Can Microtargeting Save The GOP?

It's a beautiful Indian summer day in Paramus, N.J., sunny and 60 degrees, perhaps a bit warmer than residents might expect for mid-October. The abundant oaks and maples in this bedroom community 20 miles from New York City are afire with yellow, orange and crimson leaves. It is, in short, a great day to be outdoors.

Which is why Zachary Rynar is having a tough time. A twentysomething staffer from the Paul Aronsohn for Congress campaign, Rynar has reddened his knuckles knocking on doors up and down the residential streets. Yet, on an autumnal afternoon like this, nobody is home.

Rynar has no choice but to leave leaflets behind, which more or less defeats the purpose of his showing up in person to talk to voters. Worse, he can't even leave Aronsohn's literature in mailboxes, which would be more convenient. "We have to leave them in the door," he explained. " It's a federal crime if you put them in the mailbox."

After much hoofing, Rynar finally gets a live one. He spots a middle-aged couple in fall coats, following their three teenagers into a house. Rynar begins his spiel: "Paul Aronsohn, a Democrat, is running for Congress. Won't you vote for him?"

"We're late," the man of the house says, though not impolitely. "We've got people coming over." Rynar then hands the couple a leaflet, which neither bothers to examine.

Fresh out of Brown University, Rynar has never done door-to-door campaigning before. His marching orders are to hit the houses listed on a specific sheaf of papers. Rynar wasn't sure why the list contains some houses while skipping others that may be right next door. His guess is that the list is made up of registered Democrats.


What may, until now, have been a tried-and-true method of seeking voters is considered quaint compared to what both parties are up to. Most Democratic campaign volunteers like Rynar have heard about the fearsome marketing machine the Republicans are said to be firing up nationally this year. It's a highly empirical, data-driven system that purportedly slices and dices swing voters into small, identifiable segments, which can then be hit with targeted marketing messages.

It's heady stuff, and Parisa Sabeti, the campaign manager at Aronsohn headquarters a mile or two away, knows it. But Sabeti has the bad luck of being in the Fifth Congressional District (the toupee atop New Jersey, in the words of Stephen Colbert). Even though incumbent Republican Scott Garrett's previously bedrock foundation in the region has eroded somewhat, he's still considered safe enough that the Democratic National Committee has given little financial support to Sabeti's team. As a result, the Aronsohn campaign has raised most of its cash from PACs and unions.

Given Aronsohn's long odds, Sabeti had, for a time, considered going the same route as the Republicans, hiring a firm using a database technology called First Tuesday. But when Sabeti learned that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, she took a pass.

Sabeti had a tough decision. On the one hand, Republicans claim to have won Ohio in the 2004 election with targeted, database marketing. On the other, there's no independent proof that databases were the reason. But 2004 is ancient history; the real test of the technology will be in the current election.

As the Iraq War drags on, and headlines screamingly remind voters about the bungled Hurricane Katrina effort and the Rep. Mark Foley scandal, Democrats find themselves leading by 7% in the national polls. In many districts, even in some red (i.e. Republican) states, some GOP politicians are clearly in jeopardy of losing their seats in Washington. So the question comes to this: Will cutting-edge marketing technology be enough to save those seats, save those Republicans and save their party?



The Elephant's Vault

This election will be the first major test for Voter Vault, the GOP's national database. The system's been tried before, but not on a scale this large—or, for that matter, this critical. According to Eddie Mahe, a Washington-based Republican consultant and former deputy chair of the Republican National Committee, the party used a version of Voter Vault in 2002 and 2004. Those databases were employed locally, most notably in Ohio in 2004, where some say they enabled President George W. Bush to maintain control of the White House by a statistically hair-thin margin of 118,599 votes.

Like many a database, Voter Vault contains standard demographic data such as age, average income and party affiliation. Where VV distinguishes itself, however, is with its lifestyle data. The Vault knows, for instance, a voter's preferred brand of toothpaste, and what gym he or she belongs to. Such information allows the GOP to "microtarget" voters by dividing them into categories, each of whom can then be designated for tailored campaign messages.

