Thinking Arizona
Facts to Inform the Public Discourse
Unaffiliated Voters Swing Tide For One Congressman
August 18, 2011
Arizonans Gabrielle Giffords and Paul Gosar don’t see eye to eye – she as a Blue Dog Democrat, he as a Tea Party Republican – but both were able to convince voters in skeptical districts that they should represent them in the U.S. Congress.
Registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 153,000 to 134,000 in far-flung District 1, which loops around from Flagstaff through eastern Arizona to Casa Grande. Even so, Republican Gosar won.
Registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 159,000 to 140,000 in District 8 in southeastern Arizona. Even so, Democrat Giffords won.
Giffords and Gosar were alike in being the only two congressional candidates in the state who managed to triumph despite their disadvantages in voter registration.
With fewer voters from their respective parties to turn to, the 100,000+ unaffiliated voters in each of their districts had to have factored into the outcomes. For instance, either 98.5 percent of all registered Democrats in District 8 turned out to provide Giffords with her winning total of 137,000 votes, or she was able to pull in some combination of unaffiliateds and wayward Republicans.
Two Races, Two Views
Nonetheless, their campaign managers – JP Twist for Gosar, and Rodd McLeod for Giffords – offered contrasting views of how the unaffiliateds impacted the respective races.
JP Twist said of the effort he directed for Gosar in District 1: “We still needed to energize the base, so independents weren’t the only thing we were focused on. But reaching out to independents is paramount. You can’t win elections without them.”
He went on to declare: “Paul Gosar would not be in Congress without the independent voters.”
By comparison, Rodd McLeod is less enthusiastic about their effect on the campaign he directed for Giffords in District 8. To him, they were one of many moving parts that needed attending in the right strategic balance.
“It’s not just the run that scored in the bottom of the 10th. It’s everything that happened in the game up to that point,” said McLeod, a political consultant who left Terry Goddard’s gubernatorial campaign to take over Giffords’ push for re-election. “A lot of things go into making a complex campaign work.”
Appealing to independents was one of those, but McLeod raised several qualifiers. He mentioned how John Kerry and President Obama took heat for turning too much to the center in the presidential races of 2004 and 2008. And he wasn’t keen on overspending on a group that turns out in lower numbers at the polls.
Twist, who since the fall has become chief of staff for the mayor of Scottsdale, speaks animatedly about “the 4 of 4’s, the 3 of 4’s . . . the 1 of 4’s, the oh of 4’s.” The “4 of 4′s” refers to voters who voted in all of the last four elections, and so on down the line to the “oh of 4′s” who didn’t vote at all.
Deciding Who Gets Attention
The designations provided the Gosar campaign with a blueprint for divvying up time and money. Twist said a “4 of 4” Republican didn’t hear much from the GOP, because more frequent contact would have wasted precious resources on someone who was already in the fold. Instead more attention was lavished on a “4 of 4″ independent who was deemed to be persuadable.
Voting history – not how someone voted, but how often – is just one of the many variables that campaigns are plugging into multi-dimensional computer databases to augment the sparse information contained in the voter rolls. In varying combinations, the political parties also factor in polling results and even the purchasing patterns of voters.
Even if voters didn’t register “R” or “D,” the campaigns develop a pretty good idea of which ones to target and with what messages.
So, for instance, the promotional material intended for avowed Republicans in conservative Yavapai County might have touted Gosar as a social conservative who supported the right to bear arms and opposed abortion. That same message, Twist said, might not resonate as well with unaffiliated voters in Flagstaff. So instead the promos directed at that group portrayed Gosar as a fiscal conservative who from his days as a small businessman knew how to balance a budget.
The mix worked. By energizing his core support in some areas while playing to the interests of unaffiliateds elsewhere, he won over the district.
– Richard Gilman
