Tag: Grand Rapids, Michigan

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. “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. “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. “That’s kind of the mantra of the RNC this cycle.” (Photo: Rod Sanford, Special to The Detroit News ) Targeting voters Technology has reshaped the way political parties and campaigns operate, both on the ground and online. “Because in 2016 a lot of people were blindsided by what happened because traditional polling methods, and other methods we had trusted for years, did not comport with the reality of the ground.” Two years ago, the RNC used its voter score data to fine-tune appeals to voters who were part of what officials called the “HRC change universe” and held conflicting opinions about Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. While groups are using consumer data to add shopping habits and magazine subscriptions to voter profiles, publicly available voting information “is still the most useful thing for trying to influence elections,” Grossman said. Voter privacy was tested like never before in the 2016 election cycle, when Cambridge Analytica, a firm hired by Trump’s campaign, reportedly accessed private data on more than 50 million Facebook users. Betting big on tech The RNC has invested roughly $200 million in data and technology since 2012, the second cycle in a row that President Barack Obama’s campaign had “very honestly kicked our (expletive),” Ostrow said. “But rather than go out and build it just around a candidate … we build it around a party-centric model so that any candidate with an R can use it.” The voter score system uses publicly available voter information with other data, including between 2,000 and 10,000 consumer data points for each voter, said regional data director Tyler Church.