Warning This Manual Cannot Be Directly Applied to Japanese Electoral Campaigns

For more details, please see notes.

Step Three: Targeting the Voters#

What Is Targeting?#

Once you decide how many votes you need to win and therefore how many voters you need to persuade to support your candidate, you need to determine what makes these voters different from other voters who will not support your candidate. This process is called "targeting the voters" or simply "targeting". The point of targeting is to determine which subsets of the voting population are most likely to be responsive to your candidate and focusing your campaign efforts on these groups of voters.

You will remember when you worked on "Step One: Research", you were asked to break voters down into more manageable groups. It was said then that you would use this information when you targeted particular voters. That time has come.

Why Target Voters?#

Targeting is important for two reasons. First, you want to conserve those precious campaign resources of time, money, and people, and second, you want to develop a message that will best persuade those voters you still need to convince to vote for you.

Conserving Campaign Resources#

If you develop literature for everyone in the district and try to shake the hand of every voter in the district, then you are wasting a lot of money and a lot of time on people who will not vote for you, no matter what you say or do.

If, on the other hand, you can identify a smaller but significant group of voters who will most likely be persuaded by your campaign message, you will then be able to concentrate your efforts on them, and you will have more resources to repeat your message over and over again until it seems that they have no choice but to vote for your candidate.

Suppose, for example, that you decide that you need to communicate with 33% of the voters to win. If you could identify exactly which voters were most likely to deliver that 33%, then your campaign could reach them with one-third of the resources that you would need for an untargeted campaign. Put another way, if your campaign had the resources to reach every voter in the district one time, you could instead target your efforts to reach your most likely supporters three times.

Candidates that do not take the time to target their voters have lost the right to complain about scarce campaign resources.

Persuading Target Voters#

In the next section, a good bit of time will be spent discussing your campaign message. Before that, however, you need to determine who the best audience for that message will be. This will help you determine what you can say that is likely to persuade them.

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 your campaign effort on a range of voters that can deliver approximately the same number of votes that you set as your campaign goal in Step Two. If your target audience is too narrow, you will not attract enough votes to win. If your target audience is too broad, your message will become diffused, and candidates with better focus will steal parts of the message - and the electorate - from you.

Generally speaking, there are three types of voters: your supporters, your opponents' supporters, and those voters in the middle who have yet to make up their minds. Your supporters are those who have already decided to vote for you. Your opponents' supporters are those who have already decided to vote for your opponents. Those voters in the middle who have not yet decided and still need to be persuaded to vote for one or the other candidates are called persuadable voters. It is some portion of these persuadable voters whom you want to target and with whom you want to communicate your message. Remember that a political campaign is a communication process.

How to Target Voters#

Once you have determined that you need to persuade only about half of the electorate or less to vote for your candidate, you need to figure out what makes your potential voters different from the others. 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 is simply determining who will vote for your candidate based on where they live. For example, let's say that 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.

This is a very simple example, though there are elections where the targeting is that easy. More often, the campaign will have to look at past elections to determine past performance, the persuadability of the voters, and the expected turnout. This can best be done where data can be obtained for past elections down to the precinct level.

Past performance is the percentage of votes that your candidate, your party, or a similar candidate received in past elections. Precincts with high performance contain your most likely supporters. In theory, a campaign should not spend resources on very high-performance precincts; after all, it makes little sense to try to persuade voters who will already vote for you. However, most candidates should spend some resources in areas with a history of voting for democratic candidates and parties in order to solidify their base of support before reaching out to other potential supporters.

The persuadability of voters is the percentage of voters in a precinct that do 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).

In a U.S context, "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 precincts with high persuadability. This strategy makes sense.

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 your campaign should spend more resources on precincts with a history of higher turnout.

Appendix C provides a more detailed look at the methodology used for measuring a precinct's "turnout", "performance", and "persuadability". You will need to determine which formulas make the most sense in the context of your region or election. Once you have decided upon a formula, you can do the math or enter the precinct-level voting data into a computer spreadsheet and determine for each precinct a level of turnout, performance, and persuadability.

