Hacking the Electorate

Kyriakos Pierrakakis

Director of Research, diaNEOsis

“Seeing Like A State”

“Officials of the modern state …. assess the life of their society by a series of typifications that are always some distance from the full reality these abstractions are meant to capture… These typifications are indispensable to statecraft. State simplifications such as maps, censuses, cadastral lists and standard units of measurement represent techniques for grasping a large and complex reality” James Scott

Politics 101

• Goals:

– more money in the bank

– more door knocks

– more phone calls

– more voter registrations

– more voters at the polls

Obama 2012?

Obama 2012!

The Cave

6

Moneyball

Moneyball 101

• Book by Michael Lewis (made into movie)

• Rise of baseball team “Oakland Athletics”

• Use of advanced statistical methodologies

• “People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.”

• Baseball: Spend least $ for most runs

• Politics: Spend least $ for most votes!

Targeting

Campaigning Technologies

• Radio and FDR

• Direct mail and Truman

• T.V. and Kennedy/Reagan

• Today:

– Talk Radio and the Republican Party

– New Media and the Democratic Party

• Dean ‘04/ Trippi

• Obama ‘08 & ’12 / Plouffe

Big Data in the US

• Democratic Party: lost in 2002

• Republicans: direct mail + phone calls (for fundraising)

• Gap analysis:

– Dispersed databases (fundraising, volunteers, polling, get-out-the-vote)

– Small e-mail database

Dean 2004

Dean 2004

• The internet as a fundraising platform

• The internet as an organizing platform

• The internet as a democracy platform

• “There is only one tool, one platform, one medium that allows the American people to take their government back, and that’s the internet” Joe Trippi

What the word says:

23

Catalist

• Principal repository of Democratic data

• 2008: voters contacted by Catalist member groups turned out by rate of 74.6% (vs. 60.4%).

• In four battleground states – Ohio, Florida, Indiana and North Carolina - the number of new votes cast by progressives exceeded Obama’s victory margin.

• Catalist’s member groups contacted a total of 49 million adults more than 127 million times and about half of them eventually voted (20% of total votes)

• Data enrichment: accumulation of more than 60 million new data points on 35 million Americans

Gathering Data

• Data as map of citizen preferences and profile

• 2002 Help America Vote Act: states have to keep electronic of which citizens voted in which past elections.

• Mail vendors using consumer data for modeling purposes since the 1990s

• Dispersed databases combined

Sources of Data - Party

• Publicly stated positions

• Public petitions

• Telephone polling

• Canvassing by phone

• Donor databases

• Observation of party volunteers

– Party worker smartphone who could instantaneously enrich the file

Sources of Data - Public

• Publicly available voter files (states) – Date of birth – Gender – Address – Telephone number – Past electoral participation ( key)

• Census data – Average household income – Average level of education – Average number of children per household – Ethnic distribution

Sources of Data - Private

• Data vendors: Axciom, Dun and Broadstreet, InfoUSA

• Mainly telephone numbers (out-of-date in the voter file)

• Estimated years of education

• Home ownership status

• Mortgage information

• Not really: information on magazine subscriptions, car purchases, credit card consumer profiles or other consumer tastes (i.e. pet ownership, gun ownership etc.)

Social Media

Social Media

• Access social graph (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Google+)

• Voters more likely to be persuaded if they see their peers supporting a particular party or candidate (Issenberg 2013)

• Consumers more likely to be influenced if they see their friends consuming a particular product (Christakis and Fowler 2011)

• 2012: 600,000 Facebook friends of the Obama campaign signed up for an application of the campaign that allowed the sharing of specific content about Obama with their friends.

• Access to more than 5 million contacts that saw each other register to vote, giving money, sharing videos on the campaign and voting.

Social Media, example

• In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama’s campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49.

• The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney — and Obama.

• Same with Sarah Jessica Parker

Data Revealed

• Most of the data willingly revealed by ourselves!

• People who donated/volunteered in the past have a higher propensity to do so – Data about them unpacked, inferences made about

types and characteristics of people who might showcase similar behavior

• Low threshold to take action (provide e-mail, press like)

• Behavior monitored – Which e-mails do I open?

Processing Data

• A-B Comparisons

– Mainly e-mails

• Volunteer calls through VoIP technologies

– Knocking doors: 2-4 people/hour

– Calls: 10-15 people/hour

• Traditional metric: 1-5 (Strongly Republican to Strongly Democratic)

Obama 2012

• Of his $1 billion campaign-cash haul, Obama was able to raise $690 million online in 2012, up from about $500 million in 2008. More than $200 million of that came in donations of $200 or less, a 10% increase over the history-making frenzy of 2008.

• Polling data from about 29,000 people in Ohio alone —half of 1% of all voters there — allowing for deep dives into exactly where each demographic and regional group was trending at any given moment.

• One woman in central Ohio who was living with her young voting-age daughter reported that her house got four different visits on the morning of Election Day, each from a different neighbor making sure both women had remembered to vote

Predictive Scores

• Behavior Scores – Demographics + past electoral behavior – Calculate that citizens will engage in specific forms of

political activity – (i.e. voter turnout on election day, voter donation,

volunteering, rally attendance).

• Support Scores – Predictors of the political preferences of citizens (0-100 //

aggregate, not individual)

• Responsiveness Scores – predictors of how citizens respond to campaign outreach

efforts

Example

• Calling potential voters • Phone banks: $4/completed call, regardless of

donation • Possible result: 60% gave $0, 20% gave $10, 10% give

$20 and 10% give $60. The average of that is $10 per completed call

• Fundraising score using data eliminates half of the calls to citizens who would donate nothing.

• New distribution: 30% donate $0, 35% donate $10, 17.5% donate $20 and 17.5% donate $60, then the expected revenue from each call would increase from $10 to $17.5

Enter Traditional Media

• 2012: “Optimizer” • Matched targeted voters – especially in battleground states

– to data about what television programs those voters tended to watch.

• Buy advertising time during those programs especially on smaller cable channels, whose advertising rates were cheaper

• The campaign bought ads to air during unconventional programming, like Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead and Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23, skirting the traditional route of buying ads next to local news programming.

• 14% more efficient buying.

The Perils

• Personal targeting and fact-checking? – Example: I visit Evangelical Christian Sites the

campaign does not showcase its progressive position on gay marriage

• Access to proprietary database data should be regulated with strengthened privacy laws

• Obama’s likeability factor

• We need better regulation!

• We also need investigative journalism!