Analytics Stories

CHAPTER 54Can Data Win a Presidential Election?

Jim Rutenberg's New York Times Magazine article “Data You Can Believe In” (June 20, 2013) described how Barack Obama's 2012 presidential campaign used sophisticated analytics and huge databases as powerful tools to defeat Mitt Romney. In 2016, Hillary Clinton's campaign failed to understand the power of social media as well as Donald Trump's director of digital media, Brad Parscale. Andrew Marantz's New Yorker Magazine article “The Man Behind Trump's Facebook Juggernaut” (March 9, 2020) describes in great detail how Parscale's mastery of Facebook advertising played a key role in Trump's upset victory. In this chapter, we will describe the use of analytics by Democrats and the GOP in recent presidential campaigns.

Democratic Presidential Analytics

As described by Eitan Hersh in his book Hacking the Electorate (Cambridge, 2015), Obama's 2012 campaign made extensive use of the Catalist voter database. As of March 2020, Catalist contains information on 185 million registered voters and 55 million unregistered voters (see www.catalist.us/about/). Hersh describes how most of this data comes from publicly available data, with the most used source being voter registration data. In different states, this contains different types of data. Usually the voter registration data will contain the voter's name, address, party registration, voting history, age, and gender. In seven southern states and Pennsylvania, race is required on the voter ...