Category: political

Data Driven Donald Storms Ahead?

trump

data pulse #29

Donald Trump has been quietly building a data juggernaut like Barack Obama: defying sceptics he’s been putting tools in place to get out the vote and results from the states so far suggest he is pulling ahead as front-runner because he’s getting the vote out for his supporters.

In 2015 his campaign assembled an experienced data team to build sophisticated models to transform fervour into votes. The team is led by two low-profile former data strategists, Matt Braynard and Witold Chrabaszcz, and they are using the Republican Data Centre plus supercharging it.

The RNC Data Center 2016 is a powerful query and data management tool, providing an interface for over 20 years of voter contact data. This allows Republicans / Trump to read and write data to and from the platform, continuously serving up the latest information to Trump. If Trump wanted to find 10 people on a residential block that haven’t voted in the past 20 years, have strong views on conservative topics and don’t like the Affordable Care Act, they could do so in seconds.

The system is described as the ‘centrepiece of the RNC’s new data-driven political ground game.’ Voter scoring is employed to track each individual in for contact (by mail, door, phone) and whether they voted (by absentee or on Election Day). Advanced voter profiling even matches social data to voter data automatically

The data push is focused on integrating information Trump has collected, through his campaign website and at voter rallies, on nontraditional or unregistered supporters. It also includes commercial data obtained from the RNC and other sources, in an effort to mobilize voters in key early states.

A data driven Trump seems to be storming the Primaries (he won over 50% of vote in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island  with record turnout ) and into the White House in November.

Check out other Blogs : Data Driven Rednecks, Obama in Subscription Business

Obama- in the subscription business

obama

data Pulse #27

The Obama presidential campaign 2008/2012 created a step change in how data was used in political campaigning. Obama campaign mobilised  a team of experts to give him an unfair advantage against the other candidates. It could be seen as very sophisticated but in reality they were just applying all the simple skills that data-driven Direct Marketers have been using for decades, but doing it with discipline, at scale, and speed.

Obama’s team focused on making sure that Democrats voters would come out to vote on election day, and built a machine that enabled people to be involved and donate their money, time and energy to the cause.

Obama campaign was in “the subscription business”

Obama had clear purpose, but also ran a political campaign in a professional business like manner. he had clear data-driven targets, reviewed daily. Obama built an excellent customer experience that micro-listened so they could target with precision to maximise the impact of communications. They built an engagement ladder to move through in a monitored way from aware, to supporting to donating or actively volunteering.

All messaging was A/B tested to maximise the effectiveness of targeting for different groups. They know that an email from Michelle Obama would appeal more to one group, or from a local Oklahoma name in Oklahoma would work better for a different group.

This enable mass fund raising and mass engagement of grass-roots supporters, and blew away the Republican Party candidates twice.

The rest is history…. until 2016.