This chapter develops a model of campaign decision making. In an effort to win an election, campaigns seek to mobilize supporters and persuade undecided voters. In order to contact these voters and transmit mobilizing or persuasive messages, campaigns must predict which voters will be responsive to their appeals, and they must decide which voters should get which kinds of appeals. To make these decisions, campaigns gather data and form impressions about the voters. The Perceived Voter Model draws attention to how and why the particular set of data available to campaigns affects their assessments of voters, which in turn guides strategic decisions.

To draw the connection between data inputs, perceptions, and the actions taken by campaigns, this chapter aims to accomplish four tasks. First, as a preliminary matter, I define the aspect of campaign politics that is the focus of this study. Political scientists study a wide variety of phenomena that fall under the heading of campaigns; my first goal is to situate direct voter engagement in the context of campaign politics. Second, I define the perceived voter as consisting of the attributes of voters that campaigns consider when making strategic decisions. I discuss this concept as it relates to prior research on campaigns. Third, I define information shortcuts, or heuristics, that campaigns use to perceive voters, and I discuss the features of public records that make them important shortcuts for campaigns. I compare the use of public records as a shortcut in perceiving voters with two alternatives. The first alternative is not using shortcuts; the second alternative is using plausible shortcuts other than public records. Fourth, I generate hypotheses about how the use of public records as shortcuts is likely to affect the strategic decisions of campaigns and the turnout behavior of voters.

THE STRATEGY OF DIRECT CONTACT

The term “campaign” takes on multiple meanings in the study of elections.