GOP's mastery of data changing the very nature of campaigning

[guruoo]

July 24, 2005 latimes.com : Politics
Parties Are Tracking Your Habits
Though both Democrats and Republicans collect personal information, the GOP's mastery of data is changing the very nature of campaigning.

By Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten Times Staff Writers, Times Staff Writers

COLUMBUS, Ohio — At first glance, Felicia Hill seems to fit the profile of a loyal Democrat: She is African American, married to a General Motors union worker and voted for Dukakis, Clinton and Gore in past presidential elections.

But in the weeks before election day 2004, the suburban mother of two was deluged with telephone calls, invitations and specially targeted mailings urging her to support President Bush.

The intense Republican courtship of Hill, 39, was no coincidence.

A deeper look at her lifestyle and politics reveals a voter who might be persuaded to switch sides. Among the clues: she is a church member uneasy about abortion; she lives in a growing suburb and she sent her children to a private school.

Hill and millions of other would-be Bush backers in closely contested states were identified by a GOP database that culled information ranging from the political basics, like party registration, to the personal, such as the cars they drive, the drinks they buy, even the features they order on their phone lines. The "micro-targeting" effort was so effective that the party credited it with helping to secure Bush's reelection.

In Ohio, which tipped the election to Bush, the Republican strategy helped boost African American support for the president by seven percentage points over his 2000 performance, securing the state for the president. It drew millions of Republican voters to the polls in every battleground state.

<snip>

"The Republicans have been working on this for a decade, and that's why they" are defeating us, said Dennis L. White, the Democrats' state party chairman in Ohio, referring to the GOP's technological advantage. "We are still three years behind."

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-rncdnc24jul24,1,502580.story?coll=la-headlines-politics

[JDPriestly]

1. We need a Right to Privacy amendment to the Constitution

I do not want either the Republican or the Democratic Party to snoop on my personal information. This is simply wrong. It deprives me of my freedom of association. They have no right to snoop on my life.

[MasonJar]

2. Why bother? They fixed the Diebold machines anyway.

[kevsand]

3. We're doooommed!

Doomed, I tell you, doomed!

[tanyev]

4. Wonder how much info they got

from all the recent data security breaches?

[Al-CIAda]

5. Greg Palast writes about this. Choicepoint, data mining, and rigged

elections in Florida.

[1932]

8. Republicans were using data any marketer could buy: magazine subscriptions

and stuff like that.

[LoZoccolo]

6. I've been saying for a long time they are targeting...

...African-American and Latino Christians, as well as white evangelical Democrats, and they'll use our own sloppy or abrasive rhetoric about religion to do it. The Republicans held up this idea that the biggest issue was "moral values", despite the fact that the 22% segment which said that that was the most important factor was on the wane (it was 40% in 1996 and 35% in 2000). I believe they do these things to provoke a backlash from us and eventually take these voters from us; it's probably the easiest strategy for them to pursue because they know a certain abrasive segment of our number will do their work for them.

[1932]

7. In the lead-up to the election, the NY Times ran stories about the Repub's

effort in Ohio.

They said that Republicans were trying the traditional Democratic techniques for getting out votes: door to door and phone-banking of people who were registered voters.

In retrospect, I think those stories were diversionary tactics. In reality, the Republicans were running a much more complicated strategy -- the one that's described in this story -- which involved much more sophisticated data analysis and methods.

It's a disgrace that Democrats weren't doing the same thing.

[DeepModem Mom]

9. kick