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Democrat election professionals at the top level in the DNC and across their other major election infrastructure were coerced in 2005 to 2008 by the AFL-CIO to abandon their old ways and rebuild methods that use modern data science and testing. The AFL-CIO used their heavy funding pressure to force the political consultants to start listening to PhD social science researchers who had discovered new ways to use modern experimentation to make campaigns more effective. To this day, Republicans still do most things the same ways they did in the 1990s. No one has yet persuaded the Republican election professionals to change.
No. These methods are just very good use of modern tools to study voters and find pockets of people who can be targeted with new information that leads them to switch sides. There is no question that liberal donors have ALSO funded manipulations of rules and procedures designed to make the processes advantage Democrats and we do not support those things. But the persuasion tools Valor America is using here are on the “legitimate” side of Democratic election changes.
In the past, the only way to get more votes reliably was to find more voters who already believe in Republican principles and get them to vote. This is called GOTV. But there are tens of millions of other voters who identify as Democrats but who are close in belief to becoming Republicans if we can just find them and talk to them directly. This kind of work is called PERSUASION and it has far more potential to increase our votes. The problem is in finding those voters and knowing what exactly they need to know to finalize their transition away from the Democrats. THE NEW METHODS EFFECTIVELY FIND THEM AND DETERMINE WHAT MESSAGES MOVE THEM.
Experiments over the last 18 years show these methods can reliably move the vote by 2.5% but can sometimes result in movement of 5% or more. Our own best case was the campaign we did in Texas in 2014 that saw an increase among Hispanic voters for the Republican of 18%.
We cannot legally share directly with a candidate who we are working to advertise for, but we have been promoting these methods in the “off-season” for eight years in hopes of persuading Republican efforts to invest in the same training we have so that they might bring these methods into their work in the next election.
In a Presidential race, Get Out The Vote efforts rarely make much difference because almost all voters who sometimes vote are already planning to vote. There is little room to get more votes. Efforts to get disinterested voters to vote rarely result in any significant increases in voting. But there is a block of 15% to 25% of Democrat voters who actually share values with our Republican candidates. That block needs bold messages that will awaken them to this truth but bold messages only work well if we can target those “persuadable” voters and avoid the voters who might get more motivated to vote for the Democrats by the same bold messages. Good Targeting was never possible before, but it is now. Persuasion ads targeted to the right voters are the “game changer” of these new methods.
If we can target JUST the persuadable Democrats (15% of them) and avoid the other people who will not like our messages, that saves a lot of money. Not only do we not waste money on the 85% but the messages to the 15% are far more effective if they can be bolder because they are only being heard by our targets. The scientists estimate that our spending is 7 times more effective than traditional political ads guided by educated guesses of experienced campaign pros.
In 2005, the political director at the AFL-CIO union spent $15 million to bring together a team led by Yale University researchers Dr. Alan Gerber and Dr. Donald Greene charging them with “re-inventing Democratic election efforts.” That year-long project spun off a massive effort now called The Analyst Institute. Other efforts have been founded from that and the result is now hundreds of scientists in the Democratic election world guiding every major election campaign in far more efficient and effective methods than were used before 2005. Two terms of Obama were a direct result of this.
A man with a degree in political theory from the University of Dallas, Joe Arlinghaus, learned of the Analyst Institute and their methods in 2013. He hired the only Republican political scientists who have earned degrees in the Democratic training schools at the University of Virginia, Boston University, and Tufts (among others). He did a test in the 2014 Gubernatorial race in Texas which was a smashing success and then founded Valor America in 2016 to permanently use these tools while building an operation large enough and effective enough to get the attention of every Republican leader.
With the help of 7500 new small donors and another 500 larger donors, Valor America is planning to spend $10 million on targeted ads in 6 states where both the Presidency and control of the U.S. Senate will be decided. Please help us go beyond that goal.