data pulse #28
The Republican Party after the second Obama 2012 election loss, fully reviewed and applied learnings ( and threw millions of dollars at it) They have developed a sophisticated tool that any Republican candidate even Donald Trump and Sarah Palin can use, focused on the one strategic commercial imperative: winning elections
Republican Party created a permanent resourced Data Centre, with capability developed to support Republican Party candidates in county, state, senate and presidential elections. The RNC Data Centre 2016 is a powerful query and data management tool, providing an interface for over 20 years of voter contact data. This allows Republicans to read and write data to and from the platform, continuously serving up the latest information to GOP candidates across the country. If a candidate 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 –
“We don’t just have the information they’re tweeting about, we can match them with their voting and purchasing habits in order to target them through email and social networks” said Jesse Kamzol, RNC Chief Data Officer.
Using powerful predictive analytics, the RNC claim that the Data Centre can tell a candidate, voter by voter, whether each individual is going to vote for them or not, and give reasons for each. At the macro level, this means they can identify how many votes up/down they are, which demographics to target, and then suggest suitable communications strategies to reach them.
This represents a long term strategic play for the Republicans: A permanent strategic and operational capability focused on a clear vision and goal and the right systems / processes / people continually learning and reapplying lessons learnt. This was first piloted in 2014 successful senate elections where they won majority in both houses and is now being deployed for 2016 senate and presidential elections.
This demonstrates building long term capability in data can have big impacts… we’ll have to wait and see if the investment pays off in November 2016
Data Pulses storytelling 