"What this is about, is how you find the individual," said Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for President Bush's 2004 election and now a partner with the corporate brand consultancy ViaNovo, with offices in Austin, Texas and Alexandria, Va. "You take voter-file information and you combine that with what kind of car they drive, the magazines they subscribe to and their buying habits."

How is the knowledge of whether a given voter drinks beer or wine supposed to help a GOP candidate? Microtargeting involves predictive analysis. If you buy a lot of peanut butter, a predictive analysis might suggest that you'd be open to a pitch for jelly. The technique has been around since the 1970s when State Farm Insurance, for one, combined its auto and homeowner policy lists and cross-sold customers on both. Since then, political parties have caught on quickly to predictive logic.

"We knew that Mercury owners tended to vote Republican and Volvo owners voted Democrat," Mahe said. Lacking a centralized, national database, however, neither party could do much with such intelligence. Today, what customers choose in the grocery aisle is thought to have quite a lot to do with whom they end up choosing in a voting booth.

Historically, Republicans have been ahead of the curve with database marketing (GOP guru Karl Rove came from that world). But the Democrats and former President Bill Clinton's 1996 campaign are credited with pioneering "LifeTargeting." For years, both parties had targeted voters based on where they live and their previous voting pattern. LifeTargeting was the first to look at what magazines voters read and what kind of cars they drove, and then tailored political messages toward them.

Alas, in 1996, computers and databases weren't what they are now, and what the GOP has developed trumps their rivals' older model in both scope and sophistication. "If the Clinton plan had been the equivalent of LifeTargeting 1.0, President Bush's advisers created LifeTargeting4.0—a quantum leap that allowed them to track millions of voters based on their confidential consumer histories," writes Dowd, with co-authors Ron Fournier and Douglas B. Sosnik in Applebee's America: How Successful Political, Business and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community. "If you're a voter living in one of the 16 states that determined the 2004 election, the Bush team had your name on a spreadsheet with your hobbies and habits, vices and virtues, favorite foods, sports and vacation venues, and many other facts of your life."



Private Eyes

None of this would be possible without the help of private-sector marketing research. In the 2004 election, TargetPoint Consulting of Alexandria, Va., expanded the Volvo=Democrat reasoning to considerable proportions. Research found, for example, that Coors beer drinkers tend to lean Republican. Like gin or cognac? Chances are you'll reach for the Democratic lever. In the 2004 election, according to Dowd's book, the Bush campaign forked over $3 million to TargetPoint for political consulting and to conduct surveys (and that was just in Michigan.) The same year, the GOP also sent voter lists from Michigan to a data-mining company called Acxiom, based in Little Rock, Ark.

Acxiom has one of the largest collections of consumer data in the country, culled from a plethora of sources, including airlines, credit card companies, cruise lines and retail stores.

As Dowd writes, say a certain customer "subscribed to a wine magazine, gambled at casinos or collected stamps, Acxiom had a record of it."

By themselves, voter lists and consumer data are of little use to a party trying to get its candidates into office. It's the synthesis of the two that forms the core of the voter-targeting machinery. A party supplies a list of loyal voters; those voters are profiled for their consumer-goods preferences; then all consumers with that preference profile become targets for the party's campaign activity. That group can then be sliced and diced according to a theoretically limitless array of parameters, which yields subsets that can be effectively reached with more specific messages—most always, ones that appear in the mail.

When the Republican team submitted its voter list to Acxiom, they were no doubt delighted to receive consumer-related data on 95% of the names on that list. Put in other terms, the GOP obtained consumer histories on 5.7 of the 6 million registered Michigan voters. The list from Acxiom showed "the stage of life (age, marital status, number of children, etc.) and lifestyles (hunter, biker, home renter, SUV owner, level of religious interest) of each voter, drawn from a menu of more than four hundred separate categories," Dowd writes.

