Operations Research in Planning Political Campaign Strategies

Costs of running political campaigns have increased enormously over the last decade and methods have been sought to make campaigns, especially for national office, more efficient in their utilization of resources. This paper reports the results of applying operations-research techniques to the 1970 John V. Tunney Senatorial campaign. The principal task for the operations-research specialist was to develop a method to target precincts in the state for registration drives and for the get-out-the-vote effort in the campaign. In addition, “swing” precincts were identified for media and candidate attention.