Achieving Electoral Success: Strategies for Reaching Your Political Win Number

Understanding the Political Win Number

What is the significance of knowing your political win number? It’s like your North Star, steering campaign planning and voter outreach efforts and serving as the ultimate measure of success. After all, your win number is the number of votes needed to secure the election.

How to Calculate Your Political Win Number

Calculating your political win number requires accessing past voting history and doing some simple math. Here’s how to calculate the number of votes needed to win:

1. Access election results from the past three years for the same election in the same jurisdiction.
2. Calculate the average voter turnout percentage across all three years.
3. Multiply that percentage by the total number of registered voters in your jurisdiction. This number estimates the total number of votes cast in the upcoming election.
4. Multiply the total number of votes cast by 50%, then add 1. This is the total number of votes you need to win.
5. Most political campaigns will add a couple of percentage points as a buffer. So, you could multiply by, let’s say, 52 or 53%, then add 1 to get your safety-margin political win number.

You can also find free win number calculators online, like those from re:power or Ecanvasser.

How to Reach Your Political Win Number Through Texting

To reach your vote number, you need to formulate winning text strategies to get through to voters. How can campaign strategy influence electoral success? Campaign strategy can influence electoral success because it’s a set of political tactics designed to achieve specific election goals. A strong, well-researched, and well-executed campaign strategy means better outreach, more engagement, and higher turnout, ultimately increasing your chances of winning.

The following are proven campaigning strategies for getting more votes — all through texting.

Gather Data

Voter data files are among the most crucial political campaign tools because they provide the starting point for identifying how much outreach effort to apply to specific voter segments.

You might wonder, “How can data-driven campaigning enhance electoral strategies?” Data-driven campaigning can enhance electoral strategies by unlocking insights for identifying key issues, targeting swing voters more effectively, and optimizing outreach efforts for maximum impact. Voter data gives you a snapshot of how people voted in prior elections, their demographics, their party, location, and so on, which you can use to inform your text subscriber segmentation and messaging strategies. Additionally, suppose you incorporate AI into your workflows. In that case, you can use this technology’s predictive analytics capabilities to determine patterns and apply those to future voting behaviors, giving you even more robust insights.

But remember that data gathering should be an ongoing process, not just a task you perform at the beginning of your campaign. Voter data files are a great start, but you should also acquire data throughout each text campaign, from surveys and polls to SMS conversations, and apply it to each contact and contact segment.

Know Your Audience and Segment Them Accordingly

The more data you have, the better you’ll know your audience. Why is knowing your audience important? Because your political win number equals people; every vote is a person, and you must reach each person effectively.

Accessing data from voter files and other compliant sources should give you a good idea of the makeup of voters in your jurisdiction: low-propensity voters, swing voters, supporters, and opposition voters. Understand the percentage of each that voted in previous campaigns to help you determine how much effort to focus on each segment to make the most impact.

Once you know the voter makeup, segment your contacts into buckets based on these high-level voting attributes. In the text marketing world, this is called customer segmentation — and here, your customers are your voters. Next, you can drill down to more specific subsets of contacts within those buckets based on particular concerns, ages, locations, and more to create targeted messaging that reaches every person.

Send Targeted Messages

Gathering data and segmenting SMS contacts all lead to one very important thing: targeted messaging. What role does targeted messaging play in political campaigns? It tailors communication efforts by focusing on issues that matter most to different groups of voters so that candidates can establish a more personal connection and increase the effectiveness of their outreach efforts.

To reach your political win number, you must reach voters personally and understand what type of messaging they need and at what frequency. By getting to know your audience and implementing microtargeting tactics, you can create and send texts that are relevant to them. Here are some examples of how to target those high-level contact segments we mentioned earlier:

• Low-propensity voters: Send text messages that educate and persuade. Education is crucial for these voters, who might be feeling apathetic about the democratic process or simply unaware of how their vote matters.
• Swing or undecided voters: Understand what these voters care about and what motivates them. Tap into these issues by highlighting how your campaign promotes or solves them in text messages.
• Supporters: Mobilize your supporters through voter registration and other election reminders, get-out-the-vote (GOTV) tactics, political rallies, event invites, and fundraising calls.
• Opponent voters: This group of constituents is less likely to be influenced, but you can capitalize on some of their pain points with other candidates or political parties through persuasive communication, like positive or negative campaigning.

Empower Communities through Grassroots Mobilization

One way to boost support for your campaign and, therefore, secure your political win number is through grassroots mobilization.

Why is grassroots mobilization necessary in politics? Grassroots mobilization is essential in politics because it empowers individuals and communities to participate actively in the democratic process, rallying around and increasing support for an issue or a candidate. It spurs collective action around a particular problem, amplifying your message and inspiring more people to vote for your campaign or cause.

Texting is a powerful method for a grassroots campaign strategy because it’s more personal than other forms of political communication. It can be used for quick digital organizing and urgent calls to action, like volunteer recruitment, fundraising, etc. But keep in mind that for a grassroots movement to build momentum, texting should be used in tandem with social media engagement, creating a presence in person, partnering with local organizations, and leveraging your volunteer network.

Fundraise

One thing is always for sure for political campaigns, big and small: donations are needed. Fundraising is important for many reasons, one of which is that it allows you to increase your outreach efforts—and the better your outreach, the better chance you have of achieving your political win number.

Texting makes fundraising more accessible for your campaign team and donating seamless for your audience. By leveraging features like text-to-donate, you’re allowing voters to give money quickly and easily through just a few taps on their phone. Just read our 8 secret methods to political fundraising to ensure that you keep those dollars rolling in.

Send Surveys and Polls

While knowing the number of votes needed to win and how to win them drives your campaign goals, you must also monitor where your audience stands during the campaign itself. Sending text surveys and polls is the key to clarifying who has pledged to vote for you and gaining a better understanding of which contact segments need more nurturing and persuading.

Surveys and polls can ask constituents how they feel about certain hot-button issues, their top concerns, who they’re planning on voting for and why, and so on. This is an excellent opportunity to use two-way texting to follow up with responses, connect with voters, and get to the heart of their concerns.

Track & Analyze

Achieving your election goals requires continuously monitoring your campaign’s performance. Even if you have the best data-driven campaign strategy, routine checkups are necessary to ensure that you’re on the right track to meet your win-number goal.

First, ensure that people interact with your messages and take your intended action, as this is a sign that the content and timing are right. Key metrics include click-through rates, opt-in rates, donations, and event registrations. If something doesn’t look quite right, like you’re seeing high opt-out rates, you may not personalize texts or send too many. When these metrics are in tip-top shape, you’re reaching people and spurring them to action.

Then, it’s time to analyze the less concrete metrics, like contact feedback. Remember the surveys and polls we mentioned? Don’t let any of that feedback fall through the cracks; polling and data analysis go hand in hand. Gather, process, and analyze how your contacts respond to open-ended questions and text conversations. Use these answers to get a high-level view of how your campaign meets voter needs, like assessing voter sentiment, understanding what concerns they feel aren’t being addressed, or identifying unsure contact segments that need a little extra push.

Tracking and analyzing metrics highlights areas of your campaign that need more focus. When you tweak accordingly, you create an agile political text channel that delights voters and boosts success.

Start Your Winning Campaign Today

Power up your campaign with texting. With these tips, you’ll be on the road to achieving your political win number in no time. Let EZ Texting help you along the way. Start your free trial to see how it works.