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Texting For Turnout On Super Tuesday

by Will Safer on February 5, 2008 at 04:10 PM

Texting the Obama campaign.

The Obama campaign has been reaching out to younger voters during the lead-up to Super Tuesday by telling them to text "HOPE to 62262" to learn more about how to participate in caucuses.

The traditional way to get the message out -- especially in caucus states, where every person who shows up at a caucus site can have much greater impact than someone voting in a primary -- is through targeted mailings and phone calls. But this texting message is going out over the radio airwaves via stations geared toward younger listeners. The radio ad details the date and time of the caucuses.

Those who send the text message get a response asking for their zip code, which is used to provide local information to the voter.

Since the message is going out over the radio, it could inspire people who support other candidates to go to the caucuses, but Obama's people seem to believe that the greater the turnout the more support he'll receive.

(Are you still undecided? Try glassbooth.org to see how your views line up with the candidates'.)

Does this call for texting work? According to a study by the University of Michigan and Princeton University, text messages to newly registered voters increased the likelihood of voting by 4.2 percentage points.

From the Wall Street Journal.

Related links:


Tags: campaign, caucus, obama, primary, super tuesday, SuperTuesday, text, texting, vote

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