Next, with the help of surveys and modeling techniques, those Republican voters in Michigan were divided into subgroups with names like "Flag and Family Republicans," "Mellow Bush Supporters, "Religious Independents," and "Terrorism Moderates." These groups become the recipients of highly specialized marketing messages devised solely to appeal to their demonstrated leanings and preferences.

"You are now targeting based on behavior," said Brian Reich, a senior strategic consultant at Mindshare Interactive Campaigns, a Washington public affairs shop that handles lobbying and ballot initiatives. "You understand a lot more about a person based on how they spend their time and money, rather than on how they identify themselves."

To cite one of microtargeting's more colorful examples, this year the GOP is going after the 260,000 residents of Michigan who ride snowmobiles (since the state keeps records of licenses, finding out who owns a snowmobile is fairly easy). Snowmobilers are particularly angry that Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm's pro-environmental stance has held up the creation of a trail that would link the communities of Gaylord and Cheboygan, and would likely be receptive to promises by Republicans to take their pro-trail side on the issue.

But snowmobilers are, if you will, only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Republicans' targeting efforts. Saul Anuzis, the GOP chairman for Michigan, said the party this year is targeting 44 segments of the state's population with 12 different messages. He declined to offer more specifics. "Jobs is a big issue," he said. "We'll also be talking about immigration reform."

In preparation for the crucial November elections, this kind of targeting is happening all over the country. "Victory" is the name for the New Jersey GOP's get-out-the-vote drive for both federal and local races. The state's GOP rep, Todd Riffle, confirmed that the program relies on Voter Vault data, but he refused to disclose details. RNC chairman Ken Mehlman has confirmed, in published press reports,that Republicans have rolled out microtargeting nationally this year.

What's more, the GOP's targeting reaches beyond seeking out the party faithful; microtargeting also has identified Democrats who might defect if the message is right. "We try to find both political beliefs and traits and other types of behavior, like a Democrat who is behind us on the war on terror and may be persuadable," said Adrian Gray, director of strategy for the RNC. "We want the 'connectors'—people who are leaders of their own social hub and have influence." While Gray won't identify the exact predictive variables, he says the GOP is looking for Democrats with "certain religious interests or outdoor interests."

Dowd asserted that finding the influencers is the wave of the future for both political campaigns and for companies. "Instead of using mass media, people will figure out how do I advertise and reach those navigators," he said.



Meanwhile, Back in Blue Country

The Democrats' data-gathering strategy, by contrast, leaves something to be desired. The party tends to discard voter data between elections. And unlike Republicans, who handpick candidates early on and develop corresponding campaign messages before the upcoming race, Democrats often find themselves playing catch-up—waiting until a candidate gets the party nomination, then rushing to figure out how to sell him or her to the voters.

The disparity between these arrangements is obvious. "If you wait until [a nomination] to tell people you have to mobilize, you have a problem," said Reich. The Democrats are now in a scramble, and the stakes are high. Many political observers are predicting that the GOP may lose its lock on both houses of Congress. But for that to happen, the Democrats must win 15 seats in the House and six in the Senate.

The Dems don't intend to fight those battles with the GOP's type of statistical weaponry—at least, not on as large a scale. The Democrats do, however, use two separate databases of their own. One of them goes by the name of "Demzilla." It is not, the party insists, a response to, or the equivalent of, Voter Vault. In fact, Demzilla's been around since 2003 and is a donor database that's used solely for fundraising. The Democrats are also building up another in-house database for the purpose of voter targeting.

One local targeting initiative is taking place in New Mexico over the issue of cockfighting. The practice (considered a sport by some) is currently legal in the state. But a Democratic advisor said the party is reaching out to pet owners and asking them to back Democratic candidates, who oppose cockfighting. Party officials in New Mexico did not return calls for comment.

Despite efforts like these, however, DNC chairman Howard Dean has indicated that he isn't relying much on database marketing. Instead, the party has taken a decentralized—and decidedly more low-tech—approach, focusing on developing strong party organizations in each of the 50 states.