You will then be able to rank your district's precincts as in the following example:

Precinct Number

Total Votes

Turnout

Democratic Performance (Average of similar parties)

Persuadability (Percentage that sometimes votes democratic)

35

976

62.5%

43.4%

11.2%

107

1563

52.7%

41.2%

16.7%

14

1132

53.4%

35.7%

26.7%

77

875

55.7%

28.3%

12.7%

93

1343

27.2%

26.5%

29.5%

178

734

60.4%

23.1%

17.3%

Your campaign should plan different tactics for different types of precincts. In this example, the plan may call for a lot of posters or a series of rallies in precincts like 35 and 107 in order to solidify a very high democratic base. On the other hand, the candidate may want to personally go door to door in precincts like 14 with a high level of "persuadability". Note that while precinct 93 also has a very high level of "persuadability", past turnout indicates that few people living in that precinct will actually vote and the candidate should not waste their time with inactive voters.

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.

We can then mix groups into cross-sets or break them down further into subsets of subsets. For example, breaking the population down by gender may give you roughly 50% of the population for men and for women (do not assume this is always the case). 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 your candidate addresses, is liable to persuade a large percentage of them to vote for you.

The trick here is for the group not to be so small as to be insignificant. Left-handed concert violin players have specific concerns as well (they are constantly jostled by right-handed concert violin players), but winning both of their votes will not move you much closer toward victory.

Our Demographic Groups#

Often when determining which groups will be persuaded to vote for a candidate, you should look for groups to which the candidate belongs. Say the candidate is a 38-year-old college-educated small businessman, married with a son and a daughter in school, living in the largest city in the district. His target groups are going to be young people between the ages of 25 and 40, small business people, and parents with school-age children. He is less likely to appeal to groups of the voting population to which he does not belong. He will have less appeal to pensioners, workers with less education, and farmers from the rural part of the district. If there are enough votes in his target groups to win and he is the best candidate to appeal to these voters, then he need only to communicate a persuadable message to this group throughout the campaign to win.

There are two things that can make this targeting less likely to work. First, the demographic groups he chooses are too small. Second, there are other candidates with similar backgrounds who are appealing to the same group. In both cases, if another candidate is also appealing to this same group or it is not a large enough part of the population to provide the margin of victory, then the campaign needs to look to collateral groups or those groups nearest in interests for further support. In the above example he may want to expand his message to include people with a higher education (usually professionals). He would want to broaden his message to appeal to teachers and doctors, which may work nicely with his message to parents with school age children.

The point of all of this is to do the math and figure out how many voters in a particular group can be expected to vote for the candidate if they hear a message that addresses their concerns. You shouldn't expect to win 100% of the vote of any population but if, with a little effort, you can expect to receive 6 or 7 out of every 10 votes caste, than this is a group of voters with whom you should be in touch.

You will not be able to come up with very precise numbers for these groups (politics, after all, is an art, not a science). However, going through this exercise and determining numbers for your subsets and cross-sets will help you determine whether your targeting strategy is realistic or not.

Their Demographic Groups#

An important part of demographic targeting is determining which demographic groups will not be part of your targeted audience. During your strategic planning session you should, for example, state explicitly "we will not target government workers" or "we will not target young entrepreneurs". This exercise will help you avoid the trap of defining too wide a targeted audience.

It is often easy to determine which demographic groups you are willing to give to your opponents once you have decided which groups are yours. They are the opposite of the groups that you consider to be your best target groups. For example, older male pensioners are going to have the least in common with young working mothers, so if you have targeted one group, you will most likely give the other group to your opponents. It would be very difficult to develop a message that will persuade both groups that you have their interests at heart.

Problems with Targeting#

Again, demographic targeting is not a precise science; even in the best of circumstances, definitions of demographic subsets are fuzzy and overlap with one another. They can be made more difficult by three factors:

  1. A large number of candidates in each race, which forces candidates to consider groups from which they will receive much less than half the vote.

  2. The lack of available, accurate demographic data.

  3. The undeveloped self-identification of individuals as having specific interests based on their demographic characteristics.

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 1) by naming every demographic subset imaginable, or 2) by saying, for example, "I represent the intelligentsia". In the first instance, they had no target audience because their target audience was everybody. In the second, their target audience was simply too small to bring them victory (the intelligentsia is a relatively minor part of the voting population and is, moreover, claimed by virtually every democratically oriented party).

