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At .08 Acres, sco gives us a nice review of Markos Moulitsas’ Crashing the Gate and in the process asks:

Is there any way to objectively measure the performance of a consultant? Won-loss record? Dollars spent per vote? Year over year turnout increases? I don’t know what criteria you would use, but I do know that there is so much data associated with an election, and it’s available at such a discrete level (down to the individual voting machine, even) that there should be some way to quantify the performance of a campaign team, if not an individual consultant.

Meanwhile, Jon Keller wonders about political endorsements:

Perhaps a case can be made that a few unions, special-interest groups, and elected officials can actually run a phone bank, leaflet, and deliver a few votes for you come primary day. Very few.

While we’re challenging the effectiveness of campaign measures, let me add mine: I wonder how effective face-to-face grassroots campaigning is - canvassing, leafleting, sign-holding, and prosyletizing of various sorts - or at least under what condidtions such activity persuades voters.

What makes this Doubting Thomas doubt even more has been a preponderance of LaRouche pamphleteers around downtown lately. A lot of them. In fact, I’ve seen as many LaRouche people approach me as I do political canvassers during political season. (Yes, that ignores more passive campaigning like signholding, and yes I don’t live in an electorally valuable district, but bear with me here…)  Yet, their ideological pull doesn’t seem to all that great. They probably do a decent job at recruiting other prosyletizers, but for all their efforts they don’t seem to persuade that many of the rest of us.

Which makes me think:

• The persuasiveness of any prosyletizing varies according to the ideological difference between evangel and potential convert.
• The difference involves tipping points at which potential converts "turn off" and refuse to be persuaded.
• Whatever the degree of ideological distance,  attempts at persuasion are probably the least effective. People only use them because they’re mostly free, relying on volunteer labor.

Democratic or Republican activists will have an easier road to hoe than the LaRouchies by far, but for similar reasons their fetish of "hardwork" in persuading potential voters may be misfounded. Just as the value of political consultants should be lined up with their results. I feel fairly confident in saying (or is it just me being in Boston) that in 2002, Democrats had more "muscle" in getting face-to-face contact between volunteers and voters; it’s just that the voters had other ideas. All things being equal, a campaign will benefit from phone banks, canvassing and the like. But all things aren’t usually equal.

Or maybe persuasion of another matter is at stake. In another post, sco remarks

It seems to me that there are two types of thinking around political campaigns. One is the idea that all you need to do is have a ton of money to get on TV and agree with the positions of the most people in the state and they will come out to vote for you. The other is the idea that people are not naturally inclined to come to the polls, so you need a network of volunteers to make face-to-face contact and convince them to come out.

Under that idea, campaigners aren’t trying to change people’s opinion so much as they’re trying to get people who already agree to change their behavior. Even still, do we know that other means of persuasion for that aren’t better? I worry about messages that are a) ill-crafted and b) doomed by sociological difference.