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Obama Tries Texting To Get Out The Vote

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The New York Times

Published: August 18, 2008

R U curious to know Obama's VP choice?

The names of vice presidential candidates are typically announced at news conferences or political conventions. But sometime before the opening gavel of the Democratic National Convention next Monday, Sen. Barack Obama plans to break the mold by doing it with a text message.

Last week, the Obama campaign said that anyone who sent a text message of "VP" to a dedicated phone number would be among the first to learn the identity of his running mate. The campaign is also running a television commercial that offers a campaign sticker to any person who sends the word "Barack" to the same number.

The efforts spotlight Obama's push to harvest millions of cell phone numbers of potential voters through text messaging. And it could have a significant effect in November, when the campaign plans to use the technology to get out the vote.

The campaign is drawing on its technological know-how and its support among younger voters, who as teenagers and younger children embraced the technology.

The strategy stands in sharp contrast to that of the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, who does not use text messaging and rarely uses the Internet, and whose campaign does not send text messages to supporters.

Obama's campaign has been encouraging people to sign up to receive text messages since last summer, and the effort to add names and numbers to its huge voter database has become more aggressive as the election nears. Such recruitment will be especially intense on college campuses.

Researchers are only beginning to study the effects of text messaging on get-out-the-vote efforts. A study of 4,000 people released in September found that those who received a reminder in a text message one day before an election were 4.2 percent more likely to vote, said a co-author of the study, Allison Dale, a graduate student at the University of Michigan.

Todd Rogers, the executive director of the Analyst Institute, said the findings were surprising because past research has shown that "the more personal a mode of contact, the more effective it is." But, Rogers said, the impersonal nature of text messaging might be offset by the novelty of the medium. Researchers plan to run new experiments this year to test the strategy.

The Obama campaign may be running the biggest text messaging experiment. Dale said Obama's plan was clever. "They're enticing people with a little bit of information," like the vice-presidential pick, she said, "and once they have those numbers, they can use them again for mobilization."

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