{"id":21297,"date":"2016-05-31T15:43:56","date_gmt":"2016-05-31T19:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=21297"},"modified":"2016-05-31T15:43:56","modified_gmt":"2016-05-31T19:43:56","slug":"campaigning-without-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2016\/05\/31\/campaigning-without-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Campaigning without Data"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Big-data-large\"<\/a>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\u2014how 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 \u00a0acquire, voters. Many partially attribute Obama\u2019s 2008 and 2012 successful Whitehouse bids to his team\u2019s skillful use of voter data and micro-targeting, and an uproar ensued with Bernie Sanders temporarily lost access<\/a> to a DNC voter database.<\/p>\n

In contemporary politics, big data is a big deal. \u00a0So of course, Donald Trump is not down with big data. The Associated Press is circulating a story<\/a> about the discrepancy between Trump and Clinton with regard to data usage. Clinton\u2019s campaign has embraced voter-data as a central tool of success, while in contrast, Trump has dismissed big data as \u201coverrated\u201d and expressed his intention to use big data in a \u201climited\u201d capacity (although in the story linked above, a Trump advisor assures that the campaign will be \u201cstate of the art,\u201d presumably including some degree of data analytics).<\/p>\n

Much of the commentary on Trump\u2019s 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 \u201cbreaks the rules,\u201d and therefore may beat all odds and in fact, succeed\u00a0without heavy reliance on data science. Getting beyond Trump the candidate, though, brings us to investigate the rule from which Trump deviates\u2014data driven campaigning\u2014and what it means in the democratic process.<\/p>\n

Far more interesting than renderings of Trump-as-Cavalier, is the harsh light Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Targeted messaging contrasts with the macro form of governance that defines a president\u2019s job. Presidents are elected to oversee the nation as a whole\u2014not particularistic subsets.\u00a0Presidential 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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/strong>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\u2019s data rejection does well in serving his larger narrative of \u201cauthenticity.\u201d His platform\u00a0may be racist, sexist, classist, and generally ill-informed, but\u00a0it is all of these things for all voters, not just those who live in the heart of a red state and own several firearms.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jenny Davis is on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Headline Pic Via: Source<\/a>
\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2014how they consume, who they love, when their next menstrual cycle is likely to begin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1753,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[13319,234,85,36392],"class_list":["post-21297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-big-data","tag-democracy","tag-politics","tag-trump"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1753"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21297"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21306,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21297\/revisions\/21306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}