The Voter File Can Tell You Who to Reach, Not What They’re Thinking

Voter files contain an incredible depth of voter data and could, in theory, unlock highly targeted initiatives for political campaigns. 

In reality, that data is rarely used to its full potential. When broadcasting messages, it’s too time-consuming and nuanced to craft unique messaging for every subsection of the file. More often than not, campaigns settle on simple metrics like party affiliation, voting history and whether someone has a cell phone.

Even when campaigns use additional demographic information, they’re not learning much more than what every other user of the file already knows. While that information can help campaigns determine which voters to prioritize, it doesn’t necessarily help them understand how to engage those voters. Information on someone’s current top issue, how they discuss those issues or what motivates them to vote is invaluable to campaigns, but isn’t a sortable field in the voter file.

Many things can cause voters’ interests or priorities to shift throughout a campaign. It can be economic trends that are slightly more predictable, local politics that affect their way of life or an emotional social media video driven to them by a highly personalized algorithm. At the end of the day, voters are complex and nuanced, and rarely fit into clean buckets. Two voters with similar demographic profiles or voting histories may have entirely different concerns influencing their decisions.

That is why conversation is so important. Having lines of communication where voters can share exactly what is driving them the most, and then having the ability to translate that massive amount of data into an actionable campaign strategy, is where true progress happens. Every campaign knows it has a shot at learning what moves a voter in a one-on-one chat, but scale creates problems quickly for those approaches.

Conversational polling offers one way to address that challenge. Rather than relying solely on predetermined survey questions and fixed responses, it combines structured questions with open-ended follow-up conversations that allow voters to explain their priorities in their own words. Campaigns can then identify recurring themes across those responses, including issues or concerns they may not have thought to ask about in the first place.

In one particular campaign, the team knew it needed to target a specific community within the state but had notoriously failed at reaching them. They knew they should be ideologically aligned, but it simply wasn’t clicking, and reply rates were the worst of the campaign.

Rather than continuing to test different messages, the campaign stopped A/B testing issues and started A/B testing questions. What opening question would cause people to open up and actually talk to the campaign? After figuring that part out, they scaled the question, not the answer.

From there, the campaign was able to get feedback and start understanding what language that group responded to and what problems they were facing. That type of message development typically takes weeks or requires very expensive polling, both things this campaign didn’t have. 

But by having its own communication line directly to voters, that’s where understanding started.

The value of gathering this feedback ultimately depends on how campaigns use it. You can’t base decisions on individual opinions. Once large groups of voters, completely independent of each other, are repeating issues in conversation consistently, that’s when a campaign’s messaging needs to shift.

When you know what people care about and how to say it, that needs to dominate messaging. The implications should be all-encompassing, informing the entire outreach program, from texts to mail to conversations at the door. Those insights shouldn’t be limited to the channel where the conversations originally took place.

Voter sentiment is constantly evolving and shifting, and campaigns need to be prepared to adapt quickly, sometimes as soon as morning to afternoon. A campaign that continues relying on messaging developed weeks earlier risks missing what voters are telling them in the present.

Traditional voter files still serve an important purpose in helping campaigns identify who they should reach. But knowing who to contact is different from understanding what matters to them, particularly when those priorities can and will change throughout an election cycle. The voter file provides a starting point, but the conversations that follow help campaigns determine how to respond.

Tom Carroll is co-founder and CEO of Convos, a political technology company that helps campaigns manage voter conversations.