As the 2016 US Presidential race enters its final stages, it’s interesting to see how data is being used by American political candidates and what this means for business.
During last week’s Oracle Open World in San Francisco a panel hosted by the company’s Political Action Committee featured Stephanie Cutter, who worked on Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, and Mike Murphy, a Republican operative whose most recently worked on Jeb Bush’s primary effort against Donald Trump.
While the discussion mainly focused on the politics – “Crazy times seem to require crazy candidates” says Murphy – it was the technology aspect of modern elections that was notable.
Setting the data standard
The Obama campaign of 2008 set the standard for how modern political campaigns used social media and information, “we revolutionized how data analytics helps predict how people will vote and how they will persuade voters to turn out.” Cutter said.
“We put a big investment into it and Republicans have caught up,” she continued. “The key though was we relied on our own data and nothing that was out in the public domain. We didn’t rely on one piece of data, we had multiple sources. We had an analytics program where we were making 9,000 calls a night where we were predicting the votes.”
Murphy agreed with the political campaigns using data, “the kind of polling you see in the media has kind of vanished in campaigns where they have money to spend on research.” He said, “we don’t do telephone polling any more because we have so much data we can collect.”
Capturing everything
“We capture everything. We have about four hundred data points on the American voter and we’ll have five hundred in the next two years. We’ll be able to build massive data models without phone polling,” Murphy pointed out. “We’re waiting for the tech folk to get ahead on AI so we can predict what voters are going to do in two weeks.”
Despite the amount data collected by US political parties, the real key to success is the candidate’s organisation and management. Cutter made a strong point about the strength of Obama’s campaign team in both the 2008 and 2012 campaigns.
How the US political parties use data points to how businesses will be managing data in the future. Increasingly using information well is going to be the measure of successful organisations in both politics and industry.