If you caught the tail end of the Roger Hedgecock show on Friday night, you may have heard me chatting with guest host Matt Lewis about the use of data in campaigns.
Much has been written in the past few weeks about the amazing things the Obama 2012 campaign did in identifying and turning out voters. Just as much has been written about the Romney campaign’s failure to do the same thing, but it isn’t quite as fair. There were many reasons Obama won, but the ability to take advantage of more channels of information to identify voters was a big part of it.
The private sector has been doing this for years. For advertisers like Google and Yahoo! and e-commerce sites like Amazon, knowing what you do and where you click online is their bread and butter. It helps them put products in front of you that you’re more likely to buy, because they don’t make money if you don’t click. Obama’s team was better at adapting those techniques to the campaign world.
What I didn’t get to talk about with Matt do to time constraints was the fact that Republicans can take a great deal of solace in the fact that these aren’t new magical spells being cast by technological wizards. These are old hat tactics that can (and probably will) help Republicans with in the next campaign cycle. For years, the advertising dollars have been moving toward personal advertising (like online ads) which can present content to an audience with much greater precision than mass advertising.
Romney adviser Stuart Stevens was ridiculed for saying that Mitt Romney ran less of a national campaign than Barack Obama, but he’s right, and Obama was right to do it.
Jim Eltringham 