Chapter 21 — Exercises

These exercises ask you to apply the operational frameworks of this chapter to real or hypothetical campaigns. Most require you to leave the textbook and go look at FEC filings, news coverage, or your own district's data. That is intentional. Campaigns are not abstractions; they are operations that leave detailed paper trails. Working with the trails is part of learning how to read campaigns the way insiders do.

Exercise 21.1 — Estimate the staff and budget of a competitive race in your district

Identify the most recent competitive U.S. House or Senate race in your state (within the past three election cycles). "Competitive" here means a final margin of less than 10 percentage points and at least one party committee involvement.

Using FEC.gov (the candidate's principal campaign committee filings) and news coverage from your local newspaper or a campaign-focused outlet (Inside Elections, Cook Political Report, FiveThirtyEight, Politico):

  1. Estimate the total amount the campaign committee raised and spent during the cycle. Cite the FEC filing.
  2. Estimate the staff size at peak (the final 60 days). News coverage often mentions staff counts; if not, use the rule of thumb from this chapter (10–50 paid for a competitive House; 80–200 for a Senate in a medium state).
  3. Estimate the percentage of the budget that went to paid media versus field versus staff salaries. You can reverse-engineer this from FEC quarterly filings, which categorize disbursements.
  4. Compare your estimates to the budget snapshot in Section 21.2. What is similar? What is different? What surprises you?

(Approximate length: 600–900 words. Treat this as a working professional analyst's brief.)

Exercise 21.2 — Trace one campaign's spending breakdown via FEC

Pick any 2024 federal candidate's principal campaign committee. Go to FEC.gov and pull up their itemized disbursements report.

Sort the disbursements by recipient and identify:

  • The single largest vendor (likely a media-buying firm or digital consultant).
  • The total spent on payroll versus the total spent on outside vendors.
  • The number of distinct field offices (visible from rent payments to multiple addresses).
  • Any unusual line items — large catering payments, debate-prep travel, opposition-research firm payments.

Write a 500-word commentary on what the spending pattern reveals about the campaign's operational priorities. Did it spend more on field or on paid media? Did it pay top-of-market for consulting, or did it use cheaper alternatives? What does the pattern of vendor relationships suggest about the campaign's decision-making style?

Exercise 21.3 — Design a voter-contact plan

You are the field director for a hypothetical candidate running for an open U.S. House seat. The district has 350,000 registered voters. Your campaign has $400,000 budgeted for direct voter contact (separate from paid media). The election is six months away.

Using the voter-contact channel descriptions in Section 21.4 and the channel allocation framework in Section 21.4 (the multi-touch persuasion-universe approach):

  1. Identify how you would segment the 350,000 voters into priority tiers based on persuadability and turnout scores. Roughly how many voters would be in your "top tier" persuasion universe?
  2. Allocate the $400,000 across mail, digital ads, P2P texting, phone banking, and door-to-door canvassing. Justify your allocation with reference to the empirical literature (Green and Gerber, Kalla and Broockman) and the cost-per-voter estimates in this chapter.
  3. Sketch a 26-week timeline showing how the contact program ramps from low-intensity early outreach through saturation in the final 60 days.

Submit a 600–800 word memo, structured as if it were going to your campaign manager for sign-off.

Exercise 21.4 — Read a campaign memoir critically

Read selected chapters from one of the campaign memoirs in the further-reading list (David Plouffe, The Audacity to Win; Steve Israel, Big Guns or his published essays on call time; Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie; Brad Parscale's interviews; or another book of similar genre). Write a 700-word analysis that does three things:

  1. Identifies the operational decisions the author describes that are described in this chapter (call time, field organizing, message discipline, etc.).
  2. Identifies what the author leaves out — what aspects of the campaign you would have wanted to read about that the memoir glosses over.
  3. Argues whether the memoir is mostly self-justifying (the author retrospectively rationalizing decisions) or mostly analytical (the author honestly assessing what worked and didn't).

This is an exercise in reading insider sources critically. Memoirs are useful but not neutral; the campaign manager who wrote the book also wants the book to read well.

Exercise 21.5 — Steel-man negative campaigning's pros and cons

Section 21.9 presented the strongest version of each side of the negative-campaigning debate in compressed form. Expand both sides into a 700-word essay structured as a Federalist-style debate:

  • 350 words steel-manning the argument that negative campaigning is a legitimate and even necessary part of democratic accountability.
  • 350 words steel-manning the argument that negative campaigning, especially in its current saturation form, harms democratic culture and depresses participation.

You should not conclude in favor of one side. The grade is on the quality of each steel-man, not on a final judgment.

