Table of Contents
How do you get the voter to like you? One way of solving this critical election question is to tailor your outreach to the issues or attitudes your voters care about – hoping to cement the support of your loyalists while swaying the swing voters. This is why to segment contact lists is a common practice.
While segmenting does help campaigns hyper-focus on voter blocks to move the needle toward the candidate, it makes a huge difference to ensure that your segments fully reflect your voters’ multi-dimensional identities.
Campaigns need ‘hybrid segmentation.’ This goes far beyond the usual trope of segmenting by age and gender and then attaching ‘issues’ these ages and genders are assumed to care about.
Its principal hallmarks include:
- Multiple data sources from different types of consumer data.
- Combination of ‘attitude’ data (ex: supports gay marriage), behavior (ex: donates to Democrats), and demographics (ex: 27% male).
In this article, we examine similar hybrid segments in America and how you should customize your outreach to address multiple aspects of a voter’s worldview while still focusing on their primary issue.
Read More: How to Make Your Voter Outreach Boost Every Kind of Voter Bloc
Sample candidate for the election
Representative image. Source: Pixabay
For the sake of this article, we shall create a candidate for the elections. Mary is a 50-year-old woman of mixed heritage from Boston with a middle-class background.
The child of blue-collar workers, she was a college professor who was always active in politics and is standing in the race for the first time.
The election question
“How much do you like me?” is a fundamental question that is the foundation of every election. This can be affected by any number of factors. Some of these are wildly out of your control, and many are often baffling.
There have been cases of politicians losing votes because of how they ate a hot dog, how much they sweated during a televised debate if they had a regional accent, or even one horrible moment of misjudgment where they made a funny sound on stage.
Assuming our candidate, Mary, manages to eat hot dogs properly and resisted the urge to yell ‘Yahoo!’ on stage, how much a swing voter likes her will depend entirely on her ability to effectively reach out to them.
Image: Pew Research poll on candidate likeability. Source
Consider this Pew research: “66% of US adults say it is extremely or very important that candidates share their views on political issues.”
That sounds good – people will vote for whoever stands for their issues. Mary’s team can call them through phonebanking, and even a simple script mentioning Mary’s policy positions would swing the election in her favor.
Sample phonebanking script: Policy appeal
- “Good evening! I am calling on behalf of Mary. If you support her, can I list some major policy positions she promises to enact?
- “Yes, go ahead.”
- “Excellent. So Mary supports passing bill 332b to strengthen universal insurance, is looking to end homelessness through low-cost housing, and will help bring the constitution out of the hands of activist judges.”
Say thank you and end the call. Job done? Hardly.
However, we must assume at least half of these people will vote for the other side.
So technically, only close to 35% of the voters would vote for Mary if her policies were the only criteria.
This is where the hybrid criteria kicks in.
According to Pew, 20% of ‘lower income’ Americans care strongly if their candidate is from a similar economic class.
So Mary will have to have a second segment among her voters, for those from this economic class. And the script will have to highlight this aspect of her life.
Sample phonebanking script: Segment contact list for income
- “Good evening! I am calling on behalf of Mary. May I share how watching her father come home from long shifts in the coal mine inspired her to back policies that help this backbone of America?”
- “Yes, go ahead.”
- “Excellent. So Mary supports passing bill 332b – which includes a provision to help workers get higher insurance, wants to help those who cannot afford a down payment for a home, and will help ensure American rights are always enshrined in the constitution.”
Note: While Mary’s position on these policies remains unchanged, segmentation allows Mary’s volunteers to highlight how her personal life has influenced her views on them.
In America, policy and income remain the ‘big’ topics for voter segmentation. But just these two alone cannot swing the entire election. We must also consider the candidate’s ethnic background.
Mary comes from a mixed heritage—Black and Indian—and her outreach must differentiate between ethnicities to have a larger impact.
