and have worked on dozens of campaigns.
In 40 years of experience I have never read or heard anything as absurd as
"One point of persuasion is worth more than everything devoted to GOTV"
There is literally no scholarship, pundit, or employed campaign manager on either side that would agree with that statement.
There has been some scholarship that has questioned the value of GOTV and the question on whether in some cases whether or not too much resource has been invested for the return but the peer view review of these studies have found them wanting.
There are elections that are "persuasion" elections like 2008 where President Obama needed to persuade the American people that it was time to make a major expansion in the role of the US Government in health care.
This is NOT one of those elections and again no political professional, pundit, academic, or professional political operative has claimed that it is. Both sides are only working at getting people already persuaded out. Trump by ads and his hate filled rallies and the Democrats by individually contacting each identified supporter. The more divided the populace the less persuasion there is and it turns into a race to get already committed supporters to vote early, do mail in ballots and vote on election day.
The question of the break on Independents is not a generic or national question but a state by state question as the role of independents varies significantly by state.
In Arizona Republicans are the largest party with about 37%, independents are about 32% and Democrats are 31%. In states like AZ with large independent populations where we are contesting Senate seats, the independents have been breaking by about 20% consistently for weeks.
This poll from last week shows it at 19%
http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/NBC-News_Marist-Poll_AZ-NOS-and-Tables_Adults-and-Registered-Voters-and-Likely-Voters_1810291243.pdf#page=4
The most surprising and uninformed comment you made was that you worked in Las Vegas and that you didn't see early voting having an impact.
Las Vegas, because of the culinary union runs the most effective GOTV operation in the country. Every poll had Reid losing his Senate seat last time and he won it solely on the basis of GOTV. In fact because of Jon Ralston (who was the only one to correctly predict Reids' victory) we now can follow GOTV hour by hour.
We know for example that the GOTV effort delivered 17,000 votes in Las Vegas yesterday between 3 and 7 pm.
You can keep track of that here
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/the-early-voting-blog
The Culinary Union in Las Vegas starts with assisting hundreds of permanent residents their citizenship. They have registered over 10,000 new voters for this election alone and personally contact 40,000 voters individually.
They arrange for work breaks at the hotels and transportation to the polls. They employ 250 people to work 70 hours a week on canvassing.
https://www.culinaryunion226.org/news/press/culinary-union-members-to-drive-turnout-in-nevada-during-midterms
The field team, currently comprised of 250 guest room attendants, bartenders, cocktail and food servers, porters, bellmen, cooks, and kitchen workers, spend up to 10-12 hours a day, 6 days a week (Monday-Saturday) canvassing, and will ramp up to 300 canvassers for days prior to Election Day (11/4-11/6). The field team launches their canvass everyday between 9am-9:30am with last knock at 7:30pm. The Culinary Union’s political field team in seven weeks has knocked on over 190,000 doors and had one-on-one conversations with approximately 40,000 voters across Nevada statewide.
The Culinary Union has also worked with the Las Vegas Strip casino resorts to ensure that thousands of workers will be able to vote early everyday of Early Vote during their lunch break at the nearby early Strip vote center with an organized bus program.
If you were not aware of that great GOTV effort in Las Vegas then it is really astonishing.
We have a word for people who work hard to disparage Democratic Party GOTV efforts, we call them Republicans.
I will leave you the final word because I don't want to waste time with someone who is so exceptionally ill informed on what is actually going on. I will also take steps to ensure that we don't meet again in threads.
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