Jeb Bush’s field campaign in Iowa doesn’t know how to measure its own failure

[eridani]

http://americablog.com/tag/rachel-maddow

As I’ve written before, Jeb Bush’s field campaign isn’t exactly a juggernaut, but even its meager ten-person staff and two offices Iowa is a bigger investment than most of his rivals. However, as I’ve also written before, if Republican campaigns are going to get serious about field, they’d do well to stop measuring their success in calls made and start measuring it in conversations they’ve actually had with voters. 1,281 supporters out of 70,381 calls is about what you’d expect given a 20% contact rate if Jeb’s internal polling has him at nine percent among Iowa Republicans. This wouldn’t be an unreasonable assumption, especially since 70,000 dials at a 20% contact rate and 9% support would equal 1,260, exactly the number of supporters the campaign says it’s confident it has. But if Jeb’s campaign wants to measure how voters are responding to his campaign’s ground-level messaging, instead of measuring empty dials, they’d do well to report what is likely closer to 14,000 phone conversations.

Furthermore, 70,000 dials in the state that will cast the nation’s first votes isn’t all that much for a campaign that’s existed for 136 days, as Jeb’s has, and it’s even less for a ten person staff. Even assuming that his staff has only been on the ground for 70 days, or just about half that time, that’s only 100 dials per day per staffer (100 x 10 x 70 = 70,000). One good volunteer should be able to knock that out in two hours; a full-time staffer should be able to get through them even more quickly. Which leads to the question of what his staff is doing with the other six hours to ten hours in the campaign workday because, again, it doesn’t appear to be knocking doors or organizing volunteers.

[brush]

1. I agree with most everything in your post

However, having phone banking experience on campaigns, it's not likely you'll get through 100 answered calls in two hours.

There are hang-ups, nobody home, numbers no longer current, people on there way out of the door, deceased people, and then when you do reach a person, it \takes time to get through your scripted message and, hopefully have a short conversation that will persuade them to go out and vote for your candidate on primary day.

[madaboutharry]

2. 100 calls in two hours is not realistic.

I made phone calls during both Obama campaigns. Getting in 50 calls in an hour would be a very high amount.

That said, I think Jeb! always planned to give little attention to Iowa. Republican caucus goers in Iowa are generally of the loony John Bircher type.