Tom Edsall on politics inside and outside of Washington.
The Republican Party faces hurdles as it attempts to equal or surpass the Democratic Party’s success in capitalizing on technological innovation to win President Obama a second term.
It was only two presidential elections ago, in 2004, that the political classes were talking about Republican domination of data mining and microtargeting. Now the party is acutely aware of its own deficiencies as it confronts a decisive Democratic advantage.
The Republican National Committee’s Growth and Opportunity Project, a recently released study of the last election, pointedly acknowledged that in 2012
Democrats had the clear edge on new media and ground game, in terms of both reach and effectiveness. Obama’s campaign knocked on twice as many doors as the Romney campaign, and Obama’s campaign had a ballot edge among those contacted by both campaigns. In addition, the president’s campaign significantly changed the makeup of the national electorate and identified, persuaded and turned out low-propensity voters by unleashing a barrage of human and technological resources previously unseen in a presidential contest. Marrying grassroots politics with technology and analytics, they successfully contacted, persuaded and turned out their margin of victory.
The report, commissioned by Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, cited another, subtler liability for the party as it tries to deploy emerging technologies: a conservative culture that stresses hierarchy, authority, command and control over creativity and open inquiry:
Another consistent theme that emerged from our conversations related to mechanics is the immediate need for the R.N.C. and Republicans to foster what has been referred to as an “environment of intellectual curiosity” and a “culture of data and learning,” and the R.N.C. must lead this effort. We need to be much more purposeful and expansive in our use of research and more sophisticated in how we employ data across all campaign and Party functions. No longer can campaign activities be compartmentalized or “siloed” in a way that makes sharing resources and knowledge less efficient.
To that point, greater collaboration and sharing of information is critical. Republicans do not do this very well, but we must if we intend to compete with Democrats who have naturally embraced a more collective approach. Doing so has allowed them to assemble more complete and detailed snapshots of voters — what motivates them and how to better reach them in a way that actually results in votes. The R.N.C. must take the lead in developing an environment in which information is shared and G.O.P. entities work together to ensure greater communication.
The use of high-tech voter contact and turnout techniques is of particular importance in American elections because the percentage of the voting age population that actually casts ballots is so low – in the mid-50 percent range in presidential years, in the 35 to 37 percent range in non-presidential years. A seemingly small boost of 2 to 3 percent can often change the outcome.
Interviews with Republicans who worked on the R.N.C. report, as well as with party consultants who specialize in microtargeting, media research and digital communications, produced universal agreement with the Priebus report. A majority of those I spoke to asked not to be quoted by name because they do not want to publicly fault the strategy and tactics of their own party.
Their criticism of bad leadership decisions included the unwillingness of the Romney campaign – or the McCain team in 2008, for that matter — to open the strategy-making process to hypertargeting pioneers who were breaking new ground, trawling social media sites and deploying online and offline data to create customized voter appeals.
Republican operatives also criticized the fund-raising and planning during the period when Michael Steele served as R.N.C. chair in 2009 and 2010, and they noted the loss of interest by the Bush White House, and in particular Karl Rove, in tackling the frontiers of data management once the 2004 election had been won.
“We definitely had the head start in 2004,” one Republican involved in the campaign said. “After that, Bush couldn’t run again, and Karl just stopped caring. We were the Blackberry of the day.”
Reached by phone, Alex Lundry, vice president and research director of TargetPoint, a company at the forefront of microtargeting for the Republicans in 2002 and 2004, pointed to further difficulties:
We had 90 to 95 percent of the data and tools, but we did not have our data sources talking to each other. It’s not about the lack of data, it’s about integrating the data. This takes time and a huge amount of money.
“The trickiest problem, the one that will take the longest time to solve, is the creation of a culture of data and analytics, including training operatives to understand what data is,” Lundry said. And the collaborative nature of “data ecosystems,” he suggested, do not play to Republican strengths.
The Priebus report surveyed 227 Republican campaign managers, field staff, consultants, vendors and other political professionals, asking them to rank the Democrat and Republican advantages on 24 different measures using a scale ranging from plus 5 (decisive Republican edge) to minus 5 (solid Democratic advantage). “Democrats,” the report noted, “were seen as having the advantage on all but one.” As the graph on Page 28 of the report illustrates, most of the largest Democratic advantages relate directly to the integration of technology with “ground war” campaign activities like person-to-person voter contact, election-day turnout and demographic analysis:
Several journalists have documented this Democratic advantage. Sasha Issenberg, who wrote “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns,” has described what liberals and Democrats have done to “mathematicize” voter turnout. Right after the 2012 election, Issenberg explained how things have changed:
Within the practice of politics, no shift seems more dramatic than the role reversal between the two parties on campaigning competence. Today, there is only one direction in which envy can and should be directed: Democrats have proved themselves better — more disciplined, rigorous, serious, and forward-looking — at nearly every aspect of the project of winning elections.
During the period of acknowledged Republican technological stasis, from 2005 until now, Democrats not only leapfrogged their opposition, but also used the time to build a private sector training ground. That private sector infrastructure serves both as a resource for innovation, testing and research, and as a source of paying jobs between campaigns for computer and data specialists.
The premier pro-Democratic quantitatively oriented organizations — both for-profit and nonprofit — have become crucial sources of data, voter contact and nanotargeting innovation for Democrats and liberal organizations. These include:
• Catalist, which maintains a “comprehensive database of voting-age Americans” for progressive organizations;
• The Analyst Institute, “a clearinghouse for evidence-based best practices in progressive voter contact,” which conducts experimental, randomized testing of voter persuasion and voter mobilization programs;
• TargetSmart Communications, which develops political and technology strategies;
• American Bridge 21st Century, which conducts year-round opposition research on Republicans and conservative groups;
• The Atlas Project, which provides clients with online access to detailed political history from national to local races, including media buys and campaign finance data and a host of other politically relevant data;
• Blue State Digital, a commercial firm founded by operatives in Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign that now provides digital services to clients ranging from the Obama campaign to Ford Motor Company to Google.
