It’s the era of “microtargeting.” Unlike the old days, when the Hancocks of the world would sift through stacks of voter files and scrawl notes on tattered maps, political tacticians are now harnessing computing power to digest troves of voter and consumer data. The national parties and some state organizations have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to beef up their voter databases with market-research information–such morsels as the magazines you subscribe to and the car you drive. The better they understand you, they reason, the more effectively they can tailor their message to you. In short, political campaigns are becoming more like marketing campaigns all the time. Karl Rove was a pioneer in this regard, using direct-mail techniques to market George W. Bush long before the two reached the White House. “What the parties are trying to do is turn this into something like a voter science,” says James Gimpel of the University of Maryland, “to know as much as possible about a person’s likes or dislikes… before they knock on that door.”
To demonstrate this technology at work, Caliper’s Howard Simkowitz flips open his laptop and creates a map of Overland Park, Kans. Say you want to reach senior citizens, he suggests. After a few clicks of the mouse, the map erupts in color, ranging from deep blue–districts with fewer than 10 elderly voters–to bright red, where more than 300 live. To narrow the search to poor seniors, Simkowitz taps a few keys, and the red regions morph into orange and yellow hues, representing smaller numbers. With a click, he zeroes in on a particularly red neighborhood with tiny dots for each house. He slides the cursor over one dot, and a pop-up window shows each resident’s name, party affiliation and voting history.
But the parties know much more than that. They are inputting things ranging from mortgage data to the social views you might have expressed to a visiting canvasser. Recently, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee signed a contract with Acxiom Corp. to obtain information on political and charitable contributions. Armed with this abundance of personal data, the parties hope to target voters more efficiently. A campaign could craft a direct mailing on gun control aimed at voters who subscribe to hunting magazines in particularly coveted precincts. To boost turnout, the parties could focus outreach just on those houses that could really make a difference. “You don’t have to send [a reliable voter] in your base five pieces of mail or knock on their door 20 times to get them out to vote,” says Gimpel. “Instead, campaigns can direct that energy into going after some of the so-called undecideds.”
However potent the technology may be, though, it has its shortcomings. It can’t easily pluck out party loyalists in districts where the other party dominates. And no computer program can match a precinct captain who knows his community inside out. “Our software doesn’t aim to replace human contact,” says Simkowitz. But if it can help identify whom to reach out to, and how, that’s half the battle.
