Target Point

A technique forged to boost voter turnout in tight political campaigns is now pumping up grassroots lobbying efforts on major public policy fights over labor organizing, healthcare reform and climate change.

Until recently, microtargeting referred to the practice of leveraging the growing store of personal data to tailor campaign messages to specific segments of the population, from snowmobilers in Michigan to union members in Akron.

The practice first gained prominence during President Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004. President Obama’s campaign fine-tuned the technique to raise historic amounts of
money from online donors.

Veterans of Bush and Obama presidential campaigns are now driving the evolution of microtargeting as an advocacy tool.

Alex Gage is a fidgety man. In the first five minutes visiting his office, you’re likely to see him slide back in his chair, run his hands through his thinning red hair, flip randomly through his 2004 Florida research, and then lean forward to make his next point. All the while, a steady breeze blows in from his office’s deck overlooking the Potomac River. It’s the luxe office you’d expect of the guy credited with inventing political microtargeting. And the restless spirit of someone who knows he’s got a lot of new competition.

In late 2002, Alex Gage sold his share of a well-established polling firm and set about convincing Karl Rove that he had the answer to ensuring President Bush's reelection.

His pitch was simple: Take corporate America's love affair with learning everything it can about its customers, and its obsession with carving up the country into smaller and smaller clusters of like-minded consumers, and turn those trends into a political strategy. The Bush majority would be made up of thousands of groups of like-minded voters whom the campaign could reach with precisely the right message on the issues they considered most important.

In the final week before the election, Democrats pushing to convert their lead in the polls into control of Congress are pinning their hopes of success on an increasingly common tactic for pumping up voter turnout: microtargeting.
 
The technique aims to identify potential supporters by collecting and analyzing the unprecedented amount of information now readily available -- from census data to credit-card bills -- to profile individual voters. Political strategists then tailor messages to entice those prospects to the polls, using the same methods marketers use to sell autos or aspirin to consumers.
 
In this tight election year, microtargeting could make the difference in important House and Senate races in states such as Minnesota, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Alexander Gage, president and founder of TargetPoint Consulting, an Alexandria, Va., microtargeting firm that works for the Republican Party, estimates that successful microtargeting can bring congressional campaigns an additional 5,000 to 10,000 votes, a number that could be decisive in a House race.  "Politics is always won and lost at the margins," he says.

Facing an otherwise bleak political landscape, the Republican Party believes Michigan presents a rare opportunity to pick up both a U.S. Senate and a governor's seat this November, and it knows just the kind of voters who can make it happen: male snowmobilers who live in the state's rugged Upper Peninsula. "We appeal to them on the need for more [snowmobile] trails," says state GOP Chair Saul Anuzis, who blames the "environmental extremism" of Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Sen. Debbie Stabenow for holding up construction of such trails. Of course, that message won't play in Detroit. So the GOP is crafting a separate appeal just for antiabortion union members. And it may target wealthy retirees along Lake Michigan in a different way, by vowing more tax cuts.

“In the most expensive presidential contest in the nation'shistory, John F. Kerry and his Democratic supporters nearly matched PresidentBush and the Republicans, who outspent them by just $60 million, $1.14 billionto $1.08 billion....In a $2.2 billion election, two relatively small expendituresby Bush and his allies stand out for their impact: the $546,000 ad buy by SwiftBoat Veterans for Truth and the Bush campaign's $3.25 million contract with thefirm TargetPoint Consulting....The first portrayed Kerry in unrelentinglynegative terms, permanently damaging him, while the second produced dramaticinnovations in direct mail and voter technology, enabling Bush to identify andtarget potential voters with pinpoint precision...."They were smart. Theycame into our neighborhoods. They came into Democratic areas with very specifictargeted messages to take Democratic voters away from us," DemocraticNational Committee Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe said. "They were muchmore sophisticated in their message delivery."

The Hotline recently declared that microtargeting stories were “overserved” – that is, too many media outlets doing too many stories about how the car you drive or the coffee you drink determine how you vote.  But beyond a fairly shallow pass at the methodology, there has been little substantive discussion among political professionals about why microtargeting is necessary and how it all works.

“A successful presidential campaign is an extraordinarilycomplex ballet that lasts years and requires intricate footwork by manythousands of people. Leaving aside evaluations of the candid-ate himself,political professionals and independent experts across the ideological spectrumpoint to several people whose performances -- intentionally or not -- may wellhave been pivotal to President Bush's victory. Karl Rove, The Architect, Osamabin Laden, Terrorist, Alex Gage, TargetPoint Consulting, Margaret Marshall,Chief Justice-Massachusetts Supreme Court and John O'Neill, Swift Boat Veteransfor Truth.

The head of a little-known marketing firm called TargetPointConsulting, Alex Gage developed a targeting strategy based on concepts and databorrowed from commercial marketing efforts. TargetPoint’s microtargeting is farmore sophisticated than the traditional practice of focusing get-out-the-voteefforts on entire precincts that generally vote heavily for the party doing thetargeting. And the GOP banked on Gage's approach.”