RALEIGH, N.C. — The foot soldiers in the battle for control of the Senate come well armed. With data-infused smartphones and tablets in hand, they have an unprecedented amount of information about the potential voters they are trying to persuade and more money than ever in a midterm election to do it.
This fusion of old-school door knocking and an overlay of data analytics has been changing elections for at least three cycles, but each advance builds on its predecessor with voters largely unaware why the canvassers know so much about them.
So now, even before Emma Benson, a field director for the conservative political organization Americans for Prosperity, knocks on a door, she has more than 700 data points about the person behind it, like magazine subscriptions, car ownership (make, model, year), propensity for voting, and likes and dislikes mined from Facebook and Twitter, from rock bands to baseball teams. All fodder for her pitch for voters to throw out Senator Kay Hagan, a Democrat.
Midterm Elections 2014
The latest news, analysis and election results for the 2014 midterm campaign.
With the political tide against them, Democrats’ last chance to hold their Senate majority comes down to a vigorous get-out-the-vote effort. But the fight has changed. Republicans, outflanked by a superior Democratic turnout operation in the past two presidential elections, have been spending tens of millions of dollars to improve data collection to achieve a rough parity.
“The left is still ahead on the ground — they just have more resources,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, referring more to turnout muscle than to money. Yet the steeper climb is for Democrats, whose support among young, female and minority voters historically drops off in midterm elections. President Obama’s approval ratings are hovering near all-time lows, and Republicans have successfully persuaded their core supporters that the election is a referendum on him.
In few states has the ground game been as intense as in North Carolina, where Ms. Hagan is locked in a close race with Thom Tillis, a Republican. Maria Palmer, a Chapel Hill town councilwoman working a phone bank for Ms. Hagan, understands why, from her outreach to Hispanic voters. “Many of them were not planning on voting,” said Ms. Palmer, who is from Peru. “They’re angry there has been no immigration reform. They’re angry with a lot of things.”
Some of the grass-roots campaign efforts have an underground dimension. Mysterious fliers with a grainy image of a lynching have appeared in black neighborhoods, warning voters that if Ms. Hagan loses, Mr. Obama will be impeached. A conservative group is running online ads to draw young voters away from Ms. Hagan and to the Libertarian candidate, Sean Haugh; the ads say, “Get Haugh, get high,” promoting his position to legalize marijuana.
And if voters are confused about who exactly is trying to get them to the polls, there is good reason. Americans for Prosperity on the right and Planned Parenthood, labor-backed Working America and the League of Conservation Voters, among others, on the left are augmenting the robust efforts by the campaigns and the parties themselves.
Americans for Prosperity, financed by the billionaire brothers David H. and Charles G. Koch, is the most significant player on the Republican side, providing far more clout than either Mr. Tillis or the Republican Party.
“As far as large-scale, smart operations, nobody on our side compares,” said Donald Bryson, Americans for Prosperity’s North Carolina director.
For all the labor and money spent on turnout, dividends often pay out in the margins, affecting only a few percentage points, but can swing a close election.
On Wednesday, Seth Noble went door to door on Penny Lane in Cary with a brief soft sell. “Would you take a two-question survey? Just two questions?” Mr. Noble, 24, a North Carolina State University senior working for the North Carolina Republican Party, asked potential voters. Ms. Hagan or Mr. Tillis? Voting early or on Nov. 4?
The night before in Chapel Hill, Pat Wellington, a Hagan volunteer, worked her way through an online call sheet at a campaign phone bank. “I really do think the best thing to do is vote early, because if you wait until Election Day, I’m afraid it’s going to be very busy,” she told a likely Hagan voter, before reminding him of his neighborhood early voting location.
Workers like Ms. Wellington and Mr. Noble are, in the end, critical to any ground campaign, no matter how sophisticated data collection and targeting models are, said Sasha Issenberg, author of “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns.”
“The great irony of the modern ground game is it’s this meeting of incredibly modern analytics and data married to very old-fashioned delivery devices,” he said. “It’s people knocking on doors; it’s people making phone calls out of phone banks; but the calculations that are determining which door and which phone are different.”
Democratic strategists concede they have to do it better than Republicans, given the anger at the president.
“There’s a lot more fluidity to the Democratic voting base than the Republican one,” said Mitch Stewart, who ran turnout operations for Mr. Obama’s campaigns.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ramped up its commitment, creating the “Bannock Street project," a multimillion dollar, data-driven effort to persuade, register and turn out voters.
“The easiest way to look at it is our strategy to winning is expanding the voting universe,” said Preston Elliott, Hagan’s campaign manager, in an interview in his Greensboro office. “It’s a little more machineish than just catching a wave and riding momentum.”
Republicans say they are catching up. In Raleigh, campaign workers and volunteers showed off a new smartphone app that helps canvassers target their door knocks. But Republican officials refused to reveal volunteer numbers, paid staff totals, field office locations or a tabulation of voter contacts. Nor would they allow reporters to recount the phone-bank pitch, “the secret sauce,” as they called it.
Democratic groups are also using smartphone technology to make canvassing more efficient. On a Monday night in Durham, Ekundayo Akinloye, a field manager for Working America, the community arm of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., walked in an upscale neighborhood. An iPhone app helped her choose which doors to knock, with a goal of 20 to 30 an hour, and as well as a dozen “IDs” — a voter’s key issue and which candidate he or she is likely to support.
When one voter cited her top concern as “women’s rights, women’s rights, women’s rights,” Ms. Akinloye immediately put the information into her phone, and it was sent to headquarters to refine targeting.
The Hagan campaign said that through its coordinated effort, Forward North Carolina, it has more than 40 offices throughout the state, a paid staff of more than 100 and roughly 10,000 volunteers knocking on doors. By constantly refining its universe of potential voters with real-time data, Mr. Elliott said, the Hagan team has also been able to identify “some folks who looked like Republicans, but when we modeled them some more, we saw they were a little more movable.”
Americans for Prosperity, in contrast, has 47 paid staff members in the state, up from nine in 2012, said Mr. Bryson, the group’s state director.
Planned Parenthood, while it is not allowed to coordinate directly with the Hagan campaign, is also aiding the effort here through its political arm, Planned Parenthood Votes.
As part of its “catch-and-release” program, it is calling voters and recording them talking about why voting is important. Building on research that shows holding voters accountable for their own promises can increase the likelihood a voter will show up to the polls, Planned Parenthood Votes is planning to call the voters back on Election Day and the day before and play their message to them, reminding them why voting matters.
In Cary, Mr. Noble was undeterred by the occasional slammed door. Bob Hays reluctantly agreed to take his two-question survey and declared himself undecided in the Senate race.
“That one is up in the air for me right now,” he said. “Thom Tillis and Kay Hagan have really been taking some shots at each other. It’s gotten ruthless.”
Maybe, he added, Ms. Hagan “has annoyed me more.”
That seemed like an invitation to press the Republican case. Mr. Noble instead gingerly handed over a Republican door hanger and moved on.