With Obama’s VP announcement imminent via text message, reporters are taking a renewed interest in the study that Allison Dale and I completed last cycle. We found a 3 percentage point intent-to-treat effect for mobilization text messages (with a 4 percentage point treatment-on-treated). For those of you not familiar with the field experiment lingo, those results mean that campaigns who use text messaging to get-out-the-(newly-registered)-vote can expect a boost in turnout of 3 percentage points. On the individual side, if you receive a text message, your probability of voting increases by 4 percentage points. Those numbers are different because not every text message reaches its intended target.

Garret Graff started off the (small, academic version of a) media feeding frenzy by alluding to our study in his NYT Op-Ed piece last week. Then, our study landed in the news section of the Times, with a slightly innacurate article by Brian Stelter. The quotes from Allison are accurate, but:

• 4.2 prectage <b>points</b>, not 4.2 percent. Those two phrases mean different things.
• The study had over 8,000 subjects, about 4,000 of whom received text messages.
• “The Obama campaign may be running the biggest text messaging experiment” is an abuse of the word “experiment” unless Obama has a control group that no one knows about (unlikely).

Then came the UPI article and, like a game of telephone, the errors were compounded. Note the completely innaccurate use of “millions of cell phone numbers” and incorrect attribution of the “experiment” line to Allison. The article has thankfully been corrected (without a correction notice which is odd). The AP story was much more careful in its reporting.

I’ll try to update this blog post more often as futher articles are published. After the texts go out and the convention starts, this story will go away fairly quickly. But this was/is a fun week of near-fame :)

Update: Two more stories: one in the SF Chronicle and one in the National Journal.