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We thank Michael Young (Yale College '14) for his outstanding research assistance. We thank Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies and Center for the Study of American Politics for research support. We thank Jim St. George and Matt Gillette at NGP-VAN; Ethan Roeder and Ben Fuller at Obama For America; and Ann Fishman at the Association of State Democratic Party Chairs. For helpful comments, we thank Peter Aronow, Deborah Beim, John Bullock, Daniel Butler, Kyle Dropp, Greg Huber, and Kelly Rader. We also thank seminar participants at UCLA, Washington University-St. Louis, and University of Copenhagen programs at which this article was presented.
INTRODUCTION
Arecent change in political strategy brings two long-standing and distinct areas of political science research into tension. Consider these seemingly unrelated questions: How does a candidate advertise to general election voters? What kind of person becomes a political activist? Past research has provided fairly consistent answers to these questions. General election campaigns tend to advertise with vague and generic messages, conveyed by candidates or surrogates portrayed as the everyman. The activists who dedicate time to party organizations tend to be ideologically extreme and they are demographically distinct from typical citizens. So what happens when a campaign recruits activist volunteers to act as its surrogates, having them knock on doors of millions of swing voters? Are the individuals who are willing to volunteer for campaigns well-equipped to convey messages that appeal to general election voters? Using an original survey of campaign volunteers, we suggest that grassroots mobilization activities pursued by political campaigns are highly constrained because of the atypical citizens who are willing to participate in electioneering.
The objective of this article is to develop and test a theory of "ground campaign" tactics. Whereas most political science studies of campaign strategy in the last few decades have investigated broadcasted mass appeals, the recent shift toward direct contacting efforts, which has been documented in academic writing (Hersh 2015; Hillygus and Shields 2008) and popular writing (Issenberg 2012), necessitates that we develop and revise theoretical models to capture this aspect of U.S. elections. The number of citizens participating in campaign canvassing efforts is far from trivial. The 2012 Obama campaign reportedly recruited 2.3 million volunteers, roughly one of every hundred adults in the United...