In the twenty-first century, political strategists have sought ways to harness the increasingly sophisticated advances in data mining with the vast arrays of information available about modern consumers. Rather than rely on church membership lists or magazine and newspaper subscription databases, as campaigns throughout the twentieth century have done, modern-day strategists engage in more targeted predictions based on a larger array of data, including online purchasing and social network relationships, and other detailed sociodemographic and lifestyle information.
The goal of using such a vast array of data is to pinpoint precisely the type of voter that is amenable to the candidate’s message, and to avoid wasting time and scarce resources on voters who are either already firmly on the candidate’s side (and thus don’t require further persuasion) or firmly in the opponent’s camp (and thus aren’t likely to be receptive to persuasion). The more adept a campaign is at figuring out where its candidate’s support is, and who the most flexible voters are likely to be, the better it will be at tailoring the candidate’s message to attract those voters, and at not wasting resources in the pursuit of votes.
On the political left, the Analyst Institute, founded shortly before the Campaign of 2008, performs data analytic services for a range of Democratic Party clients. On the right, there has been little coordinated effort to engage in any party-wide, systematic data analytic effort. Rather, candidates have relied on a series of party-approved vendors who have operated quasi-independently of each other. However, this may be changing, as the Republican National Committee has contracted with an outside vendor to build an in-house data analytic arm aptly named Para Bellum Labs, whose task is the coordination of existing party voter databases with GOP vendors and candidates to provide the type of ongoing analysis that the Obama campaign was able to build for the Campaigns of 2008 and 2012. Other companies, often founded by individuals with a social science or other behavioral research background, now compete with traditional political consultants to provide services to political campaigns. During the 2016 contest for the Republican presidential nomination, Texas senator Ted Cruz’s campaign credited psychological data and analytics for his ascent in the polls.
See also Get-Out-the-Vote (GOTV) Programs; Microtargeting; Moneyball
Gallagher, Sean. “Built to Win: Deep Inside Obama’s Campaign Tech.” Ars Technica, November 14, 2012. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/built-to-win-deep-inside-obamas-campaign-tech/.
Gallagher, Sean. “The GOP Arms Itself for the Next ‘War’ in the Analytics Arms Race.” Ars Technica, February 27, 2014. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/the-gop-arms-itself-for-the-next-war-in-the-analytics-arms-race/.
Hamburger, Tom. “Cruz Campaign Credits Psychological Data and Analytics for Its Rising Success.” The Washington Post, December 13, 2015.
Issenberg, Sasha. The Victory Lab. New York: Crown, 2012.