Chapter 21 — Self-Check Quiz

Multiple Choice

1. Federal contribution limits for the 2025–26 cycle allow an individual to give which maximum amount per election to a federal candidate's principal campaign committee?

a) $2,800 b) $3,500 c) $5,000 d) $10,000

Answer: b) $3,500 per election. Primary, runoff, and general elections count separately, so an individual can give up to $7,000 to $10,500 across the cycle to a single candidate.

2. "Call time" in a competitive federal campaign typically consumes what share of the candidate's working hours?

a) 5–10% b) 10–20% c) 30–50% d) 70–80%

Answer: c) 30–50%. Multiple former members of Congress have publicly described their call-time routines (Tom Allen, Steve Israel, Tim Roemer), with consistent numbers in this range during competitive campaigns.

3. Which of the following is the dominant Democratic-aligned voter-file infrastructure?

a) i360 b) NGP VAN c) WinRed d) Data Trust

Answer: b) NGP VAN. i360 and Data Trust are Republican-aligned vendors. WinRed is a fundraising platform, not a voter-file system.

4. The Kalla and Broockman 2018 finding regarding voter contact during the heat of a general election concluded that:

a) Door-knocking produces large, durable shifts in candidate choice. b) Phone banking is the most effective form of contact. c) In-person contact during the campaign produces close to zero average effect on candidate choice, though it can still affect turnout. d) Direct mail outperforms all digital channels in persuasion.

Answer: c) Their meta-analysis of 49 field experiments found close to zero average effect on candidate choice during the heat of campaigns, though contact still affects turnout. Their separate work on "deep canvassing" outside the heat of campaigns found larger effects.

5. A "joint fundraising committee" (JFC) allows a single donor to:

a) Donate above the federal contribution limits to a single candidate. b) Write a single check that is split among multiple committees, each receiving up to its individual maximum. c) Make anonymous contributions to dark-money groups. d) Avoid disclosure of their identity to the FEC.

Answer: b) A JFC pools donations across committees and splits them up to each committee's maximum. The donor remains identified; the contribution simply allows multiple maximum gifts in a single transaction. McCutcheon v. FEC (2014) struck down aggregate limits, enabling these large checks.

6. "Murder boards" in campaign operations refer to:

a) Opposition research dossiers documenting an opponent's vulnerabilities. b) Mock debate sessions where staff simulate hostile questions to prepare the candidate. c) Lists of donors the campaign is unwilling to take money from. d) Internal trackers of negative news stories about the opponent.

Answer: b) Murder boards are debate-prep simulations where staff and outside experts pepper the candidate with hostile questions until responses are sharp and on-message.

7. Which of the following best describes the empirical evidence on negative ads?

a) Negative ads consistently fail to move voters. b) Negative ads, especially comparative ads, reliably affect voter assessments of candidates. c) Negative ads only work in primary elections. d) Negative ads are most effective when run by the candidate's own committee, not by outside groups.

Answer: b) Decades of research, consolidated in the Wesleyan Media Project, John Geer's work, and others, find that negative ads — especially comparative ads contrasting candidates' records — reliably move voter assessments. The ethics of their use is contested, but the effectiveness is empirically established.

8. A "persuasion universe" in modern campaign modeling is best defined as voters with:

a) High turnout score, high partisan score for the candidate, low persuadability score. b) Low turnout score, low partisan score, high persuadability score. c) High turnout score, middle partisan score, high persuadability score. d) Any voter who has not yet been contacted.

Answer: c) A persuasion-universe voter is likely to vote (high turnout score), has not committed to either side (middle partisan score), and is judged persuadable. Mobilization-universe voters, by contrast, have high partisan scores but lower turnout scores.

9. ActBlue and WinRed are:

a) Voter-file vendors used by Democratic and Republican campaigns respectively. b) Online fundraising platforms used by Democratic and Republican campaigns respectively. c) Polling firms that work primarily with one party each. d) Super PACs that have funded races since 2010.

Answer: b) ActBlue (D) and WinRed (R) process online contributions, primarily small-dollar. ActBlue processed roughly $4.1 billion in 2024; WinRed roughly $2.3 billion.

10. The "invisible primary" in political science refers to:

a) Closed primaries that exclude independents. b) The pre-formal-primary period during which party leaders, donors, and endorsers shape the field of candidates. c) Caucuses held without media coverage. d) Nominating conventions before the modern primary system.

