Two major parties are huge voter database users [priv]

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 23:35:49 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty () roscom com>
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
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