The primary elections are down to the last two weeks. Early voting starts on Saturday, June 14. For the candidates and their teams it’s all hands-on deck for the final push.
TV ads, mailers, door-to-door canvassing, and phoning will be non-stop. At this stage the candidates will be hunting for votes where they see their best opportunities. Those opportunities need to be targeted.
My first experiences in campaigns a long time ago was in helping to identify the targets. The manager of those campaigns, a successful businessman, dubbed the efforts “a marketing approach to politics.” That meant reviewing voter registration and past election results on an election district basis to zone in on the best prospects. The process was very rudimentary – there was no internet to extract data. It meant pouring over oversized canvass books from previous elections…