Political mailers have been hitting mailboxes over the last few weeks with the intensity increasing into the early voting period which begins on Tuesday. Election Day is March 5. The early voting period is scheduled to end on March 1st.
As a Democratic Party stronghold, El Paso county-wide elections are generally settled in the March Primary because the winner of the Democratic Party Primary is likely to prevail in the November elections.
El Paso News analyzed the voter data to identify who is being targeted by the various campaigns. Not all voters are being visited by the candidates running for office or receiving their election materials, digital or otherwise. Generally, who receives a mailer, a robocall, a text message or a visit from a campaign or candidate is determined by the voter’s voting history. Campaigns are also targeting voters on their social media. On Facebook, for example, political ads are shown to the Facebook user based on targeted demographics, including their likelihood of casting a ballot for the candidate in the Primary.
How the voters are selected for targeted outreach is generally done by identifying the voters that are likely to vote. Because political funds are limited, campaigns will segment their target voter lists into selected lists for mailers, robocalls, visits and other voter outreach. Mailers, the most expensive form of voter outreach, is limited to specific smaller targeted voters.
Although it is generally assumed that targeted voters are those that vote frequently – the fact is that some campaigns use sophisticated targeting methods to develop their target lists. Some campaigns may decide to target newly registered voters in hopes of persuading them to cast a vote for them or others may choose to target an infrequent voter that meets a specific criterion.
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Less sophisticated campaigns use the County’s voter list to send materials or visit potential voters because they happen to be in a neighborhood, they are comfortable with. Others may sort the County’s list on whether a voter voted in the last Primary, or two, three or four Primaries or in combination with general elections.
More sophisticated campaigns use voter management tools like NGP VAN, the go-to online tool for most El Paso Democratic Party candidates. There are other voter management tools like Nation Builder and Ecanvasser. Each of them has a fee that the campaign must pay to use the voter manager. Nation Builder, for example, can cost around $400 a month for a countywide election. Ecanvasser starts at $99 a month and goes as high as $599 a month depending on the features the candidate selects.
However, the fee is just part of the cost. Campaigns need the voting data for the voters in their political race. Although the County provides raw voting data, which can be added to any of the tools, the County’s data lacks other essential data elements like the telephone numbers, email addresses and social media channels of the voters. Without these additional elements, campaigns cannot effectively send text messages, or run social media advertising for the voters they want to reach. Although the County’s data provides the address of the voter for visits to the voters or to send them the mailers, these are time consuming and expensive, hampering the candidate’s ability to effectively reach the voters that are likely to vote starting on Tuesday.
For the additional data the campaign needs they must resort to data brokers that provide telephone numbers or email addresses. These range in price from about $600 to an average cost of $1,000 for reaching the frequent county-wide voters.
The NGP VAN Platform
The NGP VAN, frequently used in El Paso, is limited to candidates running as a Democrat. Candidates in El Paso who want to use NGP VAN must be approved to use it by the Texas Democratic Party and not all candidates are approved. NGP VAN does not publish its fees for using the software. We looked at the financial campaign reports for the top three contenders for the Texas House of Representatives District 77 seat to ascertain how much the NGP VAN fee is. The District 77 seat does not include all County voters but it is large enough to provide us with a fair assessment of the cost to use NGP VAN.
Alexsandra Annello paid $1,300 to the Texas Democratic Party for “fees” for “VAN” on November 3, 2023. A review of Norma Chavez’ campaign finance reports show that Chavez also spent $1,300 in two payments of $650 each on November 5 and another $650 on November 16 to use “Texas VAN.” Vince Perez reported spending $1,300 on “VAN/Voter Data” on January 11.
The NGP VAN platform appears to base its fees on the number of voters available in a specific race. For example, Josh Acevedo who recently won the City Council District 2 seat reported paying $560 to the Texas Democratic Party for “Voter File Access” on October 19, 2023. There were 47,838 registered voters in District 2 and 2,754 turned out to vote. In the Texas House 77 race there are 115,826 potential voters.
NGP VAN, who purports to include telephone numbers, voting histories and voter modeling is incomplete for the needs of El Paso’s Democratic Party candidates. For example, according to the Norma Chavez’ campaign finance report of February 5, she paid L2, a data broker, $600 for “data” on January 22. The “data” is likely telephone numbers to send text messages to targeted voters because on January 1, Chavez reported spending $95.94 with CallFire.
CallFire has been an NGP VAN partner for telephone messaging from NGP VAN since 2012. Had the Norma Chavez Campaign believed in the NGP VAN telephone data it is unlikely she would have spent $600 to buy “data” from the data broker L2.
Targeting the likely voter is important to candidates to maximize their campaign funds to motivate the voter likely to vote for them on Election Day. With 503,583 voters registered to vote in the County as of this morning, targeting all of them would be extremely expensive and visiting them at their home would be impossible in any election cycle.
Because of this, political candidates must focus on the voter that will likely vote in the March 5 Primary and will likely vote for the candidate that is targeting them.
