Beyond Poll Numbers: Microtargeting Political Preference
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Polls, TechnologyAs anybody in marketing will tell you, the targeting trend is going toward more and more personalized messages, or “microtargeting.” And at some point in the future, marketers want to be able to target each individual with a perfectly crafted message. By that time they think they’ll be able to have enough information about you, your habits and your life to know exactly what you want to hear and when you want to hear it.
Now take that same idea and translate it to a political campaign. That’s what Alex Gage did for the RNC in 2003, and boy did it work…
In late 2002, Alex Gage sold his share of a well-established polling firm and set about convincing Karl Rove that he had the answer to ensuring President Bush’s reelection.His pitch was simple: Take corporate America’s love affair with learning everything it can about its customers, and its obsession with carving up the country into smaller and smaller clusters of like-minded consumers, and turn those trends into a political strategy. The Bush majority would be made up of thousands of groups of like-minded voters whom the campaign could reach with precisely the right message on the issues they considered most important. [...]
As a test, Gage was asked to produce targeted messages in several Pennsylvania judicial races in the fall of 2003. Why? The state offered a diverse mix of geography and ethnicity, and it almost certainly would be a battleground for both parties in 2004.
When the election was over, the Republican National Committee commissioned a poll to figure out whether Gage’s suppositions about why people voted were accurate. Gage’s models predicted voters’ tendencies with 90 percent accuracy, according to Dowd, and Gage was hired to microtarget the 16 or so battleground states in the 2004 election.
And in 2004, Gage went on to employ the tactics in the general election campaign and Bush picked up key votes in traditionally hard to reach areas and demographics…
In Ohio, the key battleground of the 2004 campaign, Gage’s microtargeting showed that black voters — who had traditionally not been drawn to the GOP — wanted to hear candidates talk about education and health care. As a result, they received a series of contacts — direct mail and phone calls, primarily — emphasizing Bush’s accomplishments on just those two issues. It was a much different message from the president’s broader attempt to cast the election as a choice between staying the course in Iraq and the anti-terrorism effort or switching teams in midstream. [...]It worked. Nationwide, Bush won 11 percent of the black vote, a two-point increase from 2000; in Ohio, he won 16 percent, an improvement of seven percentage points. Bush won Ohio by 118,601 votes, or approximately 2 percent of the more than 5.6 million votes cast for the two major-party nominees.
You can’t ignore numbers like that, and in our ever-increasing partisan political arena, a few percentage points here or there can be just the swing a candidate needs to win it all.
So did you know that Gage is working for Mitt Romney?
[...] the Romney campaign is decidedly circumspect when it comes to divulging details of exactly what Gage and his team are doing, other than to say the process of interviewing individuals has begun in Iowa.Romney communications director Matt Rhoades is only slightly more specific when asked about the campaign’s plans for microtargeting. “Our microtargeting strategy is tied to the calendar, and we have developed microtargeting models in Iowa,” he said.
So if Romney is lagging in the polls come early next year and somehow pulls off an amazing win in Iowa…you may just know one key reason to how he secured a victory.
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 and is filed under 2008 Election, Polls, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
