Officially, early voting begins in Iowa 40 days before the general election (September 25 this year). The Iowa Democratic Party has been sending field organizers and volunteers out to do voter contacts for weeks, and didn’t even take a break for the holiday weekend.
Concern over the Democrats’ head start on GOTV was one factor behind the recent change in Iowa GOP leadership. New state party chair Jeff Kaufmann has promised to build a strong field organization in time for the midterm election. Fortunately for him, a dark money group associated with the Koch brothers is already ramping up its voter contacts in Iowa.
The Iowa Democratic strategy is straightforward: avoid a repeat of 2010 by increasing turnout among voters who don’t reliably participate in midterm elections. Volunteers are already contacting Democrats and no-party voters in their neighborhoods, bringing back absentee ballot request forms if possible. (Absentee ballots will be mailed in late September.) John Deeth blogged from the July 5 canvassing kickoff in Iowa City, where Democratic Senate nominee Bruce Braley fired up the volunteers.
A few days ago, Republican blogger Kevin Hall couldn’t resist taking a cheap shot at Democrats while warning that they have an early lead on GOTV:
[T]he Iowa Democratic Party was out canvassing for votes again over the weekend. They are so far ahead of Republicans, it’s ridiculous. IDP is reaching out to voters who very rarely vote, along with their usual constituents, non-citizens, nursing home invalids and graveyard occupants …
IDP’s goal is to have personal contact with every single voter at least three times. We are way behind and we must outwork them from here on out or we will be looking at Senator Braley, Congresswoman Appel and Governor Hatch on November 5.
Memo to Kevin Hall: Iowans don’t lose the right to vote just because they are homebound or require nursing home care. Nice of you to lump those people in with those who cannot legally vote.
Also, the highly partisan Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz did his best to prove that voter fraud is a significant problem here. A criminal investigator working full-time for two years came up with very few ineligible ballots cast, and to my knowledge no incidents of dead people voting.
The Republican Party of Iowa may be behind in voter contacts, but as Jennifer Jacobs reported in the Sunday Des Moines Register on July 6, the conservative group Americans for Prosperity is targeting Iowa.
Americans for Prosperity-Iowa now has five field offices, a 27-member staff, a record of orchestrating public events featuring state and national GOP leaders, and a strategy for marketing free-market principles as the best means to improve Iowans’ lives. […]
At the Des Moines-area office, the paid staff of phone-back callers and door-knockers, each equipped with iPad Minis, is “laser-focused on field operations,” Lucas said.
“That’s how we can make the biggest impact on people’s lives is door to door, telling them about the things that are facing our country,” Lucas said as he strolled through the office that opened in March in a quiet Clive, Iowa, strip mall.
Americans for Prosperity is contacting a universe of Iowa swing voters from a propriety database; callers aren’t working the same Iowa lists as other GOP candidates or groups, Lucas said. The intent is to assess how open voters are to ideas about lower taxes and a free-market economy with little government control, and how unwilling they are to accept deep debt as the new normal for America, he said.
“The more they talk to us, the more they like us,” Lucas said.
Like other campaigns, the group scores each Iowan based on the person’s partisan leanings and propensity to vote. At election time, it will do a get-out-the-vote push without expressly recommending whom Iowans should vote for, he said.
Groups like Americans for Prosperity or Crossroads GOP (led by Karl Rove) may not explicitly tell Iowans for whom to vote, but their communications will be designed to drive votes exclusively toward Republican candidates and against Democrats.