That decision has frustrated some of the Democratic faithful, who've sought to build their own databases. Harold Ickes, a former Clinton adviser, has set up a for-profit group called Catalist, which is creating a national voter database it will sell to political parties or third-party issue groups known as 527s. The AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union and Emily's List, a pro-choice women's group, are among Catalist's clients.

The DNC has not abandoned data-driven strategy completely. The party has spent $8 million to rebuild its voter data file, according to Ben Self, the DNC's director of technology. (Prior to co-founding the Internet-communications firm Blue State Digital, Self also had been the chief data-analysis guy for the 2004 Dean for America campaign, which was widely cited for effectively using the Web to raise funds and attract support.) The party planned to run modeling efforts in six states this fall, but party officials would not identify the states.

Microtargeting, Macro Doubts

Given the war and the scandals that have plagued the party in power, the Democrats may believe they have enough momentum—based on public opinion alone—to overcome Voter Vault and its influence. But the party may have another reason for relegating statistical crunching in its strategy. Just like Sabeti, Aronsohn's campaign manager in New Jersey, the Democratic party may simply think that microtargeting's results don't justify its expense.

Some Democrats wonder what the Voter Vault fuss is all about. "It's ridiculous for Republicans to claim they've gained an advantage over the Democrats because of their work over the past two election cycles," Self said. "First, the Democratic party has been microtargeting for the same amount of time, and second, I'm fairly certain that the Republican party hasn't developed any new algorithms for modeling that didn't exist before. These are all market-research techniques that have been used for years."

Self also asserted that microtargeting cases that are interesting to talk about—like bourbon drinkers being Republican and cognac and gin drinkers being Democratic—are in practice, just that: talk. "To my knowledge, there is no database that has gin drinkers on it," he said. "So you have to rely on survey data. You have to pay someone, and then you have to match your voter file, and it gets to very small numbers very fast."

By small numbers, Self means the number of potential voters that the statistical machinery spits out; not enough, in other words, to justify the effort. Still, small numbers have come to matter a great deal. In 2000, Al Gore missed snaring Florida by a mere 537 votes. (No word on whether they were cognac drinkers.)

Nevertheless, the marketing world thrives on ROI and, so far at least, electoral microtargeting hasn't evinced much of it. "It's not proven," said Don Green, a political science professor at Yale University. "It's based on speculations about how people with certain consumer traits will respond to different messages."

By contrast, microtargeting in business has earned its stripes. Walt Disney World, for instance, tapped Acxiom's Personicx database of 120 million U.S. homes to generate profiles of its customers. Using variables including age, income and Internet use, Disney found 14 metropolitan areas that house the majority of its current customers. Better still, the company learned of 10 similar locales it hadn't even known about, a marketing invitation if there ever was one.

Grocery chain Food Lion also worked with Acxiom on a segmentation strategy that highlighted 6.8 million households. Using the data, Food Lion discovered why a program pushing meat in rural stores only worked about half the time. Consumers in the slow-selling stores tended to be older and, hence, not as likely to buy meat as younger shoppers.

Apart from the question of microtargeting's worth in the electoral realm, some worry that political parties are even using the method. "This can have a chilling effect on participation," ventured Kim Alexander, president and founder of the California Voter Foundation in Davis, Calif. Alexander said that studies show about 25% of the population doesn't vote because it wants to keep personal information private. "Campaigns are supposed to raise money to communicate with voters. Now, we give campaigns complete control over which voters get informed in the first place. [We] target their messages, and exclude unlikely voters from receiving messages. No wonder there's less voter turnout."

The GOP's Mahe countered that there's not much for voters to fear about microtargeting, at least yet. The matched-up data, he pointed out, is mostly used for direct-mail campaigns and hasn't proven valuable for much else. "It's used to drive mail and it's used to make key decisions as to those people who are probably with you, but need to [be motivated to] get out and vote." Mahe added: "To try to use [microtargeting] for door-to-door canvassing would be extremely difficult."

Knocking on doors is tough enough—a fact that, on an autumn afternoon in Paramus, N.J., where nobody is at home, Democratic campaign staffer Zachary Rynar knows all too well.