During the summer of 2011, Michelle Bachman’s campaign rolled out an online video advertising campaign exclusively for Republicans likely to caucus living within one hundred miles of the straw poll in Ames, Iowa.[1] In the months leading up to the caucuses Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign purchased ads that ran before all YouTube videos watched by voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.[2] Meanwhile, through sophisticated voter modeling, targeted communications based on voters’ political interests, and tracking the attitudes of supporters over the course of two campaigns, Romney’s campaign orchestrated his near-victory in the 2012 Iowa caucuses.[3]

Underlying all of this is a vast data infrastructure that has made targeted online advertising and marketing possible, and has contributed to a revival of field campaigning over the last decade.[4] Online advertising and field campaigning rely on voter modeling based on hundreds of data points culled from surveys, public records, and commercial information sources such as credit histories. This data details the location, demographics, political affiliations, social networks, behavior, and interests of citizens.

In the remainder of this Essay, I discuss the history of political data, focusing on the recent proliferation in voter data and development of new voter-modeling techniques. I conclude with a discussion of the ways these data practices undermine privacy and democratic practice, even as they increase participation and voter turnout.

Gathering and acting on data about the electorate has a long history, but the sheer expanse of data now gathered and stored about the electorate and the modeling and targeted communications it supports are qualitatively new. Both political parties, as well as a host of commercial firms, have amassed enormous national voter databases that they maintain and provide as a service to candidates from mayoral to presidential races. There are a number of different sources of this political data. The core of these databases are public data collected from local, state, and federal records, which include information such as party registration, voting history, political donations, vehicle registration, and real estate records. This data is supplemented with commercial information such as magazine subscription records, credit histories, and even grocery “club-card” purchases.[5]

These data are continually updated during campaigns through the efforts of thousands of volunteers. In the final two months of the 2008 presidential election, for instance, Obama’s millions of volunteer field canvassers gathered over 223 million pieces of information that are now stored in a database owned by the Democratic Party.[6] Parties carry these databases across election cycles and make them available to their candidates running for office at all levels of government, who in turn continually update the voter files.[7]

Data becomes meaningful only through voter modeling. After the midterm elections, consultants for both parties began to more systematically tie these models to actual data on voter attitudes and behavior. Through much of the last decade campaigns were swimming in data that were not tied in any meaningful way to voter attitudes or behavior. What proved effective was distilling hundreds of data points into simple categories of voters: likely supporters, those that can be persuaded, and those supporting another candidate. For example, the 2008 Obama campaign hired a consulting firm, Strategic Telemetry, to create its voter models.[8] The firm began by surveying a random, representative sample of the electorate. The firm then looked for correlated data points among Obama’s supporters and undecideds. Strategic Telemetry then built models of voters from these combinations of data points and layered them onto the voter file, generating a composite score of likely support for Obama on a zero-to-one-hundred scale for every member of the electorate. The firm then continually polled the electorate and incorporated the results of field canvasses to refine its models.

The Obama campaign targeted priority individuals residing in heavily Republican districts, and focused on neighborhoods with low voter turnout but high numbers of likely supporters. The Obama campaign also developed its online advertising strategy using these voter models and targeting strategies, including using geo-location targeting made possible by IP addresses to display ads to individuals residing in congressional districts with high concentrations of Democratic voters and favorable demographics.

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