Imagine your whole organization bit being “savvy Republican consultants against Trump” but actually you’ve never heard of an AB/EV chase program

per my DMs, maybe people on here don’t know what an AB/EV chase program is either. That’s ok! This is an educational twitter feed.

AB/EV stands for Absentee Ballot / Early Vote. A “chase” program is just that — youre “chasing” voters to get them to vote.

Campaigns do a lot of different things. The stuff that gets the most attention is usually “persuasion”, or convincing people who are undecided or supporting another candidate to vote for you

But just as important is making sure people who already support you actually VOTE

So you take lists of people you’re almost positive will support your candidate *if* they vote (based on data analytics, primary vote history, whatever demographics you have, etc), and you do stuff like mail them an absentee ballot request form.

Because let’s say you have 100,000 of your strongest supporters ID’d. 95% of them will vote for you no matter what you do. But that’s 5,000 votes on the table. People who might get a flat tire on Election Day, have a kid need picking up from sports practice, whatever

The best way to take someone from 95% likely to vote to 100% likely is to have them early vote or return an absentee ballot — because the Election Authority will release who’s already voted (note: not WHO they voted for, but based on data you have a good guess at that already)

So that’s what this is — you send red-meat mailers with your candidates face on them to your strong supporters and say, hey you, remember to request your absentee ballot. You also “chase” them to remind them to return the ballot once they have it

Because you’re trying to take someone from 95% likely to vote for you up to 100%. Do that 20 times and hey, you’ve earned 1 whole new vote. Repeat thousands of times and that’s AB/EV chase.