Scores are predictions of individual voter behavior. Scores are numbers between 0 and 1 given to each person that represent probabilities of a behavior. For example, if we were to gather all of the voters that had a turnout score of .8 in 2020 we would expect to find that 80% of that group actually voted on election day in 2020.
Deck’s scores are based upon the huge troves of data that Deck has collected about the upcoming election and those in the past. The scores that Deck creates are most notably different from the standard scores because all of our scores are personalized — i.e., specific to your campaign and district — and they do not rely on surveys. Any score that you have through Deck will be these personalized scores.
Support scores are the likelihood that a voter will support Democrats or a specific candidate. Most candidates will have access to at least one generic support score. The question that a generic support score is answering is “how likely is this voter to vote for a Democrat?” The support score that you get from Deck is answering the question “how likely is this voter to vote for you?”
This is the likelihood that a voter will vote for a different party than they did in the last election. The partisan elasticity score is answering the question “how likely is this voter to vote for a different party than they voted for last time?” This score will help build a more effective persuasion universe. Most candidates do not have access to a partisan elasticity score.
A turnout score is the likelihood that a voter will vote in the election. General turnout scores answer the question “how likely is this voter to vote in this election?” The turnout scores at Deck are answering the question more specifically: “how likely is this voter to vote in this election given all of the candidates on the ballot?”
This is the likelihood that a voter will donate to your campaign. This is a fairly unique score to Deck since it is built off of the voter file and most fundraising lists are not built off of the voter file. The question that this score is asking is “will this voter donate to your campaign?”
First, what is a universe in a campaign context? A universe is a subset of voters from your district that you want to target with a specific message. The most common types of universes are turnout and persuasion. You might have more universes such as fundraising, volunteer recruitment and turnout based on method (eg. voting by mail, early in-person voting and day of voting).
By having several scores for every person in your district it allows you to quickly and easily build universes of different groups of people you may want to target with specific tactics and messages, based on their score combinations. In each universe section, we will cover what those score combinations are! You'll notice that we won't rely heavily on giving you a specific number in these examples because it varies by campaign what that cut off is and we value making sure that our users understand what the data is saying and not just knowing a number.
Universes are critical for campaigns because they will help you allocate your resources effectively. Every voter in your district should not get the same message and you likely do not have the resources to contact each voter in your district. Some campaigns in smaller districts feel the desire to try to contact every voter in their district. However, Deck advises against this method because it will limit your ability to specifically target the right voters with the right message. Contacting every voter once won’t help you if you have a group of voters who need multiple contacts to turnout or to persuade.
In your persuasion universe, you want voters who do not already support you but will be open to both your message and changing their mind. You do not want your biggest supporters or your biggest opponents to be in this universe.