ABSTRACT
A dozen or more campaign manuals offer to guide strategists through the process of sending the right message to the right voter. To learn about targeting neighborhoods, mailboxes, or individual voters, strategists might read Catherine Shaw’s The Campaign Manager (2014) or John Klemanski and David Dulio’s The Mechanics of State Legislative Campaigns (2005), both of which offer step-by-step instructions. Alternatively, the work can be outsourced to a professional. Consultants with a knack for targeting often specialize in survey research, direct mail, or statistical modeling. Old-style party bosses would not recognize a political marketplace filled with independent professionals and trained amateurs. Voter targeting is still learnable at party headquarters by working with a field coordinator—but in a time when campaigns are run by consultants and when candidates hire their own teams, burgeoning experts need not apprentice themselves to party officials.
