Voter targeting
From Mobilize the Immigrant Vote
the phase of election planning when an organization or a campaign uses demographic, geographic and historical data to identify voters to engage in order to maximize results. It determines which activities will be used with various universes to achieve desired outcome. Voter targeting helps to effectively use limited capacity and resources (time and money) an organization has and ensure the time and money invested will yield the biggest results. For example, Organization A’s goal for their movement-building electoral organizing campaign is to defeat Proposition X. Because they only have 20 volunteers, they are going to door knock to frequent voters because they know these voters are going to vote - they just need to educate them on Proposition X and get their commitment to vote no. Furthermore, they are going to target frequent Spanish-speaking voters because most of their 20 volunteers are native Spanish-speakers. The list of voters created is called the target voter list.
Movement-Building Electoral Organizing: Dictionary of Terms
- Electoral organizing, Movement-building electoral organizing, Immigrant-focused electoral campaign, Traditional electoral campaign, Work plans
- Issue advocacy, Issue, Direct-action organizing, Lobbying, Constituency target, Decision-maker target
- Media campaign, Media hits
- Voter advocacy, Voting Rights Act, Poll monitoring, Election day activities
- GOTV, Contact, GOTV target list, Phone banking, Precinct, Precinct walking, Raps or scripts, Robo calls
- Science of numbers, Voter turnout, Win number, Consistent voters, Infrequent voters, Swing voters, Expected voters, Base voters
- Evaluation, Tracking, Voter matching, Treatment and control, Exit polling
- Voter files or lists, Universe, Voter targeting, Voter modeling, Voter identification
- Voter technology, Voter Activation Network (VAN), Catalist
- Census, Naturalization, Political education, Training, Volunteer/member recruitment
- Absentee ballot, Poll
