A 300,000-pamphlet church-lot leafleting effort flipped Iowa’s Senate race

Evidence

In Iowa, for example, polls and pundits expected that the incumbent Democratic senator, Richard C. “Dick” Clark, would coast easily to reelection; no poll heading into the November balloting indicated that Clark held a lead of fewer than ten percentage points. Six years earlier, Clark had walked across the state to call attention to his grassroots, upstart challenge to Jack Miller, the two-term Republican incumbent, and Clark prevailed with 55 percent of the vote. He remained a popular figure in the state. Antiabortion activists, however, had targeted Clark, and on the final weekend of Clark’s reelection campaign, representatives of Iowans for Life (predominantly Roman Catholics) distributed approximately 300,000 pamphlets in church parking lots. Two days later, in a low-turnout election, Roger Jepsen, the Republican pro-life challenger, defeated Clark. An election day survey by the Des Moines Register indicated that about twenty-five thousand Iowans voted for Jepsen because of his stand on abortion. — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 126

Categorization

• QUESTION: The turnaround mechanism — low turnout plus a two-day-old leaflet blitz delivered to a captive audience at church — deserves scrutiny as a template for how narrow-interest blocs can sway low-turnout elections. Worth comparing to present-day get-out-the-vote tactics.
• XREF: connects to: Church-parking-lot leafleting on the final weekend flipped three 1978 Senate races; Megachurches manufactured political ideology that then flowed to Washington — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White…, 472; Forty-two percent of white evangelicals backed Trump before the Iowa caucuses — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White…, 2 (+1 more)

Related

• Church-parking-lot leafleting on the final weekend flipped three 1978 Senate races (similarity 0.91)
• About 25,000 Iowa voters were swayed by abortion in the 1978 Senate race (similarity 0.86)

Broader Connections

• Forty-two percent of white evangelicals backed Trump before the Iowa caucuses #exemplifies (0.78) — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 2
• Megachurches manufactured political ideology that then flowed to Washington #expands (0.72) — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 472