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Links for Pollie Award Judges: Best Mobile Campaign
Pat LaMarche — www.Pat2006.com
NOTE TO POLLIE JUDGES: Please feel free to browse any part of the overall gubernatorial campaign website. However, because it contains over 350 pages, below are direct links to the key pages relating to the mobile messaging campaign. Also, because the website is no longer active, the volunteer, contribute, and subscribe pages have been disabled.
1. Key Mobile Campaign Links
2. Campaign Context
Pat LaMarche is a popular radio personality who supported universal healthcare and wanted to raise that as an issue for public discussion in Maine. Running on the Independent Green Party line, she not only won them a place on the statewide ballot and several strong newspaper endorsements, but also raised public consciousness about healthcare issues so much that a statewide referendum to mandate universal healthcare is being being widely discussed as a possibility in 2008.
Realizing that college students and younger voters would be natural allies in a campaign for universal healthcare, the campaign devised and implemented an outreach campaign using text messaging, online townhall meetings, email newsletters, and a strong website presence. The website was judged to be so strong, in fact, that the Library of Congress decided to archive it for posterity as one of the best websites of 2006.
The text messaging campaign was first unveiled on October 30, when LaMarche asked students to suggest topics for a speech that she was scheduled to give at the University of Maine in Orono; as promised, her speech was based on the top three topics that students and other Maine citizens sent to her via text message. Then, at the most important televised debate of the campaign on November 1, 2006, LaMarche used her closing comments to ask viewers to pick up their mobile phones and vote for the person they saw as the winner of the televised debate.
3. Mobile Campaign Goal
The goal was to show LaMarche as a credible candidate with a statewide perspective and support that cut across party and geographic lines. This credibility, in turn, helped to give her call for universal healthcare the push it needed to gain several strong newspaper endorsements and a lot of positive media attention.
4. Mobile Campaign Results
The headline the next morning said it all: Pat and All Voters Win First Mobile Phone Campaign Poll. For the first time in American political history, an instantaneous poll had been taken after a televised debate using American Idol-style voting techniques. Voters watched the televised debate on Maine Public Broadcasting and then voted via cell phone by texting the word "pat" to 30644. A ballot was sent that allowed voters to easily choose their favorite. Within minutes, over 100 people had voted. By 8:00 the next morning, 220 votes had been received. The totals were as follows:
LaMarche 120 votes, 54%
Baldacci 44 votes, 20%
Woodcock 28 votes, 13%
Merrill 16 votes, 7%
NaPier 12 votes, 6%
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Total = 220 votes
The results of this poll generated immediate buzz. The campaign of the incumbent governor, John Baldacci, apparently was so surprised and worried about this result that their website started focusing on how much young voters liked him. He even used his contacts in state government to commission a poll among K-12 students to show that he, too could win a student poll. However, while Pat's poll was targeted at voting age college students and other adults via mobile phone, the governor did not use mobile technology and thus his poll represented only elementary school students — which, of course, only made his poll seem comical and gave Pat's poll even better publicity.
Other ways of measuring the results of this texting outreach were the large numbers of college-age students who volunteered for the campaign, and the doubling of website traffic in the days following Pat's announcement of the text message-based vote.
Most telling, however, were the robocalls telling voters not to vote for LaMarche — and actually mentioning her by name — that were immediately launched by both the Republican and Democratic campaigns within days of the text messaging vote.
Text messaging experts all around the world recognized the historic nature of LaMarche's efforts. For example, Ewan MacLeod of SMS Text News, based in the United Kingdom, said that LaMarche was the first to PROPERLY use mobile in a campaign. At the conclusion of his article, he said, "Bodes well. Bodes very well indeed. I'm going to see if I can closely follow what goes on with Pat's campaign — I'm terrifically excited at seeing the medium getting used correctly. I haven't seen anything like this level of true engagement yet in either America or the United Kingdom. Bring it on."
5. Other Relevant Information
Voters who do not have or use a land line are routinely left out of the otherwise scientific polls that are used by many polling operations. This text message-based poll, by comparison, measured the opinions of those who watched the debate, decided to vote, and had cell phone technology and skill. The purpose of this poll was not to measure percentage of support among the broad electorate, but to collect evidence of strong existing support among a specific segment of mainly younger voters and reflect back that evidence of support to the electorate as a whole. The results show that, when approached and encouraged to participate, mobile voters enthusiastically respond.
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