Engle_S_Week10

WEEK 10:

FINAL PROJECT

Democratic Election Campaign Strategy:

California’s 25th Assembly District

Sterling Engle

ID: 904-341-227

Shenyue Jia, TA

Lab 2C

December 14, 2014

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December 16, 2014

Sterling Engle

Election Campaign Geographic Targeting Consultant

Honorable Lily Mei

Councilmember

City of Fremont, CA

Dear Lily,

Congratulations on your recent election to Fremont City Council with the highest vote total in a

crowded field while beating a sitting appointed councilmember! This is quite a remarkable

achievement. I’m sure you will bring the same dedication and focus on performance as you did

during the past six years serving as a Fremont Unified School District trustee.

With your political success, I expect you may consider running for District 25 of the California

State Assembly someday. With this thought in mind, I decided to share with you part of a

comprehensive report I researched and prepared for the 2014 race. It was based upon the most

recent SR precinct-level 2012 25th district assembly general election results available at that time.

My report shows how to employ geographic

targeting (Democratic Party 2004) to organize

and run a more effective field operation to

help win an election in District 25. One

important geopolitical fact to note is that most

of District 25 lies outside the City of Fremont,

in: Newark, Milpitas, most of Santa Clara,

and portions of both Sunnyvale and San Jose

(see figure 1). Since you haven’t established

name recognition in these non-Fremont areas,

nor have you appeared on the ballot before,

you will have to work extra hard during the

primary election to become one of the top two

vote getters so your name will appear on the

November general election ballot.

If you do decide to run for higher office in the

future, please feel free to contact me if I can

be of service to help your campaign field

manager geographically target your efforts.

Sincerely yours,

Sterling Engle

Figure 1. California State Assembly District 25.

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Overview of Voter Classification for Geographic Targeting

As a rule of thumb, you need a plan to achieve at least 52% of the vote so that you will have a

comfortable margin of victory. When looking for these votes, voters can be divided into the

following categories demographically:

1. Democratic Base Voters who will always vote for you as long as you get them to the polls

or to vote by mail.

2. Persuadable Voters are people who have not yet made up their minds to vote for a particular

candidate. Your goal obviously is to convince these people to vote for you.

3. Republican Base Voters are a lost cause because they aren’t going to vote for you no matter

what you say or do. Geographic targeting identifies where these people live so you can

avoid wasting your time going there or spending your resources to reach out to them.

This chart classifies voters into one of nine distinct categories based upon turnout and partisanship:

Figure 2 identifies three groups of voters you shouldn’t invest any time or resources on: those

who never vote (A) regardless of their partisanship, those who whenever they vote always vote

Republican (B), and those who always vote Democratic (C) (since they will vote for you anyway

as a Democratic candidate). Conversely, you need to invest time walking precincts to meet voters,

holding events, and sending flyers to swing voters that always (D) or sometimes (F) vote. You’ll

need to persuade enough of these people to vote for you in order to win your election. Where these

people live, based upon 2012 general election results, is colored in purple and labeled with SR

precinct number in the maps that follow all created using QGIS Desktop 2.4.0 (QGIS.org 2014)

Figure 2. Voter targeting classification based upon turnout and partisanship.

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using final certified assembly district maps from (California Citizens Redistricting Commision

2011) and final 2012 general election results for all SR precincts in Alameda and Santa Clara

Counties from (UC Berkeley 2012). The basemap was obtained from (OpenStreetMap 2014).

Geographic Targeting of 25th State Assembly District Voters in Alameda County

As you know, the 25th district is split across the county line between Alameda and Santa Clara

Counties. In the Alameda County portion, only four SR precincts illustrated on the map in Figure

3 on the following page are colored red to indicate low Democratic performance in the 2012

general election: 9839120, 9839300, 9839310, and 9839360. “Low democratic performance”

means the Democratic candidate received less than 45 percent of the vote. You are advised not to

make any campaign appearances or spend any funds in these areas. Fortunately for the Democratic

Party, numerous SR precincts in this district are colored blue, which means they exhibited “high

Democratic performance” in the 2012 election. This means the Democratic candidate received 65

percent or more of the votes cast. You won’t need to make campaign appearances or spend

campaign funds in these precincts because a large majority of the voters that live there are already

expected to vote for you as part of the Democratic ticket without any further effort required from

you or your campaign.

