The presidential campaigns have the technology to know more about voters than any other bids in history.





On a clear day in February 2001, a trim mid-career political analyst named Matthew Dowd landed in Washington, D.C., from Austin, Tex., and hurried into the White House for a meeting with Karl Rove. Inside a manila folder, he carried a sparsely-populated bar graph. The few numbers it had hit Rove like a bomb.

“Really?" Rove asked, snatching the document and glancing back at Dowd. "Man, this is a fundamental change.”

The truly independent voting bloc, Dowd’s data showed, had dissolved from one-fourth of the electorate in 1984 to just 7 percent. That meant the years of work leading up to the 2000 campaign and hundreds of millions of campaign dollars during it had focused on just 7 percent of voters – less than 8 million people. Everything next time, Dowd told Rove in his second-floor office, would have to be different. Forget independents. Find the Republicans hidden among the Democrats. What Dowd wanted, he would say years later, was “Moneyball for politics.”

He got it. Paired with a blond-haired pollster, Alex Gage, they marshaled a campaign strategy for the re-elect entirely divergent from anything in 2000. They named it “microtargeting.” The goal: Unearth every available fact on individual voters – what they eat, drive, buy their kids, who they really are – and use that information to persuade them to vote for George W. Bush. Use it to make them angry. Because more than any other emotion, rage and fear propel people to the polls. It worked: Just as they predicted, Americans worried by the social implications of gay marriage turned out in droves in 2004.

“But we were like kids playing with Play-doh,” said Gage, who directs TargetPoint Consulting and was Mitt Romney’s 2008 lead microtargeter, in a recent interview. “We thought we were pretty smart – but today? It’s mind-boggling. Someone handed us a magnifying glass and we said, ‘Oh, We can see some people.’ Then someone said, 'Try a microscope.’ And now we’re using electronic microscopes.”

Inside microtargeting offices in Washington and across the nation, individual voters are today coming through in HDTV clarity – every single digitally-active American consumer, which is 91 percent of us, according to Pew Internet research. Political strategists buy consumer information from data brokers, mash it up with voter records and online behavior, then run the seemingly-mundane minutiae of modern life – most-visited websites, which soda’s in the fridge – through complicated algorithms and: pow! They know with “amazing” accuracy not only if, but why, someone supports Barack Obama or Romney, says Willie Desmond of Strategic Telemetry, which works for the Obama reelection campaign.

Entertaining and baffling discoveries abound. For example: Soda seems to count a great deal. Diet Dr. Pepper evidently indicates a Republican who votes, while apathetic Democrats drink 7up, according toNational Media Research Planning & Placement. Beer, too, matters. Relatively uninterested Republicans go for Busch Light. Additional findings reveal that the most politically-motivated Republicans visitfoxnews.com (no surprise there) while Democrats who couldn’t care less attend mtv.com or scour dating websites (OK: no surprise there, too).

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(Source: The Atlantic)