Exercise 21.6 — Deconstruct an actual ad

Find one TV or digital ad from any 2024 federal campaign (the Wesleyan Media Project's Political TV Ad Archive, the Cook Political Report ad tracker, or YouTube). Watch it five times. Then write a 500-word breakdown:

  1. What is the message of the ad? Express it in one sentence.
  2. Who is the target audience? What demographic, ideological, or geographic signals are visible in the imagery, music, and framing?
  3. Is the ad positive, comparative, or attack? If it is comparative or attack, what is the specific factual claim about the opponent, and is the claim sourced or contextualized?
  4. If you were the opposing campaign's rapid-response director, what would you say in response, in 30 seconds or less?

This exercise teaches close reading of campaign communication. Most voters do not watch ads this carefully. Knowing how to do so is a useful analytical skill.

Exercise 21.7 — Democracy Audit: Field-office presence in your district

Locate, if possible, the field offices opened in your congressional district by competitive campaigns in the most recent cycle. Sources: local newspaper coverage, campaign press releases, FEC disbursement records (rent payments to specific addresses), and the campaign's own website.

Map (literally — draw a map or use a free mapping tool) where the field offices were located. Note the demographic and political composition of the neighborhoods around each office, using Census tract data.

Write a 500-word analysis that addresses:

  1. Did the campaign concentrate offices in core supporter neighborhoods (mobilization strategy) or in swing neighborhoods (persuasion strategy)?
  2. Were entire portions of the district under-served by either party's field operation? What does that say about which voters the campaigns thought were worth reaching?
  3. If you were advising a future campaign in this district, where would you locate field offices, and why?

This is the field-organizing component of your Democracy Audit project (running across the textbook).

Exercise 21.8 — The candidate decision

Imagine a friend has approached you with the following question: "I'm thinking about running for the U.S. House in our district. Should I do it?"

Write a 600-word response that walks through the considerations covered in Section 21.1 — financial cost, opportunity cost, the invisible primary, the realistic time commitment — and translates them into specific questions your friend should answer before deciding.

You do not need to encourage or discourage your friend from running. You need to help them make the decision with their eyes open. Treat this as the kind of letter a thoughtful campaign professional might write to a first-time candidate considering the leap.

Exercise 21.9 — Compare two cycles' fundraising structures

Pick the same federal candidate's principal campaign committee in two different cycles (e.g., a senator's 2018 reelection and 2024 reelection, or a House member's 2018 and 2022 cycles). Pull both cycles' FEC reports.

Compare:

  1. The total raised and total spent in each cycle.
  2. The share of receipts coming from individuals giving $200 or more (itemized) versus individuals giving less than $200 (unitemized).
  3. The share of receipts from PACs (multi-candidate political action committees).
  4. The share of receipts transferred from joint fundraising committees.
  5. The single largest vendor in each cycle.

Write a 500-word analysis identifying what changed between the two cycles. Did the candidate's small-dollar share grow? Did the share of PAC money decline? Did the campaign change consultants between cycles? What does the pattern suggest about how the candidate's relationship with their donor base evolved?

This exercise is best completed late in the semester, after several chapters of campaign-finance and electoral-politics material. It draws together skills practiced in earlier exercises.

Exercise 21.10 — Interview a campaign veteran

If you have access to anyone who has worked on a federal, state, or local campaign — a family member, a college alumni-network contact, a faculty member who consulted on a race, a local elected official's former staff — request a 30-minute interview about their campaign experience.

Suggested questions to prepare:

  1. What was your role on the campaign?
  2. What did your typical day look like?
  3. What is the single most surprising thing about campaign operations that an outsider would not understand?
  4. What did the campaign do that you thought was operationally smart? What did it do that you thought was operationally wasteful?
  5. Did the candidate make decisions that you, as staff, disagreed with? How did you handle the disagreement?
  6. What is your honest assessment of the marginal value of the work you did personally?

Write up the interview in 500–700 words. The format should be a structured interview summary — your interpretation of what the interviewee said, not a verbatim transcript.

If you cannot identify any direct interview subject, an acceptable substitute is a close reading of three published interviews with campaign professionals (in podcasts, YouTube long-form interviews, or transcribed news features) and a 500-word synthesis of what the three interviews reveal about how campaign professionals think.

Submission expectations: All exercises should be in clear, well-edited prose. Cite sources where you reference data. The skills being practiced — reading FEC filings, decomposing budgets, designing operational plans, steel-manning contested arguments, conducting structured interviews — are the practical skills of professional politics, and they cannot be faked from textbook reading alone. Take them seriously.

A note on professional norms: campaign professionals talk to students more often than students assume, especially after a cycle has ended and the professionals are between contracts. A polite request for a 30-minute conversation, with specific prepared questions and an explicit time limit, is more often granted than declined. The relationships built through these conversations sometimes lead to internships and entry-level jobs in the political-consulting field. This is not the explicit purpose of the exercise, but it is a real downstream effect. Treat the interview seriously, follow up with a thank-you note, and remember that the political community in your state is small enough that reputations form quickly.