Pinpointing Persuadables: How Tech Has Transformed Political Campaigning

Big Data's effectiveness is based on its ability to identify increasingly granular targets.


The US faces yet another election day in a couple of weeks and the cycle continues in other democracies as well.

But the big news may not be so much about who won or lost as which targeting methodology delivered the most favorable outcomes.

Technology has transformed politics in ways that have nothing to do with larger social issues and everything to do with how 'persuadable voters,' those most likely to be influenced by advertising and marketing, can be identified, targeted and communicated with via multiple channels so as to get them to change or confirm their opinion - and then go to the polls to cast their ballot.

Thanks to technology, voters have become more accessible through the disparate means by which they connect with the tangible and intangible worlds. However, they have also used this power to eliminate messages they find inconsistent with their world view. This has, ironically, made it harder to reach those who may be open to new messages because they have insulated themselves from means by which those ideas could be transferred.

The focus of politically-employed technology has been, as it has in the commercial realm, to motivate consumers - whether of detergent or public policy prescriptions - to act on those impulses. The question which has not yet been answered is whether it will become a force more effective at defending the status quo or the truly revolutionary force it has always professed to be. JL

Richard McGregor reports in the Financial Times:

The revolution has been greatest in the art and science of “micro-targeting”, which allows campaigns to home in on voters. “Software is eating politics,” code-writing engineers (are hired) for campaigns rather than “political scientists with English major degrees”.
The election of Terry McAuliffe as Virginia governor last year was not a moment of great political import, except perhaps for how one of the Democrats’ most brazen fundraisers managed to remake himself as a candidate for high office. But for the party’s strategists, Mr McAuliffe’s victory carried altogether more significance, marking another mainly unheralded advance in a larger revolution in the way that US campaigns are run.
Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election represented the high point of the art of targeting voters, combining Facebook and other social media, which had barely existed four years previously, with old-fashioned grassroots campaigning.
The Democrats’ Virginia campaign in 2013 and numerous races in November’s midterm congressional elections are raising the bar higher. Mr Obama’s 2012 campaign manager says whoever runs the presidential races in 2016 will have to start over, to keep up with the shift to mobile devices and new apps, such as Snapchat and Vine.“The evolution of technology is exploding so fast – we weren’t able to target people individually online like we can do now,” says Jim Messina, Mr Obama’s 2012 campaign manager who is advising David Cameron in the UK on digital strategy for next year’s general election. “I now give a speech saying the era of big data is over; it’s the era of small data.”
Early in 2013, Mr McAuliffe’s campaign began building a profile of any voter who might get out to support him – where they lived, what media they consumed, what issues animated them, whether they might donate money to the campaign, who their friends were on social media and whether they had voted in past elections.

“At a fundamental level, it allowed us to move our campaign from geography and demography to the individual,” said Brennan Bilberry, Mr McAuliffe’s campaign communications director.
The information gathered cumulatively, from the presidential and Senate campaigns in Virginia in 2012, and in local elections, was added so the campaign could rate voters on a scale from one to 100, measuring if they could be persuaded to support Mr McAuliffe and to come to the polls to do so.
Understanding the propensity to vote is “insanely important”, says Mr Messina, “because the problem for Democrats in the midterms is always turnout”.
Such has been the upheaval in how politicians run for office and raise and spend money, that it has spawned its own new vocabulary in the space of a few years.
Super-Pacs, or super political action committees, can raise as much money as they want after limits were swept away by the courts, creating a new class of mega-donors writing million-dollar cheques. Scores of so-called trackers now tail putative candidates from opposing parties, recording every word and uploading their files to a vast master digital archive that can then be searched by audio for the tiniest contradiction.
But the revolution has been greatest in the art and science of “micro-targeting”, which allows campaigns to home in on voters with personal messages at times and in mediums they are most likely to hear them.Without good candidates and a message that resonates, political campaigns, however well run, are destined to fail. Conversely, good candidates and campaigns without reams of data, and lots of money, run aground as well.
“If it’s just about how I feel, that’s sort of the Mad Men era of politics,” says Zac Moffatt, Mitt Romney’s 2012 digital director, referring to the TV series set in the boozy world of 1960s New York advertising.
Marketers have long sought to use such targeting techniques on behalf of brands, to convince people to buy a certain car or perfume. For them, the holy grail is to show the most persuasive ad to the right person at precisely the time they are most likely to be swayed.
This quest has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry of data brokers who compile and sell dossiers on millions of consumers, detailing their personal information as well as online activities.
But there have been doubts over how successful such targeted marketing is, and widespread concerns in the industry about fraud and privacy. Mercedes-Benz, for example, found that one of the carmaker’s recent online advertising campaigns was viewed more often by automated computer programs than by human beings.
The consultants have created a valuable industry for themselves as well, with an interest in hyping their skills to their clients, the politicians. Often, they are paid on a percentage of the advertising outlay, giving them an incentive to run ever more expensive campaigns.
But the intensity with which political campaigns deploy the latest technologies to target voters is being noticed in Silicon Valley, and is bringing Washington and the tech hub closer together.

