Calculating Your Vote Goal

About the Course

In this course, we lay the groundwork for your field plan — the plan to contact the voters you need to vote for you on Election Day.

When to Take This Course

The goal of your entire campaign is to earn the votes you need to win. So calculating the number of votes you’ll need should be one of your very first steps.

Take Aways

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Project the number of votes you need to win
• Estimate the number of base voters whose votes you can count on
• Estimate the number of voters in your persuasion universe (the people you will try to convince to vote for you).

By the end of this course, you will have these resources for your campaign:

• The “Key Field Numbers” Workbook
• The “Precinct-Level Results” Table

Sign up and enroll in this course to begin!

Course Instructor

Kelly Dietrich Instructor

Kelly is the Founder and CEO of the National Democratic Training Committee. He has worked on dozens of campaigns at every level across the country. Kelly's specialty is in new campaign creation, candidate and staff training, and fundraising. In addition to working for 18+ years in Democratic politics, he teaches a class on political campaigns at DePaul University in Chicago, where he lives with his family and dog, a large hungry blue Weimaraner named Jack Bauer. Kelly started his career in 1998 with Rep. Dennis Moore in KS-03. He's an avid basketball and poker player, though never at the same time. His wife would point out that at no time in this biography was he described as "good" at either hobby. That was a conscious decision.