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The Role of Data in Politics: A Conversation With Sasha Issenberg

English: A map of the counties won by each can...

Earlier this year, the Obama campaign posted a job ad which asked qualified data scientists to apply to join the President’s reelection effort. “Using statistical predictive modeling,” the ad stated, “modeling analysts are charged with predicting the behavior of the American electorate.”

“These models,” the ad continued “will be instrumental in helping the campaign determine which voters to target for turnout and persuasion efforts, where to buy advertising and how to best approach digital media.”

The ad revealed not only that the Obama campaign would be using data in a signifcant way this election season, but also that they were not interested in keeping it a secret.

It is now well known that both the Obama and the Romney campaigns are relying on data to increase their chances of winning the election, but also apparent how little is known about how that data is used.

To better understand the role of data in campaigns, Voted Up caught up with journalist Sasha Issenberg whose recent book, The Victory Lab, covers the use of data in politics in great depth. We spoke with Issenberg at length about the data campaigns actually use, how they use it, the effectiveness of the practice and more.

Here we present to you the conversation in a (slightly) condensed form:

We hear a lot about the use of data in politics, what sort of data do campaigns actually use and where do they find it?

The basis of the data campaigns use is found on your voter registration form. That form contains your name, address, gender, date of birth, party registration and, in some places, race. Then, using your address, campaigns can take census information and extrapolate things about your socioeconomic status, race or ethnicity, and the type of community you live in.  The big breakthrough came as campaigns merged all that data with data collected in the commercial world. That can be anything from whether you have taken a cruise to whether you bought a certain appliance, to whether you check the box that says your household income is between fifty and seventy five thousand dollars. Combining that data with the ongoing intelligence gathering done by campaigns (during phone banking, canvassing, etc.), gives campaigns hundreds if not thousands of data points to draw from compared to the few dozen they may have had as recently as 15 years ago.

Once the campaigns collect all the data, how do they put it into action?

Campaigns will come up with an individual score, which I think of as credit scores for politics. A credit rating agency takes hundreds of thousands of data points and compares you to the type of people who have defaulted on loans, or paid off their bills on time, to determine the likelihood that you will default on your loan, etc. Similarly, campaigns take all the data they know about you and then come up with a score that predicts the likelihood you will cast a ballot in November, vote for Barack Obama, be pro choice or a gun owner or say that the economy is your most important issue, etc. The scores make it easier for campaigns to first sort through the electorate and decide who they don’t want to talk to.

Campaigns are then interested in finding two different pools of voters. They want to find ‘turnout targets,’ people who already support them but are not habitual voters, and ‘persuasion targets,’ people who are likely to vote but haven’t made up their mind. What the microtargeting allows them to do, in a granular and individual way, is basically automate the process of sorting people into those buckets. So, for people who have a high support score but a relatively low turnout score, someone running an Obama field office can look at them and say, “I know what to do with them. They are very likely to vote for Obama if they vote, now my job is getting them to vote.”

Is data also used in the targeting of digital ads to likely voters?

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