Just How Important Is GOTV?

Pretty damn important. A very strong GOTV effort can wipe out a 10+ polling deficit:

On November 4, 2002, one day before the election, the Atlanta Journal/WSB-TV poll showed Roy Barnes at 51% and Sonny Perdue at 40%. The internal polling of the Barnes campaign showed similar results. So did the internals of the Perdue campaign, except the Perdue campaign was no longer looking at its internal polling. Instead, the campaign was looking at its GOTV ground game data and knew Perdue would win.

On November 5, 2002, Sonny Perdue beat Roy Barnes 51.4% to 46.3% with the Libertarian taking 2.3% of the vote.

Hit the Geraghty home page and scroll down to see a lot of polling weirdness, as he calls it. Conflicting polls which show someone up by either two points... or eighteen points.

Public polling has been becoming more and more unreliable over the years, due to the growing number of nonresponders.

Who knows, really, where ths election is?

posted by Ace at 02:01 PM

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