July 5th, 2007
Inventor of political microtargeting applies his craft for Romney
Alex Gage is the guy who invented microtargeted election campaigning, the trend that sealed Karl Rove’s reputation as political wunderkind. Using the wealth of personal data on Americans that’s available for a price, the strategy was to use databases to identify Republican voters on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood, even home-by-home basis.
In 2004, it allowed the Republicans to reach out to conservative voters in Democratic precincts — voters who would previously have been ignored by the campaigns. Gage’s techniques are credited with unearthing Republican voters in Ohio and motivating them to get to the polls.
Now Gage is working for another Republican campaign - that of Mitt Romney. As a Harvard biz school graduate, Romney is well-known for trying to apply business techniques to the political world.
Describing what he does, Gage, 57, sounds part marketer, part political strategist — and more than a little Big Brother. “Microtargeting is trying to unravel your political DNA,” he said. “The more information I have about you, the better.”
With enough information, everyone can be pigeonholed into specific descriptive groups like Flag and Family Republicans or Tax and Terrorism Moderates. From there, it’s a simple matter of targeted marketing.
” ‘Flag and Family Republicans’ might receive literature on a flag-burning amendment from its sponsor, while ‘Tax and Terrorism Moderates’ get an automated call from [former New York mayor] Rudy Giuliani talking about the war on terror, even if they lived right next door to one another,” Alex Lundry, the senior research director of TargetPoint — the firm Gage founded in 2003 — wrote recently in Winning Campaigns magazine.
So how to you get to home-level targeted marketing? Gage’s strategy was to do large-scale surveys, then overlay the results with tons of data points.
The first step in doing this is conducting a large survey of voters. By matching up their political views with detailed information about their consumer habits, a model is established that can be applied to the population as a whole. A campaign would then know which issues are important to an unmarried woman who subscribes to Outside magazine and is a frequent flier, and how they are different from issues important to an unmarried woman who has two grown children, uses corrective lenses and is an AARP member — even if they are next-door neighbors.
For Bush strategist Ken Mehlman, the work made the difference between talking about broad issues in 2000 to addressing voters’ concerns in 2004. And because this is targeting marketing, the message was fine-tuned to racial and socioeconomic groups.
In Ohio, the key battleground of the 2004 campaign, Gage’s microtargeting showed that black voters — who had traditionally not been drawn to the GOP — wanted to hear candidates talk about education and health care. As a result, they received a series of contacts — direct mail and phone calls, primarily — emphasizing Bush’s accomplishments on just those two issues. It was a much different message from the president’s broader attempt to cast the election as a choice between staying the course in Iraq and the anti-terrorism effort or switching teams in midstream.
It worked. Nationwide, Bush won 11 percent of the black vote, a two-point increase from 2000; in Ohio, he won 16 percent, an improvement of seven percentage points. Bush won Ohio by 118,601 votes, or approximately 2 percent of the more than 5.6 million votes cast for the two major-party nominees.
Another victory was in New Mexico, where Gage targeted middle-aged Hispanic women with kids in public schools who were very unlikely Republican voters. But they liked Bush’s No Child Left Behind strategy. Republicans targeted 6,000 very likely voters in this group. Could these women have made the difference? Bush lost New Mexico in 2000 and won it in 2004 - by just 5,988 votes.
For the Republican primary, the question is whether microtargeting can distinguish between groups of Republican voters. Romney’s campaign manager, Beth Myers, is sure it will.
“The question was whether you could differentiate between the eight kinds of chocolate,” she said. “I became convinced that the power of microtargeting was enhanced by segregating a generally homogenous universe.”
