Campaigns Step Up Telemarketing
Nov. 4 -- They’re affordable, timely and fairly painless— at least for the political candidates who rely on them.
But for the average battleground state resident whose phone is ringing off the hook with political telemarketing calls, this get-out-the-vote tactic can sometimes be downright annoying.
In the final days of the election year, candidates have launched a flurry of targeted telephone campaigns in key states. Using sophisticated targeting to get the right message to the right voter, campaigns are making tens of millions of recorded telephone calls starring celebrities of all stripes from comedian Bill Cosby and actor Robert Redford to former candidates Elizabeth Dole and John McCain to poet Maya Angelou and former car executive Lee Iacocca.
The candidates also are asking volunteers and paid agents to call prospective voters at home and read from scripts. Some calls are meant to persuade voters to support one side or another, or to raise a candidate’s profile. Others are meant to motivate supporters to the polls.
But several star-studded calls, and a few more from anonymous voices reminding her to vote on Tuesday, did little to energize Jackie Posey, a resident of Philadelphia — ground zero in one of the most hotly contested battleground states in the presidential race.
“When I get those kind of calls I usually say ‘no thank you’ and hang up,” she said. “They always call at the worst time. They’re really a nuisance.”
Tailor-made
In presidential race, Democrats are placing about 15 million recorded calls, most of them in the final days, with another 25 million delivered by paid phone banks and some 10 million done the old-fashioned way, by volunteers. Republicans are ringing another 62 million phones, including 50 million using recorded messages — all in about 20 key states.
While political telemarketing has been around since the 1970s, advances in technology have made it more affordable and efficient in the last two decades. The technology behind autodialed calls is fairly new, and 1998 was the first year they were widely used for political campaigns. That year, President Clinton, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Vice President Al Gore recorded more than 200 messages tailored to different races and voters.
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