The Ames sample for the month leading up to Election Day (starting
Oct. 5) contained a
total of 40 mailings from the Iowa Democratic Party and one Democratic
National Committee coordinated piece.
Ten of the 41 mailings were persuasion mail for the 4th CD race between
Congressman Steve King and former First Lady Christie Vilsack.
There were five vote by mail and GOTV mailings. Twenty-five IDP
pieces and the DNC piece were persuasion mail for the presidential
race. These have tiny identifying notations that are easy to
figure out in most cases. The sample included mailings targeting
S seniors (8), G [?general] (5), WWC [?white working class] (4), W
women (3), Y youth (2), V veterans (2) and H hunters (1). The
mailings hitting Romney as favoring the rich at the expense of the
middle class seem particularly telling. One painted Romney as
"Romney Hood" and charged "Mitt Romney's plan raises your taxes but
gives tax breaks to millionaires, oil companies and those who ship U.S.
jobs overseas." Another showed Romney on his power boat with the
headline "Mitt Romney's Plan Cuts Taxes for Families Like His - But
Raises Taxes on Ours." It is not clear that the Romney campaign
ever
developed an effective response to those charges, which, if they didn't
convince people to vote for Obama, may have caused them not to vote at
all. In terms of
format, Democrats' presidential mailings were bigger and bolder than
those of the
Republicans; of the 26
persuasion mail pieces in the sample, 11 were 8 1/2" x 14" cards, eight
were 8 1/2" x 11" cards, and seven were single fold that opened, most
to 8 1/2" x 22". The presidential mailings all have the
disclaimer, "A communication of
Organizing for America Iowa, a project of the Iowa Democratic Party,
which paid for this communication" as well as the union bug and soy ink
graphic (the pieces supporting Vilsack have the recycle symbol rather
than the soy ink graphic).