The creation of this progressive infrastructure was driven by a small cadre of activists who saw the 2004 election as a warning that the Republican Party could develop a permanent advantage in the mechanics of getting out the vote unless Democrats mounted a full-scale counterattack.
The leaders of this drive include Mike Podhorzer, political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.; Harold Ickes Jr., former deputy chief of staff to President Clinton; Steve Rosenthal, former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and now head of the Organizing Group; Ellen Malcolm, founder of Emily’s List, which supports pro-choice Democratic women; and Mary Beth Cahill, who managed John Kerry’s 2004 campaign and now runs the Washington office of the United Auto Workers.
Podhorzer noted in a phone interview that the liberal Democratic mind-set lent itself to the kind of cooperative mobilization that proved crucial to the technological gains on the left.
The big difference was that there wasn’t an über-consultant like Karl Rove in a top-down way saying, “this is how we are going to win.” It grew out of a group of individuals who had lost faith in the guru model of political strategy.
“Now,” Podhorzer said, “we have a very deep bench.”
Another factor working in favor of liberals is that neighborhoods home to advanced tech are not favorable terrain for the Republican Party, as the Times’s Nate Silver pointed out last November.
Take, for example, Santa Clara County, in the heart of Silicon Valley. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the county has the highest concentration in the United States of computer engineers, designers, software developers and digital researchers – the skills essential for the tech wars.
In 2012, Santa Clara County voted for Obama over Romney by a 70-27 margin, nearly 3 to 1. Not a good place for the Republican Party to seek loyal volunteers.
Santa Clara County is not unique. The No. 2 in high-tech employment is Boulder County, in Colorado. How did it vote? The map shows a sea of blue:
Obama’s percentage of the vote in Boulder County, 70.28, was almost identical to what he won in Santa Clara County.
Another crucial source of technology is personnel in the scientific community. Again, this is not a hotbed of Republican and conservative activism. Just the opposite.
A July 2009 Pew Research Center survey found that the partisan leaning of scientists was 55 percent Democratic, 32 percent independent and 6 percent Republican, compared with 35 Democratic, 34 independent and 23 Republican among the general public. Ideologically, 52 percent of scientists polled by Pew described themselves as liberal, 35 percent as moderate and 9 percent as conservative, compared to 20 liberal, 38 moderate and 37 conservative among all voters.
Will today’s advantage give the Democratic Party an edge for the immediate future?
Larry Grisolano, director of paid media for the Obama campaign, warned on Twitter last week:
Caution to Dems: G.O.P.’s tech clumsiness won’t last. 2012 is over. 2016 cutting edge hasn’t been invented yet.
Democrats claimed to have achieved a permanent majority after Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater, 61-39, in 1964; again, although with less confidence, in 1976 when Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford in the aftermath of Watergate; and again in 2008, when Obama beat McCain, 365 to 173, in the Electoral College. Within two years of each of these elections, Democrats suffered major setbacks.
So too was the case for George W. Bush, who won by a solid three million vote margin in 2004 and promptly claimed that “I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” only to see his party take a bath in 2006.
In fact, the Republican Party is gearing up to take the Democrats on in the battle over technological superiority, just as the Democrats did in the aftermath of the 2004 election. Democrats have some built-in advantages and have found a way to capitalize on them, but the Republican Party and its community of consultants will almost certainly discover its own built-in advantages.
For now the R.N.C. plans to try to replicate what the Democrats and allied liberal interest groups have done. Among the Priebus report proposals that echo established Democratic practices are:
Creation of a new data platform accessible (through rentals, subscriptions, licenses or data exchange agreements) to all qualified Republican organizations and campaigns, approved vendors and research organizations for data enhancement, analytics and application development.
Identify a team of strategists and funders to build a data analytics institute that can capture and distill best practices for communication to and targeting of specific voters. Using the G.O.P.’s data, the data analytics institute would work to develop a specific set of tests for 2013 and 2014 — tests on voter registration, persuasion, GOTV, and voter mobilization — that will then be adopted into future programs to ensure that our voter contact and targeting dollars are spent on proven performance.
The Republican Party needs a new training institute that can benefit all Party committees, state parties, campaigns, and outside groups. This could be established in the form of a 501(c) 4 group to train and develop political/digital talent.
Republican plans differ from those of Democrats in that they assign a central role to the party’s national committee, which would “recruit and competitively compensate talented and committed long-term data staff”; “recruit and hire a chief technology and digital officer”; “create in-house staff training programs for digital recruits to ensure the cultivation of mid-level tech/digital leaders who can effectively administer large programs within the digital team, like email, social content, fund-raising, and digital field organizing”; and “establish an R.N.C. fellows program to recruit data, digital, and tech ‘fellows’ from college campuses, targeting potential graduates in fields such as computer science and mathematics.”
By centralizing control in the R.N.C., the party runs its own risks, which the Priebus report acknowledges:
Our challenge is less of a technology problem and more of a culture problem. As referenced earlier, we need to strive for an environment of intellectual curiosity, data, research, and testing to ensure that our programs are working. We need to define our mission by setting specific political goals and then allowing data, digital, and tech talent to unleash the tools of technology and work toward achieving those goals. And just as with all forms of voter contact, digital must be tested, and we must measure our rate of return.
Even so, the biggest obstacle facing the Republican Party may be how to get its leaders, including those in charge of the R.N.C., to accommodate and accept the freewheeling approach to innovation — the invention of invention — that made the digital revolution now transforming American politics possible in the first place.