LAT: Parties Are Tracking Your Habits (Republicans are masters of data)

[DeepModem Mom]

Parties Are Tracking Your Habits
Though both Democrats and Republicans collect personal information, the GOP's mastery of data is changing the very nature of campaigning.

By Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten Times Staff Writers, Times Staff Writers


....(Felicia) Hill and millions of other would-be Bush backers in closely contested states were identified by a GOP database that culled information ranging from the political basics, like party registration, to the personal, such as the cars they drive, the drinks they buy, even the features they order on their phone lines. The "micro-targeting" effort was so effective that the party credited it with helping to secure Bush's reelection.

In Ohio, which tipped the election to Bush, the Republican strategy helped boost African American support for the president by seven percentage points over his 2000 performance, securing the state for the president. It drew millions of Republican voters to the polls in every battleground state.

Nationally, Republicans said, the targeting produced a 10 percentage point increase for Bush among evangelicals, nine points among Latinos, four points in big cities, three points in labor-union households and five points among Catholics — all groups that were wooed by both parties.

Both parties have long collected information on voters. But the sophistication of the GOP effort is now so clearly superior that it has given Republicans an edge in an area that had been a Democratic strength: identifying sympathetic voters and getting them to the polls.

Democrats will be especially vulnerable in the next two national election cycles: In 2006, they will have to defend more congressional and Senate seats than they did in 2004; and several states viewed as competitive in past presidential elections are increasingly viewed as GOP turf for 2008....


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-rncdnc24jul24,0,4206171.story?coll=la-home-nation

[FloridaPat]

1. The people in this country just keep getting dumber and dumber.

How can they be moving into the repub column when 41% think he's doing a good job? When 60% think Iraq is a disaster? When 67% think * is leading the country in the wrong direction?

(Please excuse the percentages if I got them wrong. Doing them from memory, which isn't like it use to be)

[Toots]

5. But do any of those polled vote?

When half the nation refuses to vote a minority can and does rule.

[msongs]

2. ...data used to target blacks' homophobia actually ->

the article says: "In Ohio, which tipped the election to Bush, the Republican strategy helped boost African American support for the president by seven percentage points over his 2000 performance, securing the state for the president."

most likely the initiative to eliminate human rights for glbts accounted for the increase in black support, if there actually was any.

say, are poor urban black men still joining the military in numbers higher than their proportion to society since the military seems to be one of the few financial options available in many black neighborhoods?

Msongs
www.msongs.com/political-shirts.htm

[NV Whino]

3. I expect that specific demographic targeting

got the GOP some votes in Ohio. But the real target was the voting machines. Without the corruption of the machines, the demographics mean shit.

[wli]

4. GOP strategy for African-Americans

Isn't that more like purging African-American votes and creating impossibly long lines at the polls in African-American-dominated districts?