--- Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 23:35:49 -0500 From: Monty Solomon <monty@private> Subject: The Very, Very Personal Is the Political The Very, Very Personal Is the Political By JON GERTNER February 15, 2004 Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are called into the boss's office and asked to help sell the citizens of the United States on one of two presidential candidates in the 2004 campaign. Hard work, but what makes it especially tough is that you've been directed to try something experimental, something that's never been done before in a national election. Instead of creating a traditional political narrative for your candidate -- one that highlights charisma or character, for instance, or one that hews to a message on taxes or Social Security -- you've been told to focus on nothing but the people who might be persuaded to vote. In other words, forget about your candidate's nuanced ideas for space exploration or ending the conflict in Iraq. Forget about TV commercials, forget about radio, forget about debates, forget about the ups and downs of the news cycle. Think voters -- just voters. And don't think only in terms of big demographic groups like senior citizens, middle-class white men or young single women; don't think about them only in terms of geographical areas like districts or precincts or even neighborhoods. Think about what they like, what they do, what they consume. Think about them one by one. Name by name, address by address, phone by phone. These are the customers you have to get to buy your Brand A over Brand B. So who are they? Where are they? Are they rich, with three kids and a jumbo mortgage? Do they own fly rods and drive minivans? Do they go to church or temple? And maybe most important, who among them has never voted, or rarely voted, or voted in ways that may deserve the special status of swing voter? To do the job right, of course, to really win this thing, you've got to find them, woo them and get them to the polls. Where to start? These days, the first stop is a comprehensive database of U.S. voters. There are fewer than half a dozen of them. One, named Voter Vault, belongs to the Republican National Committee; another, named Datamart, belongs to the Democratic National Committee. Over the past few years, thanks to technological advances and an escalating arms race between the parties, Republicans and Democrats have gone to great lengths to make campaigning more like commercial marketing. Moreover, both parties have begun to sort through their troves of information in order to identify and then court individual voters. Variations on the new political sharpshooting have been tested successfully by the Republican and Democratic Parties in several recent statewide elections. And over the next few months, a handful of pollsters, tacticians and statisticians on each side, almost certainly fewer than two dozen political pros in all, will be scrutinizing socioeconomic data in Washington and Virginia as a part of their targeting work -- sometimes they also call it microtargeting -- in the coming general election. This is a complicated business. Each party's databank has the name of every one of the 168 million or so registered voters in the country, cross-indexed with phone numbers, addresses, voting history, income range and so on -- up to as many as several hundred points of data on each voter. The information has been acquired from state voter-registration rolls, census reports, consumer data-mining companies and direct marketing vendors. The parties have also amassed detailed information about the political and social beliefs that you might have shared with canvassers who have phoned or knocked on the door over the past few years. While specifics vary, a typical voter profile like my own, for instance, would show my age, address, phone numbers; which elections I've voted in over the past 10 or 15 years and whether I've ever voted on an absentee ballot; and my e-mail address. It would include my New Jersey party registration (Democrat), whether I've ever made a political donation (none that I recall), my approximate income, my ethnicity, my marital status and the number of children living in my house. Thanks to the ready availability of subscriber lists, mortgage data and product warranty information, the parties might use records of the newspapers I read (this one), the computer I work on (a Macintosh), the men's-wear catalogs I receive (Brooks Brothers, Land's End) and the loan-to-value ratio of my home. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/15/magazine/15VOTERS.html _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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