The Alameda County SR precincts you’ll need to focus your efforts on are all colored purple on

this map. These swing precincts all had a 45-64.9 percent Democratic performance in 2012. There

are four located on or near the northern Fremont border. The rest are in either in the Mission or

Warm Springs areas in the East and South of Fremont, respectively. They are where most of your

“swing” or persuadable voters live whose votes are likely to determine who wins the election. You

need to walk these precincts, send mailers and leave door hangers, and hold “meet the candidate”

coffees in people’s homes there. It’s also a good idea to become familiar with the views of these

voters, such as on the Warm Springs Innovation District to be developed around the new South

Fremont / Warm Spring BART station surrounding the Tesla Factory. Keep your swing voters’

views in mind when you write speeches and decide upon your campaign platform.

Geographic Targeting of 25th State Assembly District Voters in Santa Clara County

The targeted campaign map of Santa Clara County depicted in figure 4 paints a dramatically

different picture then does Alameda County. Here almost all urban precincts in the County are in

hotly-contested areas dominated by swing voters. The only SR precincts you will be able to safely

avoid campaigning in are the 16 (depicted in blue) that had high Democratic performance for our

candidate in 2012, and the ten that had low Democratic performance (depicted in red). Most of

these 26 precincts are located in sparsely populated rural and hilly areas. These you should avoid

regardless of targeted campaign precinct type just because there are so few voters to be found.

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Figure 3. Targeted 25th State Assembly district SR precinct types in Alameda County based upon 2014 General Election results.

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Figure 4. Targeted 25th State Assembly district SR precinct types in Santa Clara County based upon 2014 General Election results.

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A second map for Santa Clara County is provided (figure 5) zoomed-in to show the urban area

containing all the Santa Clara County 25th State Assembly district swing precincts described

earlier. On this map, your campaign staff will be able to more readily identify all their

corresponding SR precinct number labels. An Excel spreadsheet file containing the two-county

merged election results information used to create these maps is available upon request.

I’ve also provided the results of both the 2012 and 2014 elections (California Secretary of State

Debra Brown 2014), for easy reference:

2014 - District 25

100.0% (258 of 258 ) precincts reporting as of December 10, 2014

Candidate Votes Percent

Kansen Chu (Party Preference: DEM)

57,718 69.4%

Bob Brunton (Party Preference: REP)

25,441 30.6%

2012 - District 25

100.0% (258 of 258 ) precincts reporting as of December 14, 2014

Candidate Votes Percent

Bob Wieckowski (Party Preference: DEM)

93,487 70.5%

ArLyne Diamond (Party Preference: REP)

39,159 29.5%

As you can see, District 25 has voted strongly Democratic in the last two assembly races.

However, running as a Democrat, you (and future candidates) still need to focus your personal and

volunteer time and limited financial resources on campaigning in the swing SR precincts identified

by the maps in this report. This will ensure that California State Assembly District 25 remains in

Democratic hands for many years to come.

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Figure 5. Targeted 25th State Assembly district SR precinct types in Urban Santa Clara County based upon 2014 General Election results.

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References

California Citizens Redistricting Commision. 2011. WeDrawTheLines.ca.gov. Accessed

December 15, 2014. http://wedrawthelines.ca.gov/maps-final-draft-assembly-

districts.html.

California Secretary of State Debra Brown. 2014. Election Results. Accessed December 12,

2014. http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/prior-elections/.

Democratic Party. 2004. Democratic Gain Voter Contact Manual. Campaign Manual,

Democratic Party.

OpenStreetMap. 2014. OpenStreetMap. Accessed November 22, 2014.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/.

QGIS.org. 2014. Download QGIS for your platform. June. Accessed October 13, 2014.

http://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html.

UC Berkeley. 2012. Statewide Database 2012 General Election Precinct Data. Accessed

December 14, 2014. http://statewidedatabase.org/d10/g12.html.