The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is building a national computer model to predict voters’ marital status, with hopes of targeting what may be the party’s most important demographic group: unmarried women. “The completed model will let us pinpoint unmarried women as the target of specific, poll-tested messages delivered through field, […] Read more »
Inside the Republican Database Behind David Jolly’s Upset Victory
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 […] Read more »
As viewing habits change, political campaigns must change their habits, as well
For half a century, television ads have been the staple of political campaigns, the preferred, if costly, vehicle for communicating a candidate’s message to the voters. What happens when people stop watching live television? That day hasn’t arrived yet and probably never will. But the outlines of the new world […] Read more »
Project Ivy: Democrats Taking Obama Technology Down Ballot
Fifteen months after the 2012 presidential campaign, the Democratic National Committee announced a new effort Monday to make the advanced data tools used by the Obama campaign available to Democratic candidates across the country. The initiative, nicknamed Project Ivy, will take many of the sophisticated data, analytics, and communications tools […] Read more »
Democrats Aim for a 2014 More Like 2012 and 2008
The Democrats’ plan to hold on to their narrow Senate majority goes by the name “Bannock Street project.” It runs through 10 states, includes a $60 million investment and requires more than 4,000 paid staff members. And the effort will need all of that — and perhaps more — to […] Read more »
The Age of ‘Infopolitics’
… What we need is a concept of infopolitics that would help us understand the increasingly dense ties between politics and information. Infopolitics encompasses not only traditional state surveillance and data surveillance, but also “data analytics” (the techniques that enable marketers at companies like Target to detect, for instance, if […] Read more »