 2019

Reviews

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Get Out the Vote, by Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber, is not only for political nerds, but, on the other hand, it’s *mostly* for political nerds, mainly people who are in the position to work to—you guessed it—get out the vote.

From this book I learned that the most effective means, by far, to encourage people to vote is to talk with people we know, face to face. According to Green and Gerber, “Relational organizing” increases voter turnout by an astonishing 13.2%. The next closest, about half as effective, is phone calls from “enthusiastic volunteers,” but a lot of that research is a little older, i.e., from a time when people actually answered the phone. Nothing else comes close: “the more personal the interaction between campaign and potential voter, the more it raises a person’s chances of voting.” Turns out, for example, that mailers, robocalls, and TV and radio ads have no effect whatsoever—except occasionally when they actually suppress the vote! Oops. Fortunately for me as a reader, my political work is based almost exclusively on relational organizing, and since I love to canvass, it’s heartening that what I like best to do in politics is also what works best.

As you might guess from the statistics above, the book focuses on carefully controlled research studies, with treatment groups and control groups, and it ranks the findings according to the reliability of the research evidence: how many studies, how large, how carefully run. Although the authors are political science professors (at Columbia and Yale), the book is straightforwardly written and accessible even to someone like me, with the most rudimentary skills at understanding statistics.

As the title indicates, the book is about getting people TO vote, not getting them to vote in any particular way. That’s because it is extremely difficult to study the effects of persuasion techniques. The book has exactly six pages about persuasion. That’s a shame, since as Green and Gerber observe, if you get a nonvoter to the polls, you change the voter margin by one vote; when you change their vote, you net two votes. Fortunately or unfortunately, persuasion techniques (to the extent it can be determined) seem to have zero impact on which candidate someone votes for; persuasion does, however, seem to have some effect on nonpartisan issue campaigns. Unfortunately for me, I live in North Carolina, which doesn’t allow statewide issue campaigns.

For what it’s worth, the GOTV studies analyzed were run by nonpartisan organizations as well as both Democratic and Republican campaigns, targeting populations sympathetic to either party (women, racial minorities, evangelical Christians—a range), or to neither. Granted, in recent years, Republicans have more of a history of suppressing than encouraging voting, but I think it’s safe to say that the research findings don’t have an ideological bias.

I would recommend this book to anyone seriously engaged with planning or carrying out a political campaign, to help you to decide where to put your financial resources—if you have any—or your energies and those of the staffers or volunteers with whom you work.

[Catherine Wicker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is useful for anyone working around campaigns and wants to understand the data behind the politics of what is happening. I have won every campaign I have been on but it is important for me to understand that yes it has data behind it.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive and accessible review of how getting out the vote works for campaigns. Although I found the examples to be enlightening, I did feel a bit over saturated with them by the end.

All in all a very well articulated book.