Bringing it All Together#

The following chart provides one model of how to relate targeting to your campaign efforts:

Voter Status

Likely Supporter

Potential Supporter

Unlikely to Support

Likely Voter

A
Solidify Support Base

B
Primary focus for message

C
Possible Communication (low priority)

Potential Voter

D
Focus on Motivating to Vote

E
Secondary focus for persuasion

F
No Program

Non-Voter

G
Possible motivation effort (last priority)

H
No Program

I
No Program

Explanations:

  • Box A: People who are most likely to vote and are most likely to support you are your base of support. You should first of all plan activities to solidify this support.

  • Box B: Likely voters who are potential supporters are your number one target for your persuasion efforts. Spare no effort on these voters.

  • Box C: Do not spend too much time on people who aren't likely to support you. In fact your activities may make it more likely that they will go to the polls and vote for your 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 you need these votes to win. Your time, money, and people would be better spent above.

  • Boxes F, H, and I: Do not waste efforts on these voters.

Voter Analysis#

Having determined a target audience for your campaign, you should make an effort to understand the members of this target audience thoroughly. The four areas you should analyze are values, attitudes, issues, and desire for leadership qualities.

Values#

What are the core values that unite the voters in your target audience? For example, which do they value more: Social protection or economic opportunity? Societal order or personal freedom? Stability or reform? Peace or military security? What values do they share with the rest of the population? What values set them apart from the rest of the population?

Attitudes#

Are voters optimistic or pessimistic about the future? Are they trustful or mistrustful of government and other social institutions? Do they feel better off or worse off now than in the past? Do they want change or stability?

Issues#

What are the important issues that will make voters sit up and take notice of this election? Generally, you should know whether voters are more concerned about economic issues, social issues, or foreign policy issues. Examples of more specific questions to ask might include the following: Is controlling crime more important or less important than it was in the past? Will your position on business investment be important in this election, or will no one care?

Leadership Qualities#

What qualities do voters most want to see in their leaders? Are they looking for stable, experienced leadership, or do they want someone young and dynamic who will shake up the establishment? Would they prefer leaders from the intelligentsia, or do they want leaders who can relate to the concerns of the common man?

Sociological Research#

Whenever possible, your voter targeting and analysis should be tested through solid sociological research. Campaigns that are not based on solid research are like drivers at night without headlights. They often do not see what is right in front of them until it is too late.

Most politicians everywhere believe that they have a natural gift for understanding "the people". They believe that they know without doing research what issues to discuss, what values to invoke, and what concerns to address in order to attract the interest of their voters. They are often surprised either by the results of a political poll or by the results on Election Day.

Most political activists use two types of sociological research to help them plan their campaign strategies: focus groups and political polling. Focus groups are designed to gain unscientific, qualitative knowledge about the values, attitudes, and concerns of voters, while political polling is used to gain scientific, quantitative knowledge. The theory and methodology of sociological research is beyond the scope of this document, however, there are some materials on polling included in Appendix D.

Worksheet 3: Geographic Targeting#

Answer the following questions to determine the geographic targeting for your campaign:

  1. Where do all the candidates live? Are there any distinct geographic areas of support for any particular candidate?

  2. What are the past performances of similar candidates in each precinct of the district?

  3. What is the level of persuadability of voters in each precinct of the district?

  4. What is the expected turnout of each precinct of the district?

Worksheet 4: Demographic Targeting#

Answer the following questions to determine the demographic targeting for your campaign:

  1. What are the demographic profiles (age, gender, profession, education, etc.) of all the viable candidates, including your candidate?

  2. What demographic groups should support your candidate?

  3. Are there enough votes within these groups to win the election?

  4. Are there other candidates appealing to the same demographic groups?

  5. What demographic groups will you concede to your opponents?

  6. What collateral groups might you appeal to if need be?

Worksheet 5: Bringing Together All the Targeting#

Answer the following questions and incorporate the answers into your written campaign plan:

  1. List all the likely supporters, both geographically and demographically.

  2. List all the potential supporters, both geographically and demographically.

  3. List all the unlikely supporters that you will concede to your opponents.

  4. What are the values of both likely and potential supporters? Do they differ in any significant way?

  5. What are their attitudes?

  6. What issues concern these voters?

  7. What leadership qualities are they looking for?

  8. Which of the answers to questions 4 through 7 are likely to be the most important factors influencing your target voters in this election?