How Much Will an Unprofessional Campaign Hurt Trump?

John Sides: “Probably the best estimate comes from a recently published piece by political scientists Ryan Enos and Anthony Fowler. They show that the effect of the 2012 presidential campaign on voter turnout was quite large, about 7-8 points overall.”

“They arrive at this estimate by analyzing a sort of experiment: media markets that span state boundaries, such that part of the market falls in a battleground state and part doesn’t. Voters in one of those markets would be potentially exposed to the same amount of televised political advertising but different amounts of other campaign activity. In particular, you would expect that the battleground state voters would be far more likely to be contacted by campaign fieldworkers, who generally aren’t going to contact voters outside of battleground states. Enos and Fowler found that voter turnout within these markets was much higher in the battleground state portion than the non-battleground state portion.”