n. The percentage of people who have volunteered to help a campaign but do not show up.
2016
Jon Carson: The technical term we like to use in the political world is we had a negative flake rate. Usually you have a bunch of volunteers scheduled to come and a certain percentage of them flake off. Well we had a negative flake rate. People were showing up and they were bringing extra friends with them.
2013
There are always going to be campaign volunteers who sign up for shifts and do not show up. That’s why when organizing an event, you can generally assume a 50% flake rate (percentage of grassroots volunteers who do not show up for their shift).
2012
The metric of the day for Barack Obama’s field team is “flake rate”: the percentage of supporters who had registered to attend his open-air stadium speech but won’t show up for one of the replacement events the campaign is scrambling to arrange in its place after moving tonight’s convention session indoors.
2008 (earliest)
What we’re seeing on the ground with volunteering, especially with public polls showing double digit leads in Pennsylvania, is that the "flake rate" for volunteers is higher. "Flake rate" is the term for how the percentage of people who sign up to do a canvassing or phonebanking shift, and then don’t show up. It tends to happen when a candidate’s supporters get complacent.
I know a lot of people "my age" aren't together with what they want to do and are, in general, lacking of any feelings of responsibility. With the current “flake rate” being something like 45-50% for new shoppers, I’d have a feeling it’d go much further upward if under eighteens were to apply.