Three degrees of separation
How a big volunteer operation wins
By Mark Sump

One of the lasting affects of the old political paradigm is that volunteer activities are free or cheap ways to marginally influence an election. It follows the old school thinking that it’s the number of phone calls made or the number of doors knocked that are the real influence volunteers can deliver. By that thinking, the volunteer influence merely displaces some of the phoning or canvassing that the campaign plans to outsource at the end of the campaign leading up to Election Day.

On its face one would think that this form of stressing volunteer activity fits with the new paradigm. Let’s review the most essential element of the paradigm: Television now reinforces opinions voters form by virtue of recommendations from people around them, friends, neighbors, co-workers…etc.

Voter contact activities from volunteers in a campaign do have more impact than a telemarketing company or paid canvassers. This impact is still only marginal. So, how do volunteers substantially impact a campaign if not through direct voter contact?

Three degrees of separation!!

When I started working on campaigns 25 years ago, we had no email, no cell phones, no computers, no internet, no telemarketing centers, no mail houses. We had volunteers and we depended on those volunteers for nearly every element of voter contact.

I recall my first presidential campaign in 1988 and my boss explaining to me the first tenet of my three degrees of separation theory: Every volunteer on a campaign will influence the vote of 50 voters by virtue of who they talk to in their own lives…friends, neighbors, family, co-workers. It isn’t about how many people they reached on the phone bank or at the doors. It’s all about who they come into contact with in their daily lives.

Remember, the new paradigm: Voters are primarily influenced by people around them, people they trust.

Okay, so lets do the math. If a campaign has 1000 active volunteers and they each influence 50 voters, the first degree of separation is 50,000 votes.

So lets say that the second degree of separation is calculated at 20% of that, so those 50,000 voters each influence 10 voters. The second degree of separation adds 500,000 voters. So now we’re at 551,000 voters.

Okay, now we’re cooking. The third degree of separation is calculated again at 20%, so those 500,000 voters will each influence 2 voters. The third degree of separation adds 1,000,000 voters.

Now we’re at 1,551,000 votes! Think about it. How many campaigns are won with 1.55 million votes?

Figuring out how many volunteers you need is rather simple. Take the expected vote and divide it by 1,551 and that will give you the number of volunteers a campaign needs to win.

This is the crux of the new paradigm…people win campaigns.

Next week I’ll define “active volunteer” in Volunteers Win Campaigns.