Ground wars: Personalized political communication in American campaigns

This dissertation deals with door-to-door canvassing and phone banking as forms of "personalized political communication"---premeditated practices that use people as media for political communication. I analyze what political operatives in the United States call the "ground war" to identify its implications for how we understand processes of political communication and for how we understand political organizations and political participation. On the basis of data from ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in two congressional districts during the 2008 elections, I will argue that personalized political communication on the large scale we have seen in recent years---where more than forty percent of the population has been contacted in person---requires resources well beyond what the campaign organizations built around individual candidates command and is pursued instead by wider "campaign assemblages." These include not only staffers and consultants, but also allied groups, numerous individual volunteers and paid part-timers, and an advanced technical infrastructure for targeting voters built by the national party. Close scrutiny of how such campaign assemblages engage in personalized political communication leads me to challenge the dominant view of political communication in contemporary America---that it primarily represses turnout and turn people off politics. I highlight how campaigns even as they bankroll negative advertisements, feed the horserace coverage, and resort to direct mail attacks also work hard to get out (partisan) voters and get people involved in (instrumental) forms of political participation. Analysis of how campaign assemblages wage ground wars leads me to problematize the widespread idea that American politics is increasingly the province of a small coterie of professionals. I show how even well-funded campaigns for federal office continue to rely on a wide range of non-professional elements and that campaign organizations themselves remain at most unevenly professionalized. Finally, attention to campaigns' instrumental need for people to engage in the labor-intensive work of contacting millions of voters one at a time leads me to suggest that where elections are competitive and ambition thus still made to counteract ambition, political operatives and organizations today have a renewed self-interest in getting people to participate in the political process as volunteers and voters.