The Election Day excitement has settled for just a minute, and the entire team at TargetPoint wanted to take a moment to look up from the numbers to congratulate the well-deserved winners this cycle.
First we would like to congratulate the most exciting winners of November 2016 – The Rickett’s Family, the City of Chicago and the Chicago Cubs for their heart stopping and historic World Series win. By embracing an analytical approach The Rickett’s Family and Theo Epstein brought the first World Series win for the Cubs in 108 years.
This historic win by the Cubs is only surpassed by the unprecedented success on Election Night by Republicans.
This year the entire GOP ecosphere embraced the power of analytics and big data – and, more importantly, put it to use at strategic and tactical levels. From big wins to the razor-thin ones, these extraordinary accomplishments can be largely attributed to the multi-million dollar investment in data-driven campaigning.
In 2014, our work with the Party modernized MicroTargeting to help drive Republican majorities in the House and Senate. In 2016 we worked to solidify those majorities and to win the White House. With data investment and a commitment to putting the data to work in the field, the hard work of the Republican National Committee and our State Parties led by Reince Priebus, Katie Walsh, Chris Carr and the tremendous data team we worked alongside everyday ended up being the competitive edge Republicans around the country needed to turn the country red. From tactical matters such as door-knocking to strategic matters such as resource distribution, the RNC voter scoring system formed the core of RNC decision making.
Working with Bill Skelly, and our good friends at Causeway Solutions, we generated enough data this cycle to fill 5 Wikipedia’s worth of information.
The accuracy of our predictions in the election were stunning. As two examples, the difference in our projections of turnout in Florida and the actual turnout was a total of just over 23,000 votes – a miss of 0.2%.
We predicted Trump just barely winning Michigan by .2% (he actually won by .3%).
The different teams at TPC took on a wide range of projects and strategic challenges this year. They included everything from helping defeat a job-killing ballot initiative in Youngstown, Ohio to making sure President-Elect Trump and his data team, led by Brad Parscale, had access to the most up-to-date and accurate targeting data possible.
- Carefully tracked the GOP Primary electorate, so we could understand whose fences needed mending once our nominee was chosen
- Crafted 2,575 unique and customized statistical models of voting behavior and preferences at the congressional, state, regional and national levels
- Produced more than 52 billion voter predictions for our clients – 52,244,974,210 to be exact
- Analyzed dozens of videos in ad testing and hundreds of messages to determine their impact on voters
- Seamlessly integrated polling insights, hard voter ID data, donor information and digital data collected from our partners with updated voter scoring and regularly pushed that knowledge out to our clients
- Optimized more than two dozen races around the country with our MicroTargeting efforts
- Worked with numerous senate campaigns to provide some last-minute help to get them over the finish line
America Rising deserves far more congratulations than they will ever receive. And we would especially like to thank Rebecca Schuller and Amanda Iovino and our research partner Chris Matthews at Burning Glass Consulting, who put together some of the most fascinationg and far reaching research our Party has ever seen.
It would also be hard not to single out the entire team of people dedicated to re-electing Senator Portman. Huge congratulations to Corey Bliss who adopted and utilized data early on, and to the team at Fighting for Ohio who made a substantial impact on the race by combining great research, great messaging, great ads, and great use of data to accomplish their goals.
We’re also especially proud of our continued partnership with Deep Root Analytics and the role we played in defining some of the most critical audiences in 2016, particularly Reluctant Republicans and Disaffected Democrats. We’re just as excited about the role we played in these innovations as we are about our role in inventing political MicroTargeting in 2004.
Powering and enabling much of this work is the team at the Data Trust. The leadership of the GOP Data Trust – Johnny DeStefano and Ellen Bredenkoetter- and their professional staff (including TPC-alum Luke Carter) are the key force behind the Republican Data Ecosystem.
And a final congratulations back to the Rickett’s Family and their incredible commitment to the Party and conservative causes. Led by Brian Baker and guided by Sara Fagen their efforts were extraordinary and their investments in data and analytics truly impressive.
The 2016 election isn’t completely over yet, as we inch closer to the final election of the cycle in Louisiana. TargetPoint is pleased with this year’s success stories that kept, and turned, states red. Our team is committed to powering campaigns, organizations, ballot initiatives, corporations and associations with data-driven decision making. And the work is never truly done as we continue to find ways to transform political polling and data in the months to come.
TPC looks forward to continuing work with our friends and partners into 2017 and building toward even more successful 2018 and 2020 elections.
