The Ground Game in the 2012 Presidential Election. (2nd April 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Masket, Seth; Sides, John; Vavreck, Lynn
• Is Part Of: Political communication. Volume 33:Number 2(2016)
• Page Start: 169
• Page End: 187
• Publication Date: 2016-04-02
• Subjects: campaign -- election -- field organization -- ground game; Communication -- Political aspects -- Periodicals; Communication in politics -- Periodicals; 306.205
• DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2015.1029657
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1058-4609

Abstract

Abstract : Relatively little research has examined the effects of campaign-led field activity in a competitive election. In this article, we leverage a unique data set containing the location of every Barack Obama and Mitt Romney field office and county-level data on the presidential vote to understand how communication with voters in the field may have affected the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. We find that the presence of Obama field offices was associated with greater Obama vote share at the county level, although we cannot detect a similar relationship for Romney field offices. We conduct additional robustness tests to address the potential limitations of these observational data. Ultimately, we conclude that even if Obama's field organization out-performed Romney's, the aggregate impact of Obama's field organization was not large enough to determine the outcome of the 2012 presidential election.