Answer: b) Cohen, Karol, Noel, and Zaller's The Party Decides (2008) describes the invisible primary as the period before formal primary contests when party actors signal preferences and winnow the field. The model's predictive power has been challenged in the post-2016 Republican environment.

11. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), as currently interpreted, generally permits which of the following?

a) Automated robocalls to cell phones without recipient consent. b) Peer-to-peer text messages sent by a human operator pressing send. c) Pre-recorded voicemails left on cell phones without consent. d) Mass voice broadcasts to cell numbers obtained from a vendor list.

Answer: b) Messages sent by a human operator pressing send are not "automatically dialed" under the TCPA and Facebook v. Duguid (2021) narrowing of the autodialer definition. This is why peer-to-peer texting platforms have become dominant in modern campaigns.

12. The roughly correct staff size for a competitive U.S. House race in 2024–26 is:

a) 5–8 paid staff. b) 10–50 paid staff. c) 100–300 paid staff. d) 500–1,000 paid staff.

Answer: b) 10–50 paid staff for a competitive House race. Senate races run 80–400 paid staff depending on state size; presidential general-election campaigns run 1,000–4,000 paid staff at peak.

Short Answer

13. Distinguish between a campaign's "ground game" and its "air war." Briefly describe what each consists of operationally and what the empirical evidence says each contributes to the campaign's outcome.

Sample answer: The "ground game" refers to direct voter-contact operations: door-to-door canvassing, phone banks, peer-to-peer texts, field offices, and the volunteer infrastructure that runs them. The "air war" refers to paid media — broadcast TV ads, radio, and digital advertising on platforms like Meta and YouTube. The empirical evidence (Green and Gerber, Kalla and Broockman) suggests the ground game produces real but modest effects on turnout (a few percentage points among contacted voters) and limited persuasion effects during the heat of campaigns. The air war reaches more voters but with shallower individual impact. Most competitive campaigns spend 50–65% of budgets on paid media and 8–14% on field operations, reflecting the cost-per-impression advantage of broadcast even though field has higher per-contact effects.

14. Explain the role of the campaign manager. What kinds of decisions does the manager make, and how does the manager's role differ from the candidate's?

Sample answer: The campaign manager is the chief executive of the campaign — responsible for budget, staffing, strategic execution, and the daily operation of voter contact, fundraising, communications, and field operations. The candidate sets the vision, makes the largest strategic calls, and is the public face of the campaign; the manager makes 80–200 smaller decisions per day that determine whether the vision is executed. The manager is typically a paid professional with prior cycle experience. The candidate sets messages; the manager enforces message discipline. The candidate meets with major donors; the manager runs the finance operation that produces the meeting list. A common saying captures the relationship: "The candidate has a campaign. The campaign has a campaign. The campaign manager's job is to keep the gap closed."

15. Describe the post-Citizens United "third-party hits" pattern in negative campaigning. Why does it allow candidates to remain "positive" in their own ads while the campaign as a whole runs negative content?

Sample answer: Outside groups — super PACs, party committees, and 501(c)(4) social-welfare organizations — can run unlimited independent expenditures since Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and SpeechNow.org v. FEC (2010). They cannot legally coordinate with candidates' campaigns, but they often share strategic intelligence informally and pursue the same general goals. This allows a campaign's own committee to run only positive ads about the candidate while allied outside groups run the harshest attacks on the opponent. The candidate publicly criticizes the negative tone of the race ("not from us"); the outside group does the work; the strategic effect on voters is the same as if the candidate ran the attacks directly. Both parties use this structure routinely, and it is the dominant pattern in modern competitive races.

16. What is "deep canvassing," and what makes it operationally different from standard canvassing?

Sample answer: Deep canvassing is a voter-contact technique developed by progressive advocacy organizations and studied by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla. The canvasser engages a voter in a 10-to-20-minute conversation that draws out the voter's own values and personal experiences, listens carefully, and offers a reframing of the policy issue under discussion through the voter's own value framework rather than through partisan or ideological language. A 2016 paper in Science found that a single deep-canvassing conversation about transgender rights produced durable shifts in voter attitudes three months later — an effect almost unprecedented in the persuasion literature. Subsequent replications have found the effect to be real but harder to scale than the initial result suggested. Deep canvassing differs from standard canvassing in three ways: each conversation takes 10–20 minutes rather than 1–3 minutes; the canvasser must be trained at length to listen and reframe rather than read a script; and the technique is generally used for advocacy on specific issues outside campaign season rather than during the saturation period of a candidate campaign.