For example, only 5% of white voters say they ‘strongly’ care about a candidate’s ethnicity. So, for white voters, Mary can focus on policy and her economic background, which affects their voting habits.
But when it comes to Black voters, 25% say the candidate’s ethnicity ‘extremely’ affects how they vote. So, further tweaks to the outreach should be reflected in scripts that volunteers use when reaching out to the Black community while keeping in mind the first two considerations—policy and income.
Sample phonebanking script: Appealing to community ties
- “Good evening! I am calling on behalf of Mary – the daughter of renowned pillar of the Black community and organizer, Mrs Alexandra Aaliyah. May I share how helping her mother agitate in her youth taught her what policies the black community needs?
- “Yes, go ahead.”
- “Excellent. So Mary supports passing bill 332b – which will ensure insurance payments can be deferred without losing the policy, wants to ensure affordable homes are as easily available for Black America as for the rest, and will help ensure the rights protected by the constitution remain unchanged.”
Interestingly, while you might imagine the third big segmentation for contacts should be gender, most American voters do not care about the gender of their elected officials. According to Pew, barely 5% of men and 7% of women say their vote is affected by the gender of the person standing for the election.
But religion is another ball game. Relatability comes from sharing a common deity and form of worship.
Image: Pew Research poll on candidate likeability based on religion. Source
26% of Black protestants would vote for one of their own, while a whopping 40% of White evangelicals prefer someone who shares their religion. About 20% of Catholics feel the same.
Mary is not a Catholic or an evangelical. So, her volunteers will have to focus on her Protestant beliefs when appealing to Black voters so she can have the maximum impact.
She will also have to push her policies and economic background more among White voters.
Sample phonebanking script: Appealing to religious beliefs
- “Good evening! I am calling on behalf of Mary, a regular at the local River of Life Christian Church. May I share how her policies can give the community what it needs?
- “Yes, go ahead.”
- “Excellent. As our pastor is so fond of saying – “For if they fall, one will lift his fellow.” So Mary supports passing bill 332b – which seeks to ensure those without aid still have insurance. Mary also wants to ensure those who wish to build community can buy homes easily, and will help ensure our rights, as granted by God, remain untouched.”
While the examples mentioned above are a bit on the nose, the reality is that no person is an island.
Now that we have three levels of hybrid segmentation let’s look at the kind of segmentation Mary will need: base voters for her party, their ethnicity, and their income levels.
So, Mary must blend all segments to form a proper pitch, maximizing a sense of belonging, understanding, and community among her voters.
Let us consider an example of blending multiple samples so that most voters can say – ‘She is like us.’
Who are we calling: A black woman from a low-income family who attends church regularly.
Sample phonebanking script: Multi-factor appeal to voters
- “Good evening! I am calling on behalf of Mary, the daughter of renowned Black community pillar and organizer, Mrs Alexandra Aaliyah. May I share how her policies can bring the community what it needs?
- “Yes, go ahead.”
- “Excellent. As our pastor from the local River of Life Christian Church is so fond of saying, “For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow.” So Mary supports the passing of bill 332b, which seeks to ensure that those without aid still have insurance despite their job status. Mary has spent many days watching her father, who worked in a coal mine, struggle to get his family what they need, and she knows what makes the difference.
- Mary also wants to ensure that those who wish to build communities can buy homes easily—with low down payments. Mary will push for this until homeownership in Black communities matches that in other communities.
- Mary considers the Constitution sacred. She will ensure that American rights, including the rights of women, are enshrined in the Constitution despite activist judges.
As mentioned before, always remember that no voter votes in isolation of all issues. This is why your volunteers must have a dynamic script – which they can navigate as issues arise.
Few people are going to listen to a long script. Mary’s volunteers will have to jump from issue to issue as the voters answer or reveal their preferences.
While one is never sure how an election swings, at least Pew research shows that if Mary can show she is like her voters, they will (for the most part) vote for her. So let’s ensure we have segments of people – at least three deep – on how much we are like them.
