Among Donald Trump’s unorthodoxies is his campaign’s refusal to use big data. “I’ve always felt it was overrated,” Mr. Trump said in May. “ Obama got the votes much more so than his data-processing machine. And I think the same is true with me.”
David Plouffe, who ran Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008, tweeted: “Trump now wants to ban data and modeling from his campaign. Agree with him that Obama got the votes not data. But flying blind is nuts.” Democratic operative Ron Klain quipped in response: “Plouffe: Ix-nay on the elping-hay of rump-tray.”
They have reason to laugh. Campaign professionals in both parties agree the Democrats have a large lead in information about voters—and that smart use of data can make the difference, at least in close elections. When she officially becomes the party’s nominee this week, Hillary Clinton will inherit the database Mr. Obama’s team built over two campaigns.
In 2008 the Obama campaign gathered so much information that it was “confident it knew the name of every one of the 69,456,897 Americans” who voted for him, according to journalist Sasha Issenberg. The 2012 campaign built a fully merged database Republicans have yet to match.
“We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in 2011. His team built a database connecting personal data from traditional sources, such as reports from field workers and pollsters, with voters’ social-media posts and other online behavior, plus commercial consumer data of the sort that online retailers and credit agencies use.
That allowed precise targeting of the most “persuadable” voters. “We knew who these people were going to vote for before they decided,” an Obama data scientist told Mr. Issenberg. Voters were hit with tailored messages. In one case, the campaign sent seven different customized email invitations to one fundraising dinner in New York.
Mitt Romney’s smaller data team started out behind and never caught up. After the Democrats’ 2012 victory, they created the Project Legacy database, which Mrs. Clinton inherits this week. Now Mr. Trump, behind in data by two election cycles, doesn’t think he needs to worry about the data he lacks—a known unknown for his campaign.
As a celebrity-politician, Mr. Trump uses social media brilliantly. By one estimate the free publicity he has drawn is the equivalent of $2 billion in advertising. But that’s very different from how analytical marketers target and persuade prospects, whether for orange juice or presidential candidates.
It may be pandering, but the Obama campaigns proved it works. Democrats are updating the existing database with voter profiles based on how they voted in local elections, which magazines they read, their bank balances and the health topics they search online. Republicans using the #NeverTrump hashtag should expect to be targeted by the Clinton campaign with custom messages on the virtues of voting Libertarian or staying home. Other messages will highlight Mr. Trump’s negatives while minimizing Mrs. Clinton’s.
Reports say her hundreds of data scientists are working especially closely with Facebook to leverage each voter’s social network. The campaign is testing which messages resonate best with each prospective voter. It will also use Facebook to remind Mrs. Clinton’s supporters to urge like-minded friends and relatives to go to the polls.
A Pew Research Center study last week uncovered a new way the Clinton campaign is using Facebook to gather more information about voters. It found that 80% of the links on the campaign’s Facebook account link to pages on the campaign’s website, where more user data can be captured. In contrast, 78% of the links on the Trump Facebook account take users to news articles on media sites, where his campaign has no ability to track users or mine their data.
Campaign strategists say big data is especially valuable in close presidential races, in which some votes matter more than others. In 2012 Mr. Obama’s data scientists ran more than 60,000 election simulations every night to figure out in which states to allocate resources, and which counties in those states were the most promising sources of votes.
The Trump campaign might hope this is the year voters resent how their information is used to market to them. But consumers seem to have gotten used to being targeted by commercial marketers, so Mr. Trump probably can’t count on outrage over Democrats’ making smarter use of data.
Mr. Trump may not like it, but data from past presidential elections finds an undeniable correlation: The candidate with the best data is the winner.
This article was originally published on www.wsj.com and can be viewed in full


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