Importance of Political Campaign Data

It’s The Data

.... That Puts You in the Driver’s Seat

By Dr. Joan Van Tassel

Think of it as the t-shirt everyone in the Obama campaign could have worn after the election: In the new politics, if you don’t count…you don’t count. Research is fundamental to integrated communication efforts, such as those executed by the Barack Obama presidential campaign. That’s nothing new. After all, marketing and its offspring, the political campaign, have long conducted research to learn about consumers and voters to shape and test prepared messages. Typically, putting together a media plan involved estimating how many people a given effort would reach and how often it would reach them, using some particular medium or mix of media.

However, in the last decade, there have been significant advances in collecting data about voters, mining that data for specific information, and most recently, combining it to compile detailed portraits of segments and individuals. Collectively, these techniques are called micro-targeting. The political pioneer of micro-targeting was Karl Rove in the Bush ’04 campaign. As one blogger put it: “You or I might speak of the Joneses at No. 42. Rove is more likely to refer to the Irish/Jordanian, Princeton/Oxford, pro-choice, World Bank-economist couple with the vacation home in the Shenandoahs, where they keep their battered second Volvo, the one with the Rehoboth Beach parking decal."²

Contemporary micro-targeting works by mining rich seams of multiple data sets for information and then recombining the results to build detailed portraits of voter segments or specific individuals. For instance, suppose a volunteer in the Obama campaign was tasked to recruit more volunteers from area code 92103 via email to be part of the Mamas for Obama phone banking team. A feature of the pitch would be to organize babysitting for everyone in a volunteer’s family room, while all the mothers make calls on their cell phones in the living room.

A query that combined data from the following data sets would provide a good list of women 18-45 with one or more children under 18, own their home, and vote Democratic:
1) State of California Precinct-level voting records
2) Purchased registered voter data from a qualified vendor
3) Purchased email lists
4) U.S. Government Census data

Is this kind of micro-targeting possible?

Definitely! However, there is a catch to all this wizardry. It’s all about the past. The past may be a prelude to the future – but it’s not the future. In addition, it is difficult to identify precisely which piece of the past is indeed the prelude.

To learn about the future, campaigns can always hire a psychic. On the other hand, they can use data to make educated, evidence-driven predictions, using a part-science, part-art practice called “predictive analytics.” To make predictive analytics successful, the challenge is to integrate the hardware, software, and databases to consolidate and analyze an immense amount of raw data.

The design culture of the computer industry has made integration one of the toughest challenges in IT (information technology) architecture and design. Yet all the best hardware and software might as well sit in their boxes if they aren’t a working coalition of processes. Like politics itself, integration requires recognizing and/or establishing a shared definition of the situation, speaking a common language, and setting into motion a cascade of coordinated processes that result in concerted action. In the same breath, integration must begin with people who have a vision of how the pieces will fit together.

Integration: Making Sense of Data Soup

The vision of building integrated communication programs came from the nonprofit world. MoveOn.org understood the potential of the viral properties of Internet communication and grew a base of millions of people. But even before that, Common Cause pioneered these ideas, which were brought to the Dean campaign partly through the nonprofit’s former webmaster Nicco Mele. In a sense, the Dean campaign was the beta project for the Obama web operation. In addition to Mele, Dean national software engineer Clay Johnson went on to co-found Blue State Digital, the company that built and managed the Obama Web programs and those of many other progressive candidates and causes.

When Howard Dean became head of the Democratic National Committee, he brought an understanding of how technology can support and grow political campaigns with him. Technology Director Ben Self, Political Director Dave Boundy, Deputy Political Director Keith Goodman, and Executive Director Tom McMahon implemented an impressive program of aligning the DNC with state-of-the-art political technologies. They hooked up with Voter Activation Network (VAN), a Boston-based private company that collects data from local campaigns and maintains a national database of Democratic voters. The DNC makes that data available to all state parties and national campaigns in the form of VoteBuilder, a system they use both to download data for campaigns and to upload the new data they gather as they conduct the campaign.

Netezza: “It’s their secret weapon.”

As the result of previous campaign technology creators, the Democratic presidential nominee entered the scene with much of the groundwork completed and in place. However, even when the Obama campaign empowered people who understood how the pieces fit together to start with, the inherent technical problems of actually integrating the hardware and software remained. Kevin Malover, the campaign’s Chief Technology Officer had the day-to-day task of making sure it happened.

The Obama campaign cooked together data from many sources -- the DNC’s VAN, their own web operations, Catalist, the U.S. census, and credit reporting agencies – resulting in a complex data stew. Like all great recipes, there was an essential ingredient that pulled all the flavors together into a fulsome bouquet. For the Obama campaign, it was Netezza (pronounced Net-eé-za), a specialized computer platform and data warehouse – a digital slice-and-dice with information superhero powers.

“Speed, automation, and disintermediation are really the story of how you can successfully fundraise, schedule, and campaign today,” said Stuart Trevelyan, president of NGP Software. NGP provided software and services to more than 1,000 campaigns, working with Democrats and their allies.

“Disintermediation means that people now self-organize without the mediation of a campaign staff. The voters stopped being passive consumers of TV ads and started being participants at an unprecedented level,” explained Trevelyan.

Social Networks: An Army of Online Pitchforks

“In previous campaigns, the average voter wasn’t interacting with significant numbers of people. Now there are applications like the Obama campaign’s Neighbor-to-Neighbor program, where people identified individuals in their social networks and had conversations with them. Persuasion studies show that face-to-face interaction is dramatically more effective than other techniques – and technology plays a key role in identifying who could talk to who,” noted Trevalyan.

The infrastructure that enables self-organization is social networks. Some social networking software is open and public, like MyBarackObama.com, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Other SN software is private, like Central Desktop. But social networking, public and private, is not the whole answer to effective use of millions of online volunteers. The Obama campaign was able to capture the information that all those self-organized voters provided and feed it into the Netezza monster. They could then use that data to expand their reach to as yet-untapped voter groups.

The technologists integrated the data collection and analysis platform so that many of the processes could be automated. In turn, automation allowed the campaign decision-makers to obtain usable information in near-real time. So while the technology platform didn’t run the campaign, it did provide a wealth of specific information that the staff could act on it with unprecedented speed and specificity.

²http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20070814-Advice-from-the-architect-Karl-Roves-top-ten-tips-for-winning-an-election.html

Joan Van Tassel, Ph.D., Communication Theory & Research.
An educator, author, and multimedia journalist. Currently,
an Associate Professor of Communication and Chair of the
Communication Arts Department at National University.
Joan teaches courses in media story-telling, strategic
communication, communication technologies, content
production, and journalism. Joan can
be reached at Click here to contact this Author.