If you voted this election season, President Obama almost certainly has a file on you. His vast campaign database includes information on voters’ magazine subscriptions, car registrations, housing values and hunting licenses, along with scores estimating how likely they were to cast ballots for his reelection.
And although the election is over, Obama’s database is just getting started.
Some of the data gathered by the Democrats during the recent presidential campaign.
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Democrats are pressing to expand and redeploy the most sophisticated voter list in history, beginning with next year’s gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey and extending to campaigns for years to come. The prospect already has some Republicans worried.
“It’s always hard to play catch-up,” said Peter Pasi, a Republican direct marketer who worked on Rick Santorum’s presidential primary campaign. “It can be done by 2016. I’m much more doubtful it can happen by 2014.”
The database consists of voting records and political donation histories bolstered by vast amounts of personal but publicly available consumer data, say campaign officials and others familiar with the operation. It could record hundreds of pieces of information for each voter.
Campaign workers added far more detail through a broad range of voter contacts — in person, on the phone, via e-mail or through visits to the campaign’s Web site. Those who used its Facebook app, for example, had their files updated with lists of their Facebook friends, along with scores measuring the intensity of those relationships and whether they lived in swing states. If their last names sounded Hispanic, a key target group for the campaign, the database recorded that, too.
The result was a digital operation far more elaborate than the one mounted by Obama’s Republican rival, Mitt Romney, who collected less data and deployed it less effectively, officials from both parties say.
To maintain their advantage, Democrats say they must navigate the inevitable intraparty squabbles over who gets access now that the unifying forces of a billion-dollar presidential campaign are gone.
“If this is all we do with this technology, I think it will be a wasted opportunity,” said Michael Slaby, the Obama campaign’s chief integration and innovation officer.
Tests of whether Obama’s database can be successfully redeployed will come even sooner. Terence R. McAuliffe, a party insider who ran unsuccessfully for governor of Virginia in 2009, has inquired about the data for his gubernatorial campaign next year, say those familiar with the conversations.
“We have been communicating to Obama for America all along about the importance of receiving that data, since Virginia has a 2013 election,” said Brian Moran, the outgoing chairman of the Virginia Democratic Party.
Although McAuliffe is the early Democratic front-runner, many in the party say individual candidates should receive access to such data only after winning the nomination — something that in Virginia can’t happen before the June primary, leaving only a few months before the November general election. The short time frame may make a full data set, should McAuliffe get it, even more valuable.
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