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.
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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.
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