Contemporary political campaigns are highly data-driven. Large datasets let campaign staffers learn about, access, and ultimately persuade potential voters through hyper-local messaging or micro-targeting. The digitization of society means that people leave traces of themselves in the course of everyday life—how they consume, who they love, when their next menstrual cycle is likely to begin and most relevant here, how they have engaged politically. These traces and advanced analysis of them, have been instrumental in political campaign strategies, guiding staffers in numbers-based decisions about how to best reach and acquire, voters. Many partially attribute Obama’s 2008 and 2012 successful Whitehouse bids to his team’s skillful use of voter data and micro-targeting, and an uproar ensued with Bernie Sanders temporarily lost access to a DNC voter database.
In contemporary politics, big data is a big deal. So of course, Donald Trump is not down with big data. The Associated Press is circulating a story about the discrepancy between Trump and Clinton with regard to data usage. Clinton’s campaign has embraced voter-data as a central tool of success, while in contrast, Trump has dismissed big data as “overrated” and expressed his intention to use big data in a “limited” capacity (although in the story linked above, a Trump advisor assures that the campaign will be “state of the art,” presumably including some degree of data analytics).
Much of the commentary on Trump’s data decentralization center around the question of whether or not rejecting data will be harmful for the candidate and/or for the Republican party. This angle is usually coupled with a reminder that Trump is the candidate who “breaks the rules,” and therefore may beat all odds and in fact, succeed without heavy reliance on data science. Getting beyond Trump the candidate, though, brings us to investigate the rule from which Trump deviates—data driven campaigning—and what it means in the democratic process.
Far more interesting than renderings of Trump-as-Cavalier, is the harsh light Trump’s data rejection pours over the role of big data in politics. Data lets candidates target audiences at the micro level, crafting messages that suit the needs, tastes, and sensibilities of diverse voters. Data facilitates campaigns in which candidates can communicate in unique ways with a hipster in Brooklyn and a teacher in Minnesota, compelling them not only to vote, but vote for the same candidate. This micro-targeting, though exciting from a political strategy perspective, is troubling from the perspective of democracy. The reason commentators are concerned about Trump’s prospects is because his data eschewal precludes the micro-targeting on which political persuasion now so strongly rests. While political persuasion may help candidates win, real democracy is driven by fully informed voters.
Targeted messaging contrasts with the macro form of governance that defines a president’s job. Presidents are elected to oversee the nation as a whole—not particularistic subsets. Presidential policy is far reaching and broad, not local or particular. So what a president does is in direct opposition to how a president, in a data age, gets elected.
Implied in data-informed curated messaging is an assumption that a candidate is telling voters what the voters wish to hear. This places voter-acquisition strategy, rather than making sure that voters are informed, at the center of the political process. One can assume that when different messages distribute to different audiences, no one gets the full story. Although the campaign has not yet framed it this way, Trump’s data rejection does well in serving his larger narrative of “authenticity.” His platform may be racist, sexist, classist, and generally ill-informed, but it is all of these things for all voters, not just those who live in the heart of a red state and own several firearms.
Big data in politics serve the interests of power. Not only is the collection and analysis of data prohibitively expensive and thereby only available to those already well connected, but also play to an end game of obscuring the information with which voters make voting decisions. Donald Trump seems to reject data out of pure hubris, but that is irrelevant. The effect of Trump decentralizing big data is, decidedly, democratic.
Jenny Davis is on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis
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Comments 2
Britney Gil — June 1, 2016
A few months back I recall a Trump campaign representative saying that they often post something on Facebook, especially something outlandish, and see what the general response is to decide if they should roll with it. Specifically they would read the comments and see how favorable they were. In an age where qualitative data seems to be less and less influential, this struck me as a very different and interesting strategy that may be uniquely suitable for Trump.
jennydavis — June 1, 2016
Yes, the use of interpretive qualitative methods is unique. The Trump-Facebook technique also reverses the order: try something and get feedback rather than begin with the voters and adapt the campaign accordingly. In a weird theory/methods jumble, Trump's strategy is qualitative but deductive, and the big data strategy is quantitative and inductive.