Akkam’s Razor

A friend of mine sent me a link to a WaPo story on Mitt Romney's successor application to the GOP's Voter Vault.  The developer of the program, Alex Gage, provided his services to Ken Mehlman, then chair of the RNC, and Karl Rove.

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.

This is an interest that is near-and-dear to me, inclusive to my academic, professional, and political interests. 

In speaking to the specific program, strictly from a commercial perspective, I support using this type of marketing.  Relevant, usable marketing that delivers more signal and less noise is far more valuable to me, whether as a marketer or a consumer.  Give me what I know (or don't know) I need when I need it (or don't know I need it).  Niche marketing such as this can be infinitely useful as a tactical weapon.

Take a look at Omega List's Market Cards.  You can see that GOPUSA is largest, at 500k individuals. You can also see that they can nicely segment their database to individual concerns in the conservative sphere, like border control, tax reform, civil right(?), "pro-english", and Radio America, all conservative interests.

But as we can tell from the Republican's electoral showing in 2006, the excessive use of single-issue politics, wedge-issues, us-versus-them rhetoric, and microtargeting can be disastrous and result in tone-deaf politicians and consultants yammering to a middle that is no longer there.  When there is no middle, the Republicans, eventually, will lose.  There's also a very valid point when it comes to the aging of the Republican demographic,the decreased chance that there will be any short-term Congressional defectors while the war is ongoing, and the failure of pollsters to capture cell-phone only (younger, affluent) respondents and how that missing cohort affects the results.

Also, in the best of times, the "strength of the weak ties" between the aligned GOP factions, say Libertarians, Corporatists, Moralists, and Authoritarians may congeal together on mutual benefits and ignore their conflicted interests.  Now that the political outlook isn't so rosy, the knives come out, and you end up with "double-sided-wedges", like the immigration issue, where two Republican constituencies lose (Corporations wanted the cheap labor pool, while Xenophobes want closed borders and low- to no-immigration). 

In the old days, microtargeting was accomplished through fringe mailing lists - did you belong to the NRA?  Give money to an Anti-Abortion group?  Support fringe candidates with a narrow policy outlook?  It's important to remember that Rove gained much of his experience working in database marketing.  I suspect he didn't really have to be sold that hard on this system, fully understanding and appreciating the benefits.

But before the Democrats rush out to build an alternative (the existing system, as of 2004, was found lacking), they would benefit from learning how too much information can be just as damaging as not enough, and that microtargeting is not a viable long term strategic strategy.  Also, such systems may serve as the enabling factor for illegal activites, such as caging lists intended to falsely claim election fraud or highlighting where the voter rolls need to be purged to ensure a GOP margin.