Uber, the global taxi service, has hired David Plouffe, a member of Mr Obama’s campaigns. Snapchat, the photo messaging app, has hired Jill Hazelbaker, a former adviser to Senator John McCain. Spotify has taken on Jonathan Prince, who worked for both the Obama and Clinton administrations.
These hires are valued for their connections but they also come from a political industry that is trying to position itself at the leading edge of technology and targeting trends.
“You are seeing back and forth – the two learn from each other, and that is a very healthy thing for both sides,” says Mr Messina, whose Messina Group consulting firm has a Silicon Valley office.
One of the new frontiers is what the industry calls “addressable television”, which gives campaigns the ability to vary the ads they broadcast into separate households, depending on their target. An elderly white male who leans towards the Republicans might be amenable to ads about national defence and pensions. A Hispanic voter might care about immigration. Even if they subscribe to the same cable service, they can get different ads at home.
Targeting individual households in this way is in its infancy but is growing fast and is being widely used in the 2014 Florida governor’s race. Dish and Direct TV, the US cable providers, offer the service. Once Comcast, the industry giant, and Verizon come on board next year, about half of the US population will be able to be reached this way.
Beyond cable TV, the businesses selling into political campaigns are already able to string together multiple large data sets to sort households according to their political views and consumption habits.
“We are beginning to see at a very granular level how people are consuming traditional media by ideology – we have never been able to do it before,” says Kyle Roberts, head of SmartMedia in Virginia, which buys airtime for Republican campaigns. “It used to be that we would think about what programmes we buy to reach Republicans and Democrats. That has changed because you can identify exactly from the set-top box data how people are consuming media by party ID.”

The conservative bias of Fox News and the liberal slant of MSNBC are a well-known part of their respective brands. But technology is allowing campaigns to modulate their messages for the viewers of mainstream, free-to-air stations or other non-partisan outlets.
“We are not even necessarily talking about advertising,” says Mr Roberts. “When you go on the five o’clock news in Lexington, we can tell a candidate, this audience is more conservative, so make sure when you are talking to ordinary reporters, do it with that in mind.”
Mr Moffatt, Mr Romney’s former digital director who now runs Targeted Victory, says: “Software is eating politics,” adding that he now hires code-writing engineers for campaigns rather than “political scientists with English major degrees”.
Mr Moffatt says addressable TV is a potentially powerful weapon but can overlook both how splintered TV viewing audiences are and how people are leaving the traditional medium behind altogether. “Two-thirds of television is watched by people who are not picked up by the ratings,” he says. “I don’t care where I find my people.”
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Not only can data-mining help firms such as Mr Moffatt’s place ads more efficiently, real-time information about media buying also lets you track your opponents’ spots and respond to them.
After the Democrats ran ads attacking Mike Coffman, a Colorado Republican House member, in September, Mr Moffatt said the campaign was able to reply with an ad placed in digital outlets and on social media so it would be seen by people who viewed the original attack.

A blanket TV spot, favoured in old-style campaigning, would have wasted a large amount of money. “If 80 per cent of your budget is on television, there is not going to be much else to go around,” he says.
The Democrats did not target the Virginia gubernatorial election in 2013 with just Mr McAuliffe in mind. The state is of growing strategic value for presidential elections, and the information gathered in 2013, and in House and Senate midterm races this year, is being harvested with the bigger prize of 2016 in mind.
Changing demographics and evolving social values make both states a target-rich environment for the data revolution. Virginia, once a conservative bastion, is now increasingly dominated by its white-collar suburbs bordering Washington, a Democratic stronghold.
In the 2013 election, the McAuliffe campaign was able to lock up many votes in northern Virginia, at the same time placing digital ads among liberal-leaning voters in the conservative southern part of the state on issues such as gay marriage.
Colorado has been moving into the Democratic camp as well, for different reasons, because of the influx of Californians and Hispanics into the state.
The Democrats believe that if they can lock up Colorado and Virginia, then the 2016 presidential election might be all but in the bag, without even counting traditional make-or-break states such as Ohio or Florida.

The margin for error, and the competition for eyeballs, from all sources of media, has been tightening with every election. In 1980, between 25 to 33 per cent of voters swung between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, the presidential candidates.
In 2012, that figure was down to 10 per cent, and the time to engage them is fleeting, according to the Obama campaign’s research.
“Low-information voters,” says Mr Messina, “think about politics less than four minutes a week.”
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Voter file: The search for ‘persuadibility’
Long before they fight it out at the ballot box, the Republicans and Democrats compete to get the best out of what they call in US politics the “voter file”.
The voter files contain basic information, such as names, addresses, and, depending on the state, party affiliation, as well as whether someone has cast a ballot in past elections.
Once in the hands of the parties, the file becomes a dossier, with information added from polling, door-knocking and, more recently, social media, to allow campaigns to judge the voter’s “persuadibility” and likelihood to turn out.
Since being outcampaigned in 2004 in George W Bush’s re-election, Democrats have developed a distinct edge in managing such data.
“The most important predictive factor in how you are going to vote in the future is how you voted in the past,” says Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager. “That is why the Democrats’ advantage in data is so helpful to them.”
The Democrats have a master list of voter files, housed at the Democratic National Committee, while the Republicans have competing ones available for their campaigns.
One is held by the Republican National Committee. The other is backed by the billionaire industrialists, Charles and David Koch.
“The Republican party is not really united on all this stuff; it is a big problem,” says Kyle Roberts of SmartMedia, which buys advertising time for Republican campaigns.
But the Democrats’ real advantage may be in how they can leverage their mass of data, with thousands of old-fashioned grassroots volunteers in field offices throughout the country.
“They have about 10,000 people across the country who know how to use it,” says Zac Moffatt, who was Mitt Romney’s digital director. “They don’t have a similar army on the right.”