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Lifestyles
and Anger Points
Campaign
operatives are upgrading traditional direct mail
with sophisticated data mining techniques.
Politics in Virginia will never be the same.
Watch
out, Virginia – the folks who send you junk mail
may try to sell you a governor this year.
A
recent Washington Post article laid out one
of the keys to Bush’s success in 2004--a
sophisticated marriage between partisan politics
and commercial databases full of consumer
preference information.
The
Bush team found that only 15 percent of Republican
voters lived in precincts with 65 percent or
higher Republican registration.
This meant that large numbers of
Republicans, especially “soft” Republicans,
were in mixed precincts that traditionally are not
top-tier targets for voter contact using
“ground” efforts like phone banks and
canvassing.
To
find these hidden Republicans, they borrowed the
methods the direct marketing industry uses to
focus their advertising.
Surveys were conducted linking profiles of
Bush supporters to product preference and
lifestyle data from large, commercial databases.
Coors
beer drinkers went into the “red” column along
with households that watched college football.
Cognac drinkers and households watching
professional football were passed over as too
“blue.” The
potential supporters were grouped (a process
called “lifestyle segmentation” in the junk
mail industry) and their “anger points” were
determined on a range of issues that resonated
with the Bush agenda.
For
example, they might focus on “Hardhats with Brokers,” an actual lifestyle segment of non-college
graduates making $75,000 or more.
Bush team surveys would identify this
segment’s “anger points,” like gun control
or the Iraq war. Then
they would devise a strategy using these issues to
keep the blue-collar, hardhat-wearing, union
members from voting Democratic, which they would
ordinarily do.
Finally
the Bush consultants rented huge national data
bases from companies like National Demographics
and Lifestyles, the folks to whom you send the
warranty card from your new Sunbeam toaster, along
with all of that “optional” demographic data.
These national databases allowed the Bush
campaign to find all the “Hardhats with
Brokers” sprinkled around precincts in suburban
Ohio and then hit them with highly tailored
messages on their “anger points.”
They
tested this approach in the 2002 mid-term
elections and refined it in the 2003 gubernatorial
elections in Kentucky and Mississippi, both of
which were won by Republican candidates.
Once proven, Bush employed this
“strategery” in key states in 2004,
perhaps changing voter identification tactics
forever.
When
I first got involved in politics in California,
voter identification meant phone banks and
precinct walking. Voter
persuasion was radio and direct mail.
Frequently, a good precinct captain did it
all, with his/her long-standing knowledge of how
every household in the neighborhood voted and what
motivated folks to vote for a candidate.
In the highest priority precincts, those
with high densities of “our” voters, we
abandoned all targeting and just swept the entire
neighborhood toward the polls on Election Day.
With
more mobile populations these simple, wholesale
approaches no longer worked.
Those that depended on personal knowledge
gradually became outdated.
Then inexpensive computing became available
and computerized voter lists spawned new tactics.
We
took these voter lists and added additional data
on each household. We
purchased union membership rolls, lists of
teachers--lists of anyone who might be inclined to
vote our way. We
scrubbed our lists looking for single mother
households, or those with school-age kids.
Phone banks added more issue-specific
information on top of that, creating a cyber
version of the precinct captain’s knowledge.
My
more recent experience as a precinct chair in
Arlington, was much the same.
The party voter lists had voting histories
and phone polling results going back over a
decade. I
knew where to find every Democratic vote, even if
I didn’t know them personally.
However,
in the “People’s Republic of Arlington,” as
my Republican friends referred to it, finding
Democrats was not a problem.
The challenge in statewide races, as the
Bush team recognized, was the new suburbs, where
elections were being won or lost and where local
party structures like the one in Arlington
didn’t exist.
In
Virginia’s suburban and exurban political
battlegrounds there is more partisan
intermingling, increasing the danger of missing
needed voters in “low priority” precincts.
At the same time, individual voters defy
traditional issue identification, like the soccer
moms who voted for Bush because of the Iraq war.
These new “data mining” operations are
an escalation of election technology to address
this political reality.
So
the next time you fill out a warranty card, or
answer a consumer preference survey, or send in a
direct mail sweepstakes form think about who may
come knocking on your door this November.
It
won’t be Ed McMahon.
It might be someone named Kaine or Kilgore.
--
January 17, 2005
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