With only forty-one days remaining before the November election, the pressure is on to sway the roughly ten percent of North Carolina voters who remain undecided. State and national campaigns are spending millions on reams of voter data, and they're using that information to connect with people in a wide variety of personalized ways.
In our series Democracy 101, we're looking at how all this works.
WFDD's David Ford tackles the question: How much information do political campaigns have about you, and how'd they get it?
It turns out that the next time you pick up a Donald Trump baseball cap, or Hillary Clinton T-shirt at a political rally, the candidates are getting something much more than a small campaign donation. They're getting demographic data with every purchase — a treasure trove of information that's being used to precisely tailor political messages to voters just like you.
It's called data mining, and it's been going on in one form or another since the early days of our democracy. Back then, presidential candidates relied on local party leaders to provide them with specific information about individual geographic locations. Then came county court house lists, and now in the digital age, it's gotten down to the micro level.
A Little Bit Of History
Duke University professor Sunshine Hillygus says one single act changed the political landscape forever, a statewide, electronic database called “Help America Vote.”
“What that did is it put in a single file – an easy to find file – all of people's voter registration information,” says Hillygus. “So that is really the foundation for campaign strategy today.”
Since that was enacted in 2002, every state has your name, address, and turnout history. Most states also have your party registration, and which primaries you've attended. This gives candidates a pretty good idea of where your vote may lie.
Hillygus says that few campaign operatives exploited the new database rules more effectively than Karl Rove, who got Christian voters to the polls during George Bush's first presidential campaign in 2004.
“That's really where you see micro-targeting emerge, particularly within direct mail at a pretty widespread and pervasive level in a presidential campaign. And so direct mail in that election cycle was really personalized on the basis of the information that the candidates had about individuals.
Getting Micro With Campaign Data
Public Policy Polling Director Tom Jensen says data brokers have continued refining the art of collecting, packaging and selling consumer data.
It's become a multi-billion-dollar industry, and according to Jensen, the level of sophistication used in catering political messaging today far exceeds what was possible in previous elections.
“Campaigns will figure out things like somebody's a baseball fan and be able to target digital ads to them. So [for example] maybe if you like a prominent baseball player who is endorsing your campaign, you can make it so that that's the sort of message that people see from you as they're surfing the internet and that sort of thing."
Jensen says with the presidential race virtually even in North Carolina, the impact of data-driven, targeted messaging will be on full display. He says Hillary Clinton has a significant advantage over her rival Donald Trump when it comes to data operations, and the amount of money that's been spent in the state collecting information on voters.
“And it's going to make it very interesting in a state like North Carolina, where it's so 50/50, to see if that data advantage that Clinton has is helping her sort of target and reach out to the voters most likely to support her,” says Jensen. “Maybe it ends up being the thing that puts her over the top by a point or two in a state that's as close as North Carolina.”
The Pros And Cons Of Data Mining
But just because the capacity for micro-targeting exists, does not mean that candidates are always able to use it effectively. Duke University professor Sunshine Hillygus says sometimes the message itself misses the mark, or worse, gets delivered to the wrong voters. And she says, there's another big downside to politicians' reliance on big data.
“This type of campaign strategy has ended up increasing the incentive for candidates to talk about divisive issues, rather than what we label valence issues – issues where people have common agreement,” says Hillygus.
But she says all these facts and figures point to another truth: people don't fit into narrow boxes, and they may not be nearly as ideologically extreme as our elected officials perceive them to be, “and so, one of the things I hope can happen as we have more information about the electorate is that it actually helps to shed some light on what the priorities and interests of a constituency really is.”
So, it turns out that centuries after America's first presidential race, billions of dollars in technology, and big data later, it may one day be revealed that, actually, people are people after all.
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