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Cover: Get Out the Vote

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Get Out the Vote

How to Increase Voter Turnout

Donald P. Green, Alan S. Gerber
Release Date: August 27, 2019

The most important element in every election is getting voters to the polls—these get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts make the difference between winning and losing office. With the first three editions of Get Out the Vote, Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber broke ground by introducing a new scientific approach to the challenge of voter mobilization and profoundly transformed how campaigns operate. Get Out the Vote has become the reference text for those who manage campaigns and study voter mobilization.

In this expanded and updated edition, Green and Gerber incorporate data from a trove of recent studies that shed new light on the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of various campaign tactics, including door-to-door canvassing, e-mail, direct mail, and telephone calls. The new edition gives special attention to “relational organizing” through friend-to-friend communication and events.

Available in time for the 2020 presidential campaign, this practical guide to voter mobilization will again be a must-read for consultants, candidates, and grassroots organizations.

Praise for Previous Editions

“Green and Gerber have studied turnout for years. Their findings, based on dozens of controlled experiments done as part of actual campaigns, are summarized in . . . Get Out the Vote, which is bound to become a bible for politicians and activists of all stripes.”
—Alan Krueger in the New York Times

Get Out the Vote shatters conventional wisdom about GOTV.”
—Hal Malchow in Campaigns & Elections

“Green and Gerber have provided a valuable resource for grassroots campaigns across the spectrum.”
National Journal

“Green and Gerber’s book represents important innovations in the study of turnout.”
Political Science Review

Authors

Donald P. Green is a J.W. Burgess Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, where he has taught since 2011. Prior to that, he taught at Yale University, where he directed Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies. An expert on elections and campaign finance, he has written widely on public opinion, political behavior, and experimental research methods.

Alan S. Gerber is a professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of American Politics at Yale University. He has published extensively on campaigns and elections and is coeditor (with Eric Patashnik) of Promoting the General Welfare: New Perspectives on Government Performance (Brookings, 2006).