Lansing — It was four days out from the 2016 presidential election when then-Michigan GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel got the call: The Republican National Committee’s advanced voter score software was, for the first time, predicting Donald Trump would narrowly win the state.
McDaniel, at the Lansing Capitol Region Airport preparing for a rally with vice presidential nominee Mike Pence, responded to RNC Chair Reince Priebus by asking him to get Trump back to Michigan as many times as possible before Election Day to build on the momentum.
Trump was in Macomb County two days later and ended his campaign with an election eve rally in Grand Rapids. He won by 10,704 votes.
“And then we also did a number of digital ads using our data to target the different voters that we really saw we had a chance of persuading and turning out to vote in order to win,” recalled Steve Ostrow, an RNC regional political director who worked for the state party in 2016.
“We clearly spent too much time and money here,” he added sarcastically, “because we ended up winning by 10,500 votes rather than the 7,700 we predicted.”
Increasingly complex systems allow Michigan’s political parties to compile robust information about individual voters that they then use in direct appeals for a cause or candidate.
“Allowing political parties and special interest groups to have a very detailed dossier on a person’s behavior raises fundamental questions about privacy in a democracy,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, calling it a bipartisan issue.
The Michigan Democratic Party, which shares voter data with the Democratic National Committee and coordinated campaigns, responded to the devastating 2016 election by launching Project 83, an attempt reach out to voters in every state county.
“It really is about engaging folks to strengthen that data and strengthen our messaging,” spokesman Paul Kanan said. “But just as important, it’s to put in place these local infrastructures so that the local parties can do a lot of this stuff themselves.”
The RNC has spent two years building on its voter score system, which combines consumer data with voter history information to create probability rankings that inform spending, messaging and other strategy decisions. How likely are you to prefer a party, candidate or issue? There’s a voter score for that.
GOP officials say the technology — combined with trained volunteers positioned across the state — could help counter a “blue wave” in an election cycle experts believe could be strong for Democrats.
“We know we have to defy history,” Ostrow said. “That’s kind of the mantra of the RNC this cycle.”
Targeting voters
Technology has reshaped the way political parties and campaigns operate, both on the ground and online.
“If someone is talking to a canvasser on the doors and says they really care about health care — that’s a big issue for them — they’re going to get a health care message online, one way or another,” said Josh Pugh of For Our Future, an…
