Inside The Targeting Game Dems Use To Win Votes– thefederalist.com

Democratic political scientists in Washington are happy with their many midterm victories. Meanwhile, no Republican campaign professional understands how this victory was largely due to Democrats’ 20-year-old data and analysis revolution.

Democratic campaigns nationwide have transformed their electioneering in a consistent and measurable way, increasing their votes. They also know that not one major campaign on the right has even begun the work of duplicating this.

The development of new methods of testing was first highlighted in a 2010 New York Times article called “Nudge the Vote: How Behavioral Science is Remaking Politics” and then more significantly in the 2012 book, The Victory Lab, by leftist reporter Sasha Issenberg.

There is a giant chasm between the usage of data in the Democratic world and its use on the right. The only data operations on the political right are gathered through polls. These are tools first developed in the 1930s, and little they give us is as reliable or as sophisticated as the data work of the modern Democratic Party.