Get out the vote efforts critical for Pryor, Ross campaigns

Polls released by Talk Business & Politics this week show Republicans Tom Cotton and Asa Hutchinson with eight point leads over their Democratic opponents in races for the U.S. Senate and governor, respectively. With less than two weeks until the general election, is there any way for Democrats Mark Pryor and Mike Ross to catch up?

According to two political experts who spoke with The City Wire, campaigns are going to shift from winning votes to driving turnout in an attempt to turn the tide.

Will Watson, a Fayetteville-based Democratic political consultant and director of digital media and data analysis at the Southern Progress Fund political action committee, said the way many campaigns would respond to the latest polling this close to an election is to not overreact but instead focus on get out the vote efforts.

"In the face of that kind of data, it just focuses the campaign's attention on turnout," he said, noting that Democrats have traditionally not done as well with get out the vote operations in elections past.

Dr. Hal Bass, professor of political science at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, said Democrats have improved during presidential election years but it has yet to be seen how get out the vote efforts will go in a mid-term. He said if the campaigns want to succeed with an effective get out the vote strategy, the planning would have had to have been in place well before Monday's (Oct. 20) first casting of votes.

"You can't set this up on the fly. You must have done your homework and legwork in advance," he said.

During get out the vote efforts, the campaigns target voters who have voted in Democratic primaries in the past in an effort to secure their early votes.

"The rules help here (in Arkansas) when you can do early voting. They allow a campaign with good precision to go into election day with a good expectation of the results. You can for all intents and purposes go a long way to winning the election before election day," Bass explained.

He said past elections have shown as high as 40% of votes in an election having been cast before election day.

"It's a matter of public record who has voted and both campaigns will be watching the courthouse postings and if the campaign organization has done its homework and the likely voters are targeted, you should have an idea of where you're doing well and where to get your act together. That's what I think you'll see the Democratic campaigns doing."

Watson said well-funded campaigns, like Pryor and Ross' campaigns, are also doing the right thing by being visible in multiple parts of the state throughout the two weeks of early voting.

"If you look at the schedules for Ross and Pryor, they are crisscrossing the state trying to get with as many voters one on one as possible. The more voters they meet, the more voters connect with their moderate approach to governing."

He said the Senate and gubernatorial races, they are likely to come down to geography and name recognition for the undecideds.

"I think that the statewide races amy come down to the areas where neither candidate is known very well. Asa has an advantage because he's run for statewide office before. Ross has ground to make up in eastern Arkansas and Northwest Arkansas with people who've never been able to cast a vote for him before," Watson said. "Northeast Arkansas, like we're seeing in some legislative races, may prove to be a battleground in the governor's race."

Bass cautioned professional and novice political observers to not place all their faith in a single poll.

"Don't bet on one poll, but look at aggregations and the averages that you see there. In that sense, I do think the volatility of the polls smooths out when you do that a little bit. You get a better sense of what the play is. There's plenty of historical examples of polls being wrong and being underweight in constituencies or whatever sample it is just doesn't reflect the universe."

The Talk Business & Politics Senate poll with Cotton at 49% and Pryor at 40.5% with a margin of error of +/- 2.2% was re-weighted "to reduce the percentage of white voters to 78 percent of the electorate and to increase the percentage of voters under the age of 44 to 34 percent of the electorate. In addition, because we are seeing different attitudes in this race between cell phone users and land line respondents (partly because of the age and race factors), we also weighted the sample for cell phone users to 30 percent of the electorate."

Even with the shift, Cotton was 7% ahead of Pryor (48% to 41%).

A RealClearPolitics average of polls in the race shows Cotton with a 5.5% advantage over Pryor, while its average of gubernatorial polls has Hutchinson up 7.5% on Ross, not too far off the Talk Business poll, which had Hutchinson at 49% and Ross at 41%, an eight point spread. More than 5% of voters said they had not yet decided.

But convincing undecideds to vote and then to vote for your guy is going to be a challenge for Democratic and Republican campaigns, Bass said. That is why he said it is all about get out the vote efforts for both parties, but especially the Democrats.

"The thing to watch in the next two weeks is turnout. If early voting looks extraordinarily high, it is debatable but I think it's good for Democrats. And the Republicans have an operation too, but the Republicans typically turnout for the midterms anyway."