Campaigns Step Up Telemarketing

Nov. 4, 2000 -- 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.

In the final week of this year’s election, such tailored calls have reached a fever pitch.

In one message supporting Bush during this election, ret. Gen. Norman Schawrzkopf focuses on Bush’s plans for the military.

“I don’t know about you, but the events of the last few weeks— the fighting in the Middle East, the terrorist attack on the USS Cole— have caused me great concern,” he says.

“Gov. George W. Bush has promised to restore our nations military,” but it will be used “only when its mission is clear and in the best interest of the United States… Let’s face it, the U.S. still has plenty of enemies who’d want to do us harm. I want to be sure we’re ready if they dare to attack us in any way.”

Gun enthusiasts in Tennessee and West Virginia might get a call from NASCAR driver Darrell Waltrip. “Instead of tougher enforcement on current laws, well, old [Al] Gore wants to blame law-abiding citizens and gun manufacturers for our problem,” he says in a GOP call. “George Bush’s plan calls for standing up for our Second Amendment rights.”

It’s Called Narrowcasting

The messages are part of a last minute effort by campaigns and political interest groups to win over swing voters, and make sure core Democratic and Republican voters show up at the polls Tuesday.

“When people don’t know what they are going to do, sometimes a phone call can make a big difference-especially in the weeks right before the campaign,” said Anthony Mandaro, vice president of operations for Portal Direct, a provider of automated call center technology based in Herndon, Va. “Telemarketing is the most affordable and timely way to reach a large number of voters in a very short time,” he said. “It’s also very efficient because you can focus on a specific group of people you need to reach.”

Apparently, automated calls are the cheapest—10 cents to 12 cents apiece compared with 35 cents for a live person.

Using databases, polling and old-fashioned instincts, campaigns can target voters in a far more precise way than their whirlwind bus tours and TV ads. It’s called narrowcasting— and delivering just the right words to as small an audience as possible.

Not only is it more affordable, it’s also more effective than direct mailing, said Mandaro. The average response from a direct mailing is 2 percent to 3 percent, while the average response from a telemarketing campaign is 10 percent, he said.

“Telemarketing is a crucial part of our overall campaign strategy, now more than ever,” said Tucker Eskew, a spokesperson for the Bush campaign. “The Internet is also helping to drive the process now.”Volunteers can now make calls from their own homes. With a password and ID they can log onto the campaign web site to get calling lists and then choose a script to read, he said.

Harsher Messages

But some critics say telephone campaigns are where some of the nastiest mudslinging takes place.

In the New York Senate race, for example, the state Republican Party targeted Mrs. Clinton with live calls that accused her of accepting “a plaque from an Arab organization that openly brags about its support of a Mideast terrorism group, the same kind of terrorism that killed our sailors on the U.S.S. Cole.”

“You’ll hear things in telephone messages that you would never hear in a television or radio ad,” said Evan Cornog, associate dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. “It’s a way for the candidates to be negative without drawing as much attention to themselves. Reporters don’t catch on as fast to those types of messages.”

In the presidential race, Eskew said the Bush campaign has tried to make all its calls “very positive and forthright. We haven’t resorted to some of the more dirty tactics,” he said.

Two calls sponsored by the Michigan Democratic Party included Texas citizens criticizing Bush’s state policies. One woman said her daughter sometimes couldn’t go outside during recess because the air is so bad. Another woman indirectly blamed Bush’s nursing home policies for the death of her husband.

“They were real people talking about their experiences under the failed leadership of Gov. Bush,” Gore campaign spokesperson Doug Hattaway said. “The Gore campaign was not connected with those messages. Most of our calls from the campaign have been get-out-the-vote calls, and we just started those.”

For Democrats, Redford, a longtime environmentalist, is phoning in Oregon on theenvironment. Comedian Al Franken is calling young people. Cosby and Angelou are phoning blacks; actor Jimmy Smits dials Hispanics.

For the GOP, actor Ben Stein is calling younger voters; McCain, independents; and Elizabeth Dole, women.

Last month, Democrats had actor Ed Asner calling seniors to slam Bush’s Social Security plan. That prompted the GOP to respond with calls from the Bush’s mother, the former first lady: “It makes me angry when the politicians … try to scare seniors,” Barbara Bush said in the call. “Don’t buy it.”

How Effective Are the Calls?

Campaign telemarketing expenditures are declared to the Federal Election Commission along with other campaign costs, but it is harder to monitor the content of the messages since they’re not public and often targeted to very specific groups of voters.

Academics are just now beginning to study the calls.

“We know an enormous amount about how broadcast advertisingworks,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who studies political communication at the University of Pennsylvania. “We know very little about how phone advertising works.”

Some voters say the message just isn’t getting across.

“I’d rather they hadn’t called,” said Okey Miller, a 70-year-old Democrat from Hurricane, W.Va., who had recorded messages left on his answering machine from Ed Asner and then Barbara Bush. “There’s no substance to any of these calls, you get these recordings and they don’t really say anything. I don’t know why they waste their money recording them.”

ABCNEWS.com’s Claire Moore and The Associated Press contributed to the report.