Target Point

Chart Wars

TargetPoint's VP and Director of Research, Alex Lundry, was recently a featured speaker at DC Ignite, an evening of short presentations in which participants are limited to 5 minutes and precisely 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. 

The title of his talk is Chart Wars: The Political Power of Data Visualization, and you can view it below:

End of Decade Polls

The Atlantic's Politics blog, written by Marc Ambinder, has been running a series of end-of-decade polls, and we are extremely pleased to see that TargetPoint is involved in two of them:

The first question asks what the best poli-tech innovation of the decade is: individual psychographic microtargeting (our product), YouTube, texting, Twitter, or Convio donation accounting software.

The second question looks to identify the political innovator of the decade: TargetPoint's CEO Alex Gage, Karl Rove, Ken Mehlman, Joe Trippi, or Markos Moulitsas.

We are very honored and humbled to be included among such luminaries as Rove and Mehlman, and amazing technologies like YouTube and Twitter.  It's been an incredible decade, and we look forward to bringing more innovations to candidates, campaigns and causes for many more decades to come.

6 Data-centric Feature Requests for GOP.am

This article assumes awareness and knowledge of the practice of URL shortening. If you’re unfamiliar and interested in learning more, here’s a good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening)

Recently, Political Media launched a GOP branded URL shortener, http://GOP.am, created in collaboration with the Republican National Committee.  At this point, the stated goals of the service are to provide a “tool for Republican activists to demonstrate brand loyalty” presumably through the visual cues inherent in the text of the link and the GOP branded frame it places around shortened websites (my two-cents on the frame: way too big).

The RNC and Political Media are to be congratulated for their innovation, but this service is capable of much more than simple brand loyalty. Indeed, it holds the promise of something far more valuable to the conservative cause: data. 

With data in mind, here are six feature requests for GOP.am that would maximize its abilities as an intelligence, analytics and targeting tool...

What Is A Rich Income?

How much would your total annual family income have to be for you to consider yourself rich? This is the question we put to respondents one year ago in our national post-election survey of registered voters and today we share the results. 

The answers extend beyond mere novelty into real world public policy and political consequences as Congress debates any number of legislative items that include a tax increase “on the rich"...

Raise The Roof

Democrats could literally raise the roof by increasing the federal debt ceiling by a staggering $1.8 trillion before the end of this year.  While they surely hoped that they could bury this issue during a time of general American holiday credit gluttony, the nation’s, and particularly Republican voters’, view of fiscal issues has decidedly changed since Obama took office last January.

The spending spree began as soon as the inauguration, and looking back at the data, Democrats probably felt safe in doing so...