Imagine a big game with two dominant teams locked in a pitched rivalry. It was down to the title game, and no side was clearly favored. For each team, a moment like this wouldn’t come once again in four years, or ever.

Imagine further that the rules of this game allowed for each team to choose how many players they fielded. The defending champions entered the field with sixteen players. The challengers, blessed with the same monetary resources, made the strategic choice to play with just six.

Which side would win?

A sport where one team would choose to put itself at such a disadvantage seems far fetched, but a version of this scenario actually played out in the 2012 Presidential election, a fact illuminated by a very informative study released by the New Organizing Institute at last week’s RootsCamp.

“Who are the campaigners in America?” that looks at the racial makeup, gender, and pay of campaign staff on both sides of the aisle. NOI used raw FEC data to create a dataset of over 23,000 Federal campaign workers in 2012 and matched it to public voter records. What interested us most about this raw data set, which you can access here, is the further evidence it presents of the human capital disparity between Democrats and Republicans in recent elections.

In total, the study identified 15,972 people who worked on Democratic campaigns compared to just 6,087 who worked on Republican federal races. (And fully one fifth of Republican campaign workers nationally were employed by just one campaign, Linda McMahon’s very well financed bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut.)

In Presidential swing states, the gap was even worse for the GOP. If Republicans feel like they’re being outdone in the ground game, that’s because they are, by a margin of roughly three-to-one. This chart breaks down staff based in each of the swing states by party.

Democrat Republican Dem %
National 15,972 6,087 70.89%
Florida 1,308 384 77.30%
North Carolina 1,247 157 88.82%
Ohio 598 243 71.11%
Virginia 527 263 66.71%
Pennsylvania 383 157 70.93%
Colorado 447 90 83.24%
Nevada 498 20 96.14%
Wisconsin 300 173 63.42%
Minnesota 338 96 77.88%
Iowa 233 73 76.14%

 

More than the raw numbers, what the data numbers tell us about what people are doing is also interesting. About a week ago, Alex Lundry from TargetPoint Consulting caught my interest with this tweet looking at the skills of political operatives on LinkedIn:

Such an analysis of LinkedIn data could be extended to a host of other areas. What about other political skillsets? How did they overlap with people who worked on Democratic and Republican campaigns as measured by their LinkedIn profiles?

In this case, the social data appears to line up with the hard numbers quite nicely. In 2012, Democrats fielded 70% of the total campaign staff on the Federal level, and on LinkedIn, they account for 71% of the references to political parties in profiles. This indicates that this gap has persisted for quite a while, as virtual resumes are likely to include stints working on campaigns. This also suggests that any methodological issues with analysis of noisier LinkedIn data don’t cancel out what appears to be a persistent Democratic edge in staffing across election cycles.

partisanbreakdown
Click to EnlargeFor campaigns, more staff means more of everything, pretty much. The chart above shows the partisan breakdown of people advertising various skillsets. In no area analyzed did Republicans win. But take a look at the areas that are the most Democratic－they include advanced aspects of data, statistical modeling, and field organizing, with more than 75% of mentions for these categories. And take a look at the areas that are the most Republican－they include things like mail, phones, advertising, and absentee ballots. Here, Democrats won but by narrower margins: 63% for mail, 60% for advertising, 55% for automated phones, and 50% for absentee ballots. Anyone who has hung around GOP campaigns can tell you that this sounds totally intuitively right. Republicans concentrate their talent on the most traditional aspects of campaigning, while Democrats tend to blaze new ground in areas like data analytics, and focus more on field.

One interesting finding in light of the much-discussed “digital divide” between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats were slightly less well represented in “digital” jobs than they were in campaign staffing overall. Democrats represent 68% of the digital operatives, compared to 71% of overall political staff. However, Democrats still led overwhelmingly in technology as represented by references to various programming languages. For Python (used heavily in statistical modeling), Democrats were 76%. In PHP, they were 75%. For Rails, the figure was 74%. Republicans still need to better distinguish between technology and digital, and hire accordingly.

Data like this can show us where to concentrate resources when it comes to training the next generation of talent. At a fundamental level, the GOP has been under-investing in people across election cycles. And not just in areas like digital and data, but in the field. As the party continues its post-2012 overhaul, data like this should be important to informing strategy decisions.

Engage had numerous people on the ground at RootsCamp, listening and talking to digital practitioners and technologists from across the aisle to apply the best insights in our work. We shared what we learned in this Storify compilation from inside RootsCamp.