An essay I wrote:
News Analysis
January 23, 2009, 6:35PM EST
What Data Crunchers Did for Obama
Sophisticated political microtargeting efforts are grouping us in
surprising ways. For Obama, swing voters known as Barn Raisers proved
pivotal
By
Stephen Baker
About three minutes into his speech on Jan. 20, President Barack Obama spoke a word never before uttered in a Presidential inauguration speech:
"data.". The word may sound nerdy, and Obama used it in reference to
indicators of economic and other crises. But it's no coincidence the
word found its way into his remarks. The harnessing of data has been
crucial to Obama's rise to power.
Throughout the campaign, Obama and his team not only bested his Democratic and Republican rivals
in social networking and fund-raising through the Internet, they also
engaged in a data battle to locate potential swing voters. These
efforts zeroed in on hotly contested states and congressional
districts, where the shift of 1,000 or 2,000 voters could prove
decisive—meaning the focus was on only a tiny fraction of the voting
public. But to find those swing voters, both sides hired tech wizards
to sift through mountains of consumer and demographic details. They
scrutinized nearly everyone they could find.
Ten "Tribes"
One Democratic consultancy, Spotlight Analysis, took this hunt to
extraordinary lengths. Working on behalf of Democratic candidates,
though not directly for the Obama campaign, Spotlight crunched
neighborhood details, family sizes, and purchasing behavior. It then
grouped nearly every American of voting age—175 million of us—into 10
"values" tribes. Fellow tribe members may not share the same race or
religion, or fall into the same income bracket, but they have common
feelings about issues that transcend politics: God, community,
responsibility, and opportunity. Spotlight believes that one of these
tribes, a morally guided (but not necessarily religious) grouping of
some 14 million voters—dubbed "Barn Raisers"—held the key to the
contest between Obama and his Republican challenger, Arizona Senator
John McCain.
The definition of a Barn Raiser cuts straight to the heart of what
distinguishes political microtargeting from traditional political
groupings. Barn Raisers can be of any race, religion, or ethnic group.
About 40% of Barn Raisers are Democrats, or lean that way, and 27%
favor Republicans—though the group strongly supported President Bush in
his 2004 reelection campaign. Barn Raisers are slightly less likely to
have a college education than Spotlight's other swing groups. They're
active in community organizations but are ambivalent about government.
And they care more deeply than most people about "playing by the rules"
and "keeping promises," to use Spotlight's definitions.
With special appeals to Barn Raisers in swing states, Spotlight's
clients, including the Service Employees International Union and the
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, hoped to turn battleground
states such as Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, and Ohio. The
data-based techniques they put to use, similar to those used to target
supermarket shoppers and even to hunt for terrorists, are turning
politics into the sophisticated calculations typically associated with
Google (GOOG)
and its ilk. In a fraction of a second, computers sort us into segments
and then calculate the potential that each of us has to swing from red
or purple to blue. For many, this signals the dehumanization of
politics.
Others say political data mining helps better pinpoint individuals
whose views and priorities may otherwise be overlooked. Consider a
voter in, say, Richmond, Va. Republican and Democratic data miners
count the number of children she has in school, they take note of her
car, her Zip Code, her magazine subscriptions, and the balance on her
mortgage. They might even find in her data that she has two cats and no
dog. (Cat owners lean slightly for Democrats, dog owners trend
Republican.) In the end, they place her into a political tribe and draw
conclusions about the issues that matter to her. Is that so horrible?
Behavioral Grouping
For generations, politicians lacked the means to study us as
individuals. So they placed us into enormous groups—blacks, Jews, gays,
union members, hunters, soccer moms—and treated us as masses. While the
rich and well-connected got to collar candidates at $1,000-a-plate
dinners, the rest of us were processed as herds.
Nowadays, Spotlight and other microtargeters (for both parties)
continue to place us into big groups. But the divisions are based more
on our behavior and choices, and less on the names, colors, and clans
that marked us from birth.
Spotlight embarked on its research three years ago by interviewing
thousands of voters the old-fashioned way. At first, Barn Raisers
didn't seem especially noteworthy. The group represented about 9% of
the electorate. It spanned genders, races, and religions.
But when Spotlight's analysts dug deeper, they discovered that Barn
Raisers stood at the epicenter of America's political swing. In 2004,
90% of them voted for President Bush, but then the group's political
leanings shifted, with 64% of them saying they voted for Democrats in
the 2006 election. Spotlight surveys showed that political scandals,
tax-funded boondoggles like Alaska's Bridge to Nowhere, and the botched
job on Hurricane Katrina sent them packing.
Suddenly, Spotlight had a line on millions of swing voters. The
challenge then was to locate groups of them in swing states. For this,
the company analyzed the demographics and buying patterns of the Barn
Raisers they surveyed personally. Then it instructed its computers to
scour commercially available databases for others with matching
profiles. By Spotlight's count, this approach nailed Barn Raisers three
times out of four. So Democrats could bet that at least three-quarters
of them would be likely to welcome an appeal stressing honesty and fair
play.
Still Swing Voters
Did it work? Spotlight hasn't yet carried out the surveys to
determine how many of its Barn Raisers backed Obama. But it's
reasonable to presume that amid that sea of humanity stretched out
before Obama on Washington's Mall on Jan. 20, at least some of those
were moved by microtargeted appeals. And if Obama and his team fail to
honor their mathematically honed vows, the Barn Raisers may abandon
them in droves. They're swing voters, after all.
And if there is one thing the research has made clear, it's this:
Even if Barn Raisers exist as a tribe only in a database, they take
broken promises very seriously. And they probably won't object if
data-mining politicians figure that out.
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