8
portion of the list they registered and made calls not only encouraging participation at the
polls, but endorsing specific candidates and ballot propositions.
Thus, there were two parallel GOTV drives going on in the days before the
election. Working in part with Robert Thorman of Youth Vote and David Nickerson of
Yale University, we randomly assigned the new registrants to different lists which would
either receive a treatment of some kind – i.e., a GOTV phone call – or would not. The
details of each effort differed, of course.
EXPERIMENT #1: CAL-BERKELEY DEMOCRATS GOTV PHONE DRIVE
The Cal Dems had fewer resources for their drive than Youth Vote did. They had
fewer callers, all of whom were undergraduates who worked as volunteers
5
, and they had
no direct access to a phone bank. They got Tom Bates, their endorsed candidate for
Berkeley mayor, to donate use of his campaign headquarters from 8:00pm-10:00pm on
Sunday November 3 and Monday November 4. Given these constraints, they were only
able to get through about 500 calls. However, the calls they did make transmitted a direct
appeal to party preferences:
“Hi, my name is __________, with the Cal Dems. I’m calling to remind you to
vote for the Democrats this coming Tuesday, November 5. Here in Berkeley
6
, we urge
you to vote for Tom Bates for Mayor. For the city council, we urge you to vote for Kriss
Worthington in district 7 and Andy Katz in district 8. Also, it is important for you to
remember to support the school bond, prop. 47, and same day voter registration, prop.
52.
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Thanks, and don’t forget to vote.”
5
One exception: I made a handful of calls.
6
Local elections in California are non-partisan.
7
All statewide Democratic candidates and local Democratic legislative candidates won. Bates and
Worthington won; Katz received enough votes to make a run-off election but eventually lost. The school
bond passed; same-day registration did not.
Convention