Politically Invisible in America

Abstract

Campaigns, parties, interest groups, pollsters, and political scientists rely on voter-registration lists and consumer files to identify people as targets for registration drives, persuasion, and mobilization and to be included in sampling frames for surveys. We introduce a new category of Americans: the politically invisible—that is, people who are unreachable using these voter and marketing lists. Matching a high-quality, random sample of the US population to multiple lists reveals that at least 11% of the adult citizenry is unlisted. An additional 12% is mislisted (i.e., not living at their recorded address). These groups are invisible to list-based campaigns and research, making them difficult or impossible to contact. Two in five Blacks and (citizen) Hispanics are unreachable, but only 18% of whites. The unreachable are poorer than the reachable population, have markedly lower levels of political engagement, and are much less likely to report contact with candidates and campaigns. They are heavily Democratic in party identification and vote intention, favoring Obama versus Romney 73 to 27, with only 16% identifying as Republicans. That the politically invisible are more liberal and from historically marginalized groups shows that the turn to list-based campaigning and research could worsen existing biases in the political system.

When Do Voter Files Accurately Measure Turnout? How Transitory Voter File Snapshots Impact Research and Representation

“…Yet, the law of available data governs grassroots organizations to be constrained to registrants on the voter file at the time of its acquisition. Potentially the most elastic of voters, verging on staying home and turnout, or swing voters that have room to be persuaded, are "unlisted" and cannot be reached (Jackman and Spahn, 2021).…”

Does Context Outweigh Individual Characteristics in Driving Voting Behavior? Evidence from Relocations within the U.S

“…In fact, Catalist acknowledges that the commercial data used for unregistered citizens cover the voting-age (VAP), rather than the voting-eligible population (VEP). Moreover, Jackman and Spahn (2018) estimate that at least 11 percent of the adult citizenry does not appear in commercial voter lists like Catalist's. Second, Ansolabehere and Hersh (2014) argue that Catalist's deceased flag misses some dead voters, making the total number of deceased voters in the voter file lower than it really is.…”

Do political protests mobilize voters? Evidence from the Black Lives Matter protests

“…First, registrations capture only the political engagement of previously unregistered voters. Although studying this population is interesting in its own right, its non-representative nature limits the extent to which findings can be extrapolated to the electorate as a whole (Jackman & Spahn, 2021 ). Second, the analysis of timing variation in voter registrations requires assumptions about why individuals prefer to register to vote at one point in time rather than another.…”