When we go to My BarackObama.com to use the "Neighbor to Neighbor" program, how can we know that the lists of names the campaign provides are useful leads for registering and mobilizing voters who will help the campaign? Below the jump, read about some of the ways in which the campaign is developing its voter contact lists. Bottom line: Obama's campaign is far more sophisticated and far reaching in compiling and analyzing voter lists than John Kerry's and Al Gore's campaigns ever were. This development, fused with our work as the masses on the phones and the ground, provide Obama an edge over the past two Democratic campaigns.
When John Kerry endorsed Barack Obama back in January, one of the reasons his support was seen as so valuable was his possession of a voter list of more than two million e-mail addresses. According to veteran political writer Thomas Edsall, however, what Obama has now makes Kerry's voter information cache look small and primitive by comparison. Edsall discussed the evolution of datamining and microtargeting in both the Democratic and Republican campaign infrastructures:
Traditional Democratic get-out-the-vote techniques usually involved targeting urban and minority precincts and simply trying to get everyone in these neighborhoods en masse to the polls. As more and more voters have dispersed, and as the Democratic Party has gained strength among well-educated professionals, the traditional approach has proven inadequate, especially after Republicans in the first part of this decade made huge gains in figuring out how to identify and contact key voters no matter where they lived - for example, black Detroit voters adamantly opposed to gay marriage, or gun-owning union members.
In 2004, the George W. Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee were light years ahead of the Democrats on this high-tech front. Now, four years later, according to knowledgeable Republicans and Democrats, the Obama campaign has caught up with, if not surpassed the GOP.
The president of one datamining firm working with the Obama campaign, Strategic Telemetry, claims to have identified 7,368,609 Democratic voters who lived in strongly Republican rural and exurban areas in 2006, as well as 23,616,066 voters who were likely undecided. The numbers in both categories are likely much larger today.
The highest profile firm aiding Obama is Catalist, run by former Clinton operative Harold Ickes and claiming information on 230 million Americans. Catalist was built over the past four years on a model of VoterVault, the Republican database that shaped Bush's voter outreach efforts in both the 2000 and 2004 campaigns.
VoterVault was an effective tool for Bush. Recall that in 2004, Bush beat Kerry in Iowa and New Mexico by a margin of less than one percent of the vote. Bush won Ohio and Nevada by less than three percent of the vote in each state. Putting aside for the moment the massive turn against Bush and the GOP by the electorate since early 2005, the advances in identifying potential voters in the numbers referenced above could be enough to swing these states to the Democratic column this year.
Furthermore, this data may help keep states like Michigan, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania Democratic this year. It may also help swing states that were not quite as close last time -- states like Florida, Colorado, and Virginia -- our way this time. Technology is no substitute for the enthusiasm of massive numbers of volunteers (access to Catalist did not prevent Hillary Clinton from losing the nomination to Barack Obama), but it can maximize the potential of our enthusiasm with the best possible information we can use in the seven weeks remaining before voters decide this nation's future.
I do not write this diary without misgivings. As anyone who followed the FISA fights knows, the amount of information about each and all of us that the government and private entities has access to is vast. That information is available to Barack Obama, and to John McCain, and to many other entities with many interests. In this environment, however, I am relieved that the Obama campaign is not falling behind the Republican machine in using information to contact voters. We need every voter we can to ensure that in January 2009 we have a President Barack Obama working with strong Democratic majorities in the House and Senate to begin repairing the damage of the current regime. The "Neighbor to Neighbor" program is an important tool to realizing this goal; this diary gives some idea of why it is so useful. Now let's use it.