GOTV

GOTV
A little tv set that you pull out on the subway so you don't miss the beginning of "House" on your way home from work?

A flat screen installed at the midway point in your Range Rover to keep the kids entertained on the trip to the dentist?

In an interesting article this week in the Washington Post, "In R.I., a Model for Voter Turnout: Employing Senate Primary Strategy May Give GOP an Edge", Jim VandeHei and Chris Cillizza show the importance of voter pull.

Do votes cost money? Are votes expensive?
Of course! From an October 2004 article by Alan B. Krueger on his Princeton website, (Krueger is the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University), we learn that:
"Two Yale political scientists, Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber, have studied turnout for years. Their findings, based on dozens of controlled experiments done as part of actual campaigns, are summarized in a slim and readable new book called ''Get Out the Vote!'' (Brookings Institution Press)..... Door-to-door canvassing, though expensive, yields the most votes. As a rule of thumb, one additional vote is cast from each 14 people contacted. That works out to somewhere between $7 and $19 a vote, depending on the pay of canvassers -- not much different from the cost of that three-pack of underwear....." The study goes on to cost out leafleting, mailings, phone calls (heavily scripted and more personalized), and negative campaigning to anti-pull votes.