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The science of campaigning has gotten some attention over the past several cycles, but I think the lessons of this data-driven campaigning has some useful insights for other areas, like increasing COVID vaccination (no, I’m not an epidemiologist, but hear me out)
1) You don’t need to win every vote. You need to get a majority of votes. Similarly, we don’t need to get everyone vaccinated (thought that sure would be nice). We need to get to herd immunity. I’ll leave epidemiologists to say what that is, but my understanding is like 80-90%
That means you don’t need to develop interventions to go after the most intransigent anti-vaxxers. You need to develop interventions to persuade the people who are on that margin.
. @KFF’s excellent polling shows that the hardest “will never get” group is ~ 13-15%, and has been pretty stable across survey waves https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monitor-march-2021/
Which is to say we collectively should not be focused on interventions to persuade this group. They are the hardest to persuade — they haven’t changed much as vaccine has rolled out — and *we don’t really need them to get to herd immunity*. Focus on the others first
2. Two decades of studies on GOTV has shown that the way to get people to vote is *not* to try to increase their motivation to vote. It is to decrease their barriers to voting, and to increase the sense that getting voted is descriptively normative.
Applying that to vaccination, the key is to (a) make getting vaccinated as easy as possible, and (b) increasing the perception of unvaccinated people that getting vaccinated is normal, particularly among people like them
Which, to be clear, is definitely starting to happen. But we need to normalize this discourse. For instance, MD Governor Larry Hogan has blamed low vaccination rates in MD’s black and Latino communities on vaccine hesitancy — which is not a claim supported by recent survey data
But MD has had — until the relatively recent opening of some mass vax sites — a *terrible* distribution system that has required people seeking vaccination to call up multiple different pharmacy and hospital systems to try to find vaccination appointments.
The opportunity to spend the time to do this hunting differs by class, and therefore, by race. It’s not about motivation, it’s about barriers to access. Just like GOTV research has shown that lower barriers + procedural info -> turnout, we need the same approach for vaxxing
3. When persuading people, to vote for a candidate or to get vaccinated, we need to not focus on reasons that are persuasive to the people who are already vaxxed/supporting our candidate, but which are supportive to the persuasion audience
(That sounds so obvious as to almost be tautological, but I assure you that even politically sophisticated people make this mistake all the time)
That means interviewing — and doing survey and field experiments with — the vaccine hesitant but not the adamant anti-vaxxers (see point 1). And again, this is happening! I again point you to @KFF’s work looking at vaccine hesitant groups (plural) https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monitor-what-weve-learned-april-2021/
And I’ve also seen good work being done with survey experiments, like that from @davidlazer and his lab https://covidstates.org/
I haven’t done a comprehensive review of such survey experiments , but if you have others @ me and I’ll retweet them in a thread.
I haven’t done a comprehensive review of such survey experiments , but if you have others @ me and I’ll retweet them in a thread.
The point is, political campaigns have increasingly relied upon experimentation — both in surveys and in the field — to test what works to persuade the persuadable, instead of descriptive analysis, and this can and should be applied to the case of vaccination
I’d also love to see some field experiments on this, perhaps using online ads, which can be done relatively quickly as fitting the circumstances