For this, a voter management tool that includes voter histories, provides telephone numbers and email addresses and some type of behavior modeling is important to all candidates running for office. The cost of such a tool ranges from $300 to about $1,000. The more segmentation of the voter data the tool provides the higher the expense it is for the campaign.
The primary voter data comes from the County Elections Department. Any candidate or voter can request a list of voters who are registered to vote in the County. Included in the digital list of voters are lists of elections a particular voter voted in. Generally, the County’s voter list includes whether a particular voter voted in the last ten elections. These can be the Primaries, General and other elections including municipal elections.
Although some political campaigns choose to use the County data as their primary source for targeting the voters they wish to reach, more sophisticated campaigns use a combination of tools to create a target list of voters who will likely vote in the March 5 Primary. From that target list, campaigns segment the voters into voters who will likely vote for them and the ones that will likely not vote for them. The campaigns will focus on getting the likely voters to cast a ballot on Election Day in their favor.
Who are El Paso’s prolific voters? Who are the people in El Paso who are receiving the mailers, robocalls, text messages and knocks on their doors?
El Paso’s Prolific Voters
Of the over half a million El Paso voters, only about 303,359 have cast a ballot in a Primary or General election in the last ten years. That means that 39.76%, or 200,224 voters have never voted in a Primary or General election. Of the voters that have cast at least one ballot in the last ten years in a March or November election, 11,684 El Pasoans have a perfect 100% voting record in Primary elections.
When we look at the voters who vote in the General elections, we find that 13,192 are 100% General election voters.
However, when we look at both the voters who vote in the Primaries with those that vote in the General elections, we find that the two voter types are not the same. Many of the 100% Primary voters have a 0% score in the November elections. Likewise, those who are 100% General election voters are not necessarily the same voters who vote in the Primaries.
Thus, the El Paso Primary voter is not the same as the El Paso November voter.
It is important to point out that our methodology differs from most campaign consultants who choose voters to target on voting records from the last four primaries, for example. The so-called four-of-four voter commonly chosen by campaign consultants assumes that a voter had the opportunity to cast four ballots in the last four Primaries, or General elections even though the voter may have not been eligible to vote in the last four selected elections.
Our model, instead, looks at the eligible date of the voter and assigns them a percentage score based on the number of eligible elections versus the number of ballots cast. Thus, a voter who was eligible to vote in two Primaries and cast a ballot in the two Primaries they were eligible to vote in is assigned a 100% voting score. The common four-of-four methodology normally does not account for a voter’s eligibility date and a two-of-two voter is likely overlooked by the campaign that uses a standard four-of-four model.
As our data analysis demonstrates, the voters who will cast a ballot on March 5 are not necessarily the voter that will turn out in November. However, it is commonly assumed that most El Paso voters are Democrats.
Texas does not require voters to select a party. Instead, in Texas, a voter that casts a ballot in the Democratic Party ballot is labeled a Democrat. And a voter that votes on the Republican ballot is labeled a Republican voter.
But the voter may not consider themselves a Democrat or a Republican simply because they voted in a party’s Primary ballot. This is because in El Paso, the election history shows that it is in the Primary where the elected office is generally selected. Thus a voter may choose to vote in a party ballot not because of party allegiance but because of an interest in who is elected to an office or offices on the ballot.
Assuming that every voter in El Paso that casts a Democratic Party ballot is a Democrat is based on an incomplete profile of the voter. Our data shows that 10,903 El Paso voters have cast at least one Republican ballot in the last ten years. They range in age from 20 to 60 years old. They also represent zip codes from across town.
There are 30,068 El Paso voters who consistently vote in the Democratic Party ballots.
With 27,829 Primary and General election voters in the 79938-zip code, that zip code has the most prolific voters according to our data. The 79936-zip code hosts the second most prolific voter in El Paso. The zip code with the least concentration of engaged El Paso County voter is the 79821-zip code with 1,897 active voters.
Our voter data analysis shows that of the voters who cast a ballot in the Primaries and General elections consists of 134,252 male voters. They represent 44.25% of the voters we analyzed.
The average age of El Paso’s prolific voter is 52 years old.
Although it is generally accepted that older voters tend to vote more than their younger counterparts, our data shows that there are 421 20-year-old voters with 100% voting records in either the Primaries, General or both elections. Our data also shows that those aged 25 and younger – who are often ignored by campaigns – account for 21,954 of El Paso’s prolific voters.
El Paso News will relaunch our early voting tool on Wednesday showing who has cast a ballot each day, either as an early voter or as mail in ballot. At a glance, readers will be able to see who has voted and see if they are included on our list of El Paso’s prolific voters.
Disclosure
Each election cycle, El Paso News publishes the names of the political candidates that the technology company owned by Martín Paredes provides branding and technology services to. Although not required to, we provide this list to our readers for transparency purposes. Clients of Cognent have no influence over the stories we choose to cover. Click here for more details.