Recent presidential campaigns increasingly recruit party activists for direct voter contact, raising strategic questions about their suitability as intermediaries. Analyzing survey data from the 2012 Obama campaign reveals that field agents interacting with swing voters were demographically unrepresentative and held ideologically extreme views. They also prioritized non-standard issues while misunderstanding voters' key concerns.
Findings:
* Field agents lacked demographic diversity among swing voters.
* Agents often shared the most extreme partisan ideologies of their target groups.
* Issues raised by agents were typically not representative or central to voter priorities.
These results suggest that campaigns may struggle to align motivated volunteers with effective message delivery, raising doubts about whether typical surrogates can serve as productive strategic intermediaries in general elections. The study underscores the challenges in resolving principal-agent problems within high-stakes political contexts.
| Party Activists As Campaign Advertisers: The Ground Campaign As a Principal-Agent Problem was authored by Ryan Enos and Eitan Hersh. It was published by Cambridge in APSR in 2015. |
