Many articles are being written about how Republican National Chairman Reince Priebus and a crack data team headed by Jesse Kamzol made great strides this year with voter micro-targeting that helped identify fellow partisans or likely GOP voters in order to capture their votes. Kamzol is quoted saying how far the world of micro-targeting has progressed, and leading Democrat consultants even admit that the GOP nationally has caught up to their successful 2008 and 2012 micro-targeting operations.
Kamzol, for example, notes that in 2004 the Bush presidential campaign could track voters based on a couple hundred consumer variables – brands of beer, cars, etc. Now, targeting gurus can choose from 3,600. And while the Bush campaign back then conducted a one-time poll of 10,000 people nationwide to produce modeling for the duration of the campaign, the RNC this year polled 26,000 people each week – 1,000 in each of the key states.
Finally, as Ron Fournier writes in the National Journal, there is just so much more digital data on all of us than there was a decade ago – collected and analyzed in orders of unfathomable magnitude. “The RNC had enough data this year to rate each individual registered voter on a scale of 1 to 100 on their likelihood to vote strictly along party lines; to vote for a GOP candidate or a Democratic candidate; to participate in elections; and to cast an early ballot. They also rated each voter’s view on Obamacare,” he writes.
Fournier writes that “micro-targeting could return politics to its roots – to the time before mass media when people joined a party because of a personal connection. Consider the 19th century immigrant who arrived to the United States by boat and was greeted at the docks by a Democratic official who helped him find a home, a job, and a good school for his kids – and then six months later, showed him how (and for whom) to vote.”
“It was a highly personalized, transactional relationship built upon the immediate needs of the voter. In that sense, technology can take us back to the future: The maturation of digital-data politics will place a higher value on people on the ground than negative ads on the air, which may not be such a bad thing,” he writes.
The Georgia Republican Party employed micro-targeting, old-fashioned door-to-door outreach as well as tried-and-true phone banking (over one million volunteer calls went out and some 87,000 telephone calls were made to targeted voters just on Nov. 3, a party consultant claims).
It all helped result, of course, in a nice Republican victory. The GOP Peach State sweep, from the U.S. Senate and governor races on down, remained just about the same as when Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama by eight percentage points.
But, aside from all this euphoria over micro-targeting, there is a downside in Georgia. Turnout in the Senate election fell by more than 5 percentage points. That’s right. Senator-elect David Perdue, although winning convincingly, collected 130,000 fewer votes than GOP Sen. Johnny
Isakson did four years ago in his own non-competitive election. That’s obviously something that Georgia GOP office-holders and their consultants need to ponder.
