Ever since Republicans lost the popular vote for the fifth time in the last six presidential elections — despite economic news that should have spelled doom for the Democratic incumbent in 2012 — GOP supporters have talked about the need for changes such as rebranding.
But the latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek reminds us that Republicans also need help with the technological battle. The magazine describes how Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt helped put together a data analytics team “credited with producing Obama’s surprising 5-million-vote margin of victory.”
For all its acclaim, the analytics team’s main achievement is often misunderstood as “microtargeting” or some variant on wooing voters. This reverses the relationship between campaign and voter at the heart of Wagner’s method. Recent campaigns have employed a top-down approach to identify what they thought were vital demographic groups such as “soccer moms.” Wagner’s team pursued a bottom-up strategy of unifying vast commercial and political databases to understand the proclivities of individual voters likely to support Obama or be open to his message, and then sought to persuade them through personalized contact via Facebook (FB), e-mail, or a knock on the door. “I think of them as people scientists,’’ says Schmidt. “They apply scientific techniques to how people will behave when confronted with a choice or a question.” Obama’s rout of Mitt Romney was a lesson in how this insight can translate into political strength.