is your voter registration up to date?
if you haven’t already seen it, there is this neat analysis of amazon.com’s “customers who bought this, also bought…” recommendations for political “non-fiction” books.
the goal of collecting the data was to see what relationships existed between liberal and conservative titles. the hypothesis being that people either buy conservative or liberal books, not both, and the question being: what books join the two sides of the political spectrum?
people have speculated that political campaigns should be targeting the people who’ve bought the books in the middle (the people on the fence), as opposed to the people who’ve bought the “o’reilly factor” or “lies and the lying liars who tell them”.
i think there is a more essential problem: figuring out how to get the non-voters on your team to vote.
if i was running for president, i would sink a hell of a lot of time and money into trying to get more of my team to vote. 105 million people voted in the last election out of 205 million eligible voters, and the difference between the two top candidates was 0.57% (they were tied).
so forget about the 105 million people who actually voted. go after your half of the 100 million people who didn’t vote.
People always laugh at me when I say things like “so what are we going to do about this election” as if I’m kidding or something. I’ve done my best this year to hammer in the message to vote in my classes and the school sends around personalized registration forms to every 18 year old, so that’s a good thing. But what about all the other people in this community, who seem about as likely to vote as they are to buy a car with normal-sized wheels? There are untapped voter sources all around us.