Political Micro-Targeting: What Decision Support Systems Did for Barack Obama On the day he took the oath of office in 2009, President Barack Obama spoke a word rarely heard in inaugural addresses- data- referencing indicators of economic and other crises. His use of the word is perhaps not so surprising. Capturing and analyzing data were crucial to Obama's rise to power.
Throughout his historic campaign he not only used the Internet for networking and fundraising, but he also relied on decision support systems to identify potential swing voters. Obama's team carefully monitored contested states and congressional districts, where as few as 2,000 voters could prove decisive-a tiny fraction of the voting public. Both presidential candidates hired technology wizards to help sift through mountains of consumer and demographic details to recognize these important voters. 10 "Tribes" Spotlight Analysis, a Democratic consultancy, used political micro-targeting to analyze neighborhood details, family sizes, and spending patterns to categorize every person of voting age-all 175 million-into 10 "values" tribes.
Individual tribe members do not necessarily share the same race, religion, or income bracket, but they have common mind-sets about political issues: God, community, responsibility, and opportunity. Spotlight Analysis predicted the influence of a particular morally guided (but not necessarily religious) tribe of some 14 million voters, dubbed Barn Raisers. Barn Raisers are of many races, religions, and ethnicities; about 40 percent favor Democrats and 27 percent Republicans. Barn Raisers are slightly less likely to have a college education than Spotlight's other swing groups.
They are active in community organizations, ambivalent about government, and deeply concerned about "playing by the rules" and "keeping promises," to use Spotlight's definitions. Spotlight believed the Barn Raisers held the key to the race between Obama and his Republican challenger, Arizona Senator John McCain. Political micro-targeting, which depends on MIS to support decision making, is turning government segments into sophisticated, intelligent, methodical political machines. In nanoseconds, decision support systems sort 175 million voters into segments and quickly calculate the potential for each individual voter to swing from red or purple to blue. For some, political micro-targeting signals the dehumanization of politics.
For others, this type of sophisticated analysis is a highly efficient way of pinpointing potential voters. For example, the analysis of a voter in Richmond, Virginia, simply identifies the number of his or her school-age children, type of car, zip code, magazine subscriptions, and mortgage balance. Data could even indicate whether the voter has dogs or cats. (Cat owners lean slightly for Democrats, dog owners trend Republican.) After the analysis, the voter is placed into a political tribe, and analysts can draw conclusions about the issues that matter to him or her and make campaign decisions accordingly. Is this a bad thing?
Behavioral Grouping For generations, governments lacked the means to study individual behaviors and simply placed all citizens into enormous groupings such as Hispanics, Catholics, union members, hunters, soccer moms, and so on. With the use of sophisticated MIS analysis techniques, companies such as Spotlight Analysis can group individuals based more on specific behavior and choices, and less on the names, colors, and clans that mark us from birth. When Spotlight first embarked on its research, it interviewed thousands of voters the old-fashioned way.
The Barn Raisers did not seem significant; the tribe represented about 9 percent of the electorate. However, when Spotlight's analysts drilled down or dug deeper, they discovered that Barn Raisers stood at the epicenter of a political swing. In 2004, 90 percent of them voted for President Bush, but then the group's political leanings shifted, with 64 percent saying they voted for Democrats in the 2006 election. Spotlight surveys showed that Republican political scandals, tax-funded boondoggles such as Alaska's "bridge to nowhere," and the botched recovery job after Hurricane Katrina sent them packing. Suddenly, Spotlight had identified millions of potential swing voters. The challenge then was to locate them by state.
For this, the company analyzed the demographics and buying patterns of the Barn Raisers it had surveyed personally. Then it began correlating its data with commercially available data to match profiles. By Spotlight's count, this approach nailed Barn Raisers three times out of four. So Democrats could bet that at least three-quarters of them would be likely to welcome an election appeal stressing honesty and fair play. Still Swing Voters Spotlight has not correlated the Barn Raisers to their actual votes, so it's not clear how well the company's strategy worked.
However, it is reasonable to presume that amid that sea of humanity stretched out before the newly inaugurated Obama on the National Mall, at least some were moved by micro-targeted appeals. And if Obama and his team fail to honor their mathematically honed vows, the Barn Raisers may abandon them in droves. They are swing voters, after all. 23
Questions
1. Define the three primary types of decision-making systems, and explain how Obama's campaign team used them to win votes.
2. Describe the difference between transactional and analytical information, and determine which types Spotlight Analysis used to identify its 10 tribes.
3. Illustrate the business process model used to identify the 10 tribes.
4. Explain business process reengineering and how Obama's team used it to develop political micro-targeting.
5. Formulate different metrics the Obama team used to measure the success of political micro-targeting.
6. Argue for or against the following statement: Political micro-targeting signals the dehumanization of politics.