How Analytics Has Reshaped Political Campaigning Forever

Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign team reinvented the art of modern campaigning by using data to transform almost every aspect of running for office. It succeeded wildly in turning out infrequent and new voters, and since then its innovations—which included mining individual TV-viewing habits to get more out of advertising dollars—have been hard-wired into both parties’ presidential campaigns. That’s led to the birth of dozens of consulting firms making grandiose promises to disrupt politics with analytics.

With more money flowing into local races in 2016 than ever, those consultants are marketing the data revolution not just to would-be presidents but to dogcatchers, too. In Ohio, the Republican Senate Campaign Committee’s four-person staff contracts with a Washington-based consulting firm, Optimus, to acquire data, develop statistical models, and make targeting decisions for candidates running for seats in the state legislature—the same suite of services Optimus is providing to Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign. “If you’re Joe Legislative Candidate out on your own, that’s a hard thing to do,” says John McClelland, executive director of the Ohio committee.