No Republicans, more GOTV won't help you that much
by David Atkins
The consensus among the conservative chattering class appears to be that they wasted their money on Karl Rove and their SuperPACs, and that their consultant class did a terrible job and is screwing them over.
All of this is true, of course, and reminiscent of conversations that progressives were having in 2000 and 2004. Both sides have a consultant problem to a certain degree, but the conservative movement has even more of these flim-flam operations and more big donors to bilk.
Still, the biggest lesson Republicans learned this cycle was that they need to spend less money on TV and mail, and more on direct voter contact. See, for instance, this from one of the Breitbart flacks:
To be sure, Obama and the Democrats also spent a lot on broadcast TV, but they also committed enormous resources in direct voter contact and turning out the vote. The Republicans were several orders of magnitude less sophisticated on this front. Its a big reason why the GOP was able to spend billions on this election and win fewer votes than McCain won in 2008.
Then there's Rush Limbaugh:
It's a huge error if [Republicans] think that demography did them in. They didn't get their base out.
That's not even necessarily true. We'll know more when all the votes are tallied.
Regardless, the Republicans' problem here is that Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) efforts are much more useful to Democrats than to Republicans. Why?
Because, simply put, there are many more progressive voters in this country than conservative ones, and conservative voters are much more reliable. If we could guarantee 100% turnout, Republicans would never win another national election.
As effective as the Obama ground game was, Democrats still have a great deal of room to grow our vote among the young and the economically disadvantaged who traditionally vote much less frequently. Republican voters are a smaller (and shrinking) share of the electorate and effectively turn themselves out to vote. Also, as Digby has noted here in the past, most of the conservative "cusp" voters are social conservatives whom the evangelical and hardcore Catholic churches are already working hard to turn out. Ralph Reed didn't just go away.
Then there's the fact that money just isn't as good at buying a ground game as it is at buying TV. A good ground game is much less effective if the people working the ground don't really believe in the cause. Paid precinct walkers are notoriously unreliable and constantly fake data if their hearts and souls aren't in the game.
So Republicans can transfer some of their money into GOTV. But it won't work that well. They'll be chasing a smaller share of an already mostly reliable electorate, with paid flunkies who won't be as effective as our passionate idealists, to target voters already being hit with more credibility by religious groups.
Talking about devoting resources to GOTV is just another example of Republicans believing that they can fix their structural, demographic and moral problems by simply throwing money at them and hoping they go away.
It won't work.
.