Analysis of 2012 elections finds Americans largely don’t know or care about the small-scale visits politicians make at diners, delis and restaurants across US

Voters largely don’t know or care about the campaign visits of would-be presidents, according to a new study on the 2012 election that casts doubt on the benefits of the countless stops politicians make to meet Americans in diners and delis around the US.

Hillary Clinton has stressed such small “retail” visits throughout her campaign, stopping by churches, restaurants and local events like the New York gay pride parade fitting with a traditional credo: “All politics is local.” Her allies argue these intimate settings show a warmth and candor that Americans so rarely see, and Clinton has made dozens of trail stops in clear view of the cameras – though she almost always refuses to take questions from the press.

While her rival Donald Trump has gone “big league” with rallies in airport hangers and convention halls, Clinton has gone small. But, whatever the size, “campaign events probably don’t influence voters”, Ohio State political scientist Thomas Wood said.

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Wood studied data from Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s 2012 campaign and found that about 56% of local people surveyed after visits were unaware that they had even happened. In places that both candidates visited the numbers were only slightly better: only 36% to 45% of people were unaware.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mitt Romney as he speaks during a campaign stop at Homer’s Deli and Bakery in Clinton, Iowa, in December 2011. Photograph: Chris Carlson/AP

He also found that a limited effect of visits for those voters who did notice: support increased by 2-3% the day after a stop, and was fading by the third day. After visits, independents were 5% more likely to vote for Romney, Wood found, and they were the only group affected for longer than two days, leading him to conclude that they might only affect an extremely close election.

In the study, published this week in the Annals of the American Academic of Political and Social Science, Wood asked: “If visits have only a moderate impact on voters, but consume vast amounts of the candidates’ and their staff’s time, attention and resources, why not neglect visits and instead redouble candidates’ attention to fundraising?”

Wood said that mundane duties, such as hiring staff, renting office space and paying for yard signs, bumper stickers and office supplies have an outsize effect on voter behavior.

“Having somebody come to your door and give you a Trump yard sign or bumper sticker, it’s expensive. You need to have guys organize who goes where, who’s going to rent the office space, run the headquarters,” he said. “These things turn out to have small but meaningful effects.”

The failed campaigns of Republicans John Kasich and Chris Christie seemed to bear out Wood’s research. Kasich held more than 100 town hall events in New Hampshire but could not win the state, winning 15.8% of the vote, a distant second to Trump. Christie spent more than 70 days in the state and left in sixth place, with 7.4% of the vote.

Lynn Vavreck, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that Wood’s research fits with similar studies. Vavreck noted Obama’s successful data campaign relied heavily on voter data to target treated field operations “like a field goal unit: if the race is close, you want to have a good one.”

She similarly downplayed the importance of local stops, saying: “I don’t think anyone has ever said, and certainly the Obama people never said, that the reason a presidential campaign won an election was because of their field operation.”

Wood suggested that Clinton would be better off visiting donors who can give her the cash for her regional offices, though he noted that her campaign is so well financed – with almost $45m to begin July – that she may feel secure at the moment.

He also said campaign consultants may be more interested in their national image than local votes: a bus tour traps journalists together from one cheesy event to another, and gives campaigns time to grind their message home.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hillary Clinton greets a worker during a visit to a Dunkin’ Donuts in West Palm Beach, Florida, in March. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

In contrast to Clinton’s many detours and pauses, Trump rarely stops to meet and greet with voters. “For whatever reason Trump does not like buses,” Wood said, “and he’s had about half as many rallies as his Democratic opponent.”

Trump has instead hewed for months to the strategy that won him the Republican primary: rallies and a promiscuous approach to television interviews and Twitter. With only 82 days before election day [as of Thursday], Trump spent $4m on his first purchase of advertising in swing states on Thursday. Since June, Clinton’s campaign has spent more than $75m on ads, according to Kantar Media’s political ad tracker.

His style of campaigning, with a skeletal staff mostly using the internet and national media, is largely unprecedented – and reportedly relying on the Republican party for what voter data it does use.

Both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns relied heavily on voter data to target specific voter groups, and some veterans of his team have joined Clinton’s campaign. In the aftermath of Obama’s 2012 victory, his campaign manager Jim Messina told the Washington Post: “There’s always been two campaigns since the internet was invented, the campaign online and the campaign on the doors.”

With Trump’s recent collapse in national and swing state polls, following weeks of controversy and provocation, Clinton’s campaign appears to have followed at least some of the data. She has no open events scheduled for the rest of August, only fundraisers.