Karl Rove: Republicans Are Looking at Up to 450 Data Points About Each US Household
Speaking this morning at the Aspen Ideas Festival (co-organized by Quartz’s sister publication The Atlantic), Rove discussed in some detail how it works:
“In the Republican case, they take up to 450 pieces of household-level of information about you in order to develop three numbers: how likely are you to vote, how persuadable are you, and then a complex algorithm for every voter and non-voter—everyone registered and everybody unregistered—that describes your view of the world, what’s important to you and how do you think about things, what will motivate you.”
Campaigns then use that data to target individual voters with specific messages, or calls or visits from campaign volunteers. Rove said that Republicans were earlier to use such technology, but a contributing factor to president Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election was Democrats’ “dynamic micro-targeting” of voters. Rove said that this allowed Democrats to identify on-the-fly how news and campaign developments could sway specific voters, while the Republicans’ campaign modeling was more fixed.
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