Has anyone here changed their mind after receiving a call from a campaign phone bank? Alternately, has anyone here who has worked the phone banks had a positive experience, feeling like they were able to connect with and influence one of the people they called?
I've received a very large number of political phone calls this year, to the point where they became absurd and depressing, a continual interruption. I initially had positive opinions of one particular local candidate, but that candidate ended up losing my vote after his volunteers called every night to ask for our support, sometimes multiple times per night.
In another bizarre instance, my partner went to phonebank for a different candidate. While my partner was phonebanking, another person at that candidate's same phonebank actually called to ask my partner to come phonebank. Afterwards, we received frequent calls from representatives of that phone bank asking for our support.
My reaction to these calls -- which I never cared much about in prior years -- has became extremely negative across the board, and I found myself giving preferential treatment to candidates who did
not call me. My reactions have been so negative that I've begun to wonder if anyone has actually had a positive reaction to the calls -- on either end.
This article on Salon makes it seem like the phone banks are a waste of time.
In your experience, have you actually had an experience with political phone banking that's been productive and/or positive?
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One of the 'supervisors' (not an Obama official or anything) told me that, despite the fact that I seemed to just be annoying people, no poll has ever showed that harassing people over the phone caused them to become less likely to vote.
I had a few good conversations with undecided voters, but it was probably different, as it was things like Democrats not sure if they preferred Obama or Richardson, so it was more talking up subtle differences as opposed to trying to market the polar opposite of what they want.
The unspoken second reason for calling, I think (this is MHO, not fact) is that it helps to 'hype' the candidate. If you get ten calls for Obama and one for McCain, you might intuitively think that Obama's much more popular and take the time to check him out. When I went door-to-door, I got a lot of people who made comments about how they were impressed with how motivated we were. This is pretty much impossible to objectively measure, I'd think, since it can be somewhat subconscious.
Of course, none of this changes the fact that I, too, am fed up with political calls... I figure it's like spam, though: maybe 1 in 20 calls won't hang up on you, and 1 in 10 of those will actually be good conversations. But done enough, that can add up to a number of votes for your candidate. Conversely, it would take an awful lot to get someone to vote against their preferred candidate just because of lots of phone calls.
posted by fogster at 4:11 PM on November 4, 2008