To hear Republican strategists involved with David Jolly’s campaign tell it, the newest Republican in Congress owes his victory to a “Honeybadger.” That’s what officials at National Republican Congressional Committee call the voter database they’ve spent a year tirelessly building from scratch, which they argue was essential to Jolly’s surprising win in last week’s special election in Florida.
In details shared exclusively with National Journal, leaders at the NRCC described a first-of-its-kind political operation deployed on behalf of a Republican congressional candidate. Led by Honeybadger, a continually updating system that integrates real-time data with existing voter files, they say they were able to track voters they had to target, discover what messages would motivate them to go to the polls, and project exactly how much ground Jolly had to recover when early absentee voting didn’t swing his way. CONT.
Alex Roarty, National Journal