Democrats Used Databases In Election Wins Over GOP

[sabra]

http://www.informationweek.com/management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=194400260

Democrats Used Databases In Election Wins Over GOP

The Democratic National Committee spent $8 million this cycle building a multi-terabyte relational database that contained 300 million records.

InformationWeek

Pundits have ascribed the sweeping Democratic victories in this year's mid-term elections to a number of factors, including corruption and dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq. But Democrats had at least one more weapon at hand during this election cycle that had lagged behind Republicans in prior elections: vast databases of public and commercial data that were used to find and target likely Democratic voters in a method politicos call micro-targeting.

Republicans had built and mined their own Voter Vault databases since 2002, and some analysts have credited at least part of President Bush's win in 2004 to a get out the vote campaign catalyzed by that data. Democrats built similar databases, but until this cycle they were marred by problems like incorrect address formats that had Florida residents living in the city of Fort and the state of Lauderdale or data errors that had more names listed in the data on Colorado than the number of people who live in that state.

However, things were different this time around. While Republicans continue to use micro-targeting, Democrats significantly stepped up their efforts. The Democratic National Committee spent $8 million this cycle on a multi-terabyte relational database from Netezza; somewhere between 60% and 70% was filled with data purchased from InfoUSA.

Meanwhile, Harold Ickes, former deputy chief of staff to President Clinton, set up his own database called Catalist for a group called America Votes, a Democratic coalition of interest groups that targeted campaigns in battleground states. "I think we've caught up to, if not passed on the technological level," said Ken Strasma, president of Strategic Telemetry, a micro-targeting firm that works with the Democratic Party.

[ixion]

1. The GOP beat themselves by being corrupted thugs and war criminals

IMO.

[wakeme2008]

2. BUT BUT BUT ahole Carville said Dean did nothing to help the

Dems win... :grr:

[Morgana LaFey]

9. and that Dean is incompetent

which blows me away because I think Dean is the very soul of competence.

[stepnw1f]

10. We All Know Carville is Bullshit

It's time we all told him so....

[Robbien]

3. I wonder if the media is going to remember how bad the GOP GOTV

really was in comparison to the media hype.

The Dem and GOP GOTV campaigns were equally impressive this year, but you wouldn't know that from listening to the pundits.

[damntexdem]

4. Well, I guess the Dems did a good job of this, in that ...

they seem to have known that I would vote straight Democrat DESPITE being inundated with voluminous Dem messages, many nearly identical in content.

[LiberalFighter]

17. In a 1993 city election the campaign manager ignored hard D's

He went after the persuadable and those that voted just presidential or presidential and midterm but not city elections.

Democratic candidate ran against the same Republican candidate both years
1999 -- 21657 vs 21528
2003 -- 27251 vs 19701

Republican was elected Mayor elected to 3 straight terms before this.

There is no point in making contact with voters that vote in every Democratic Primary election other than minimal. It wastes resources needed to get the votes really needed.

[SpeedwayDemocrat]

5. It's about f-ing time!

Democrats have been notoriously bad at marketing in the past; the concept of integrated marketing communications as applied to campaign management is still foreign to most of them. Thank God we got some campaign target training at Camp Evan Bayh (thanks to the Senator and Grass Roots Solutions for an amazing job training us in Indiana!)
However, as a marketer, I saw other glimmers of hope in 2006. Hopefully, by 2008, we'll be micro-targeting and 1-to-1 communicating targeted messaging in all 50 states!
P.S. One caution though - InfoUSA's data is notoriously "dirty" and not updated as frequently as they would like you to believe. I'd be mining the Dunn & Bradtreet Million Dollar database for the big donors...

[LiberalFighter]

19. Micro-targeting is not about big donors

It is about identifying the issues that the voters are concerned about.

I don't think the targeting is anywhere near what it should be here in Indiana.
They should know whether they are gun owners, what type of beer or other alcohol they drink, car they drive, whether they are a veteran or in the military and other marketing data available that would help target voters on key issues.

And then supplementing that data with local polling.

[many a good man]

6. GREAT investment!

And I'm not just saying that because I'm an OCP and MCDBA.

We absolutely must leverage business intelligence to compete. The party ought get us to volunteer and input election data. We're eons behind the GOP in this. Its effective and it saves money.

[Straight Shooter]

7. Rove and the GOP have been doing this for years and years and years.

You can have the greatest product in the world, but you've got to know how to market it, too, and to do that you need to know who might be interested in that product. *sigh*

[alfredo]

8. Here's what we have started using for

building our volunteer list:

http://www.advokit.net/

Advokit is a free web-based voter contact management system created by and for the grassroots. Using Advokit, you can combine the power of voter files and social networking to build your grassroots into an organization, and use that organization to identify and mobilize supporters. Advokit is an online hub for a campaign’s activist recruitment, voter registration, supporter identification, get-out-the-vote, door-to-door canvassing and phone bank work.

[JudyM]

13. Interesting, Alfredo. How was your experience with this software?

We also spent too much time developing walk lists for neighborhoods. Downloading Google maps and matching it up with the party's voter rolls... I need to find out exactly how this was done, but I was told that in order to do the walk lists with maps we need to manually (street by street) match up 2 or 3 data sources. I wish there was a better, more streamlined way to do this, because I can't begin to estimate the number of volunteer hours that were spent doing this into the wee hours of the night. Would rather have those volunteers doing more direct contact or other organizing work.

[alfredo]

16. I did the streetwork, no time was spent in

the office. If you are interested I can give you the address for Jane at our county Dem party. PM me.

[Renew Deal]

11. Here's another similar article.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/11/15/HNdemsdb_1.html?source=NLC-TB2006-11-15

[LordLovesAWorkingMan]

12. Not to be a fly in the ointment, but...

Isn't anyone concerned about what data fields they have in their database, and where they got them from?

[slackmaster]

14. Yes, I am concerned - "multi terabyte" and only 300 million records?

Maybe the database has very little information but it's extremely normalized for fast retrieval.

:shrug:

[many a good man]

15. Don't be naive

All this information is out there on the market. You just have to cough up the (big) bucks to buy it. This is about cross-referencing registered Dem voters with demographic data on the whole population. Who's registered? Do they vote? Primaries, generals, or just presidential elections? Do they contribute to the party? Do they contribute to liberal causes? How much money do they have? What magazines do you subscribe to? What issues are you interested in? Etc., etc., etc.

I'm not trying to be condescending; this data is being compiled, bought and sold whether the DNC buys it or not. If you're concerned about privacy, call your Congressman and let's get some laws passed. Until then its suicide not take advantage of something that is greatly benefitting our competition.

Republicans are twenty years ahead of us on this. On Election Day Dems write information from the BOE on paper napkins and later throw it away while Republicans have a legion of people entering it into relational databases. They squeeze every ounce of GOTV and donations they can get. We have to level the playing field.

[Ouabache]

18. Right I have seen Dems not even have a plan to to collect

the final tabulation PRINTED at the PRECINCT LEVEL before the memory card from ES&S machines goes downtown in the car trunk of a Republican election inspector. (Inspectors have been R since the clerk was an R, but that changed with this election the County Clerk is now a DEM, so I am hoping I can quit worrying about this.)