Democrats' Data Mining Stirs an Intraparty Battle

This approach is designed to complement the broad-brush approach of television and radio advertising, which by its nature must be addressed to large, and often diverse, audiences.

Traditional get-out-the-vote efforts operated crudely, such as by canvassing neighborhoods in which at least 65 percent of residents voted for a particular party. It was often deemed too inefficient to focus on neighborhoods where the partisan tilt was less decisive, and it ran the risk of doing more to turn out the opposition's vote.

The advantage of data-based targeting is that political field operatives can home in on precisely the voters they wish to reach -- the antiabortion parishioners of a traditionally Democratic African American church congregation, for instance.

Consultants working for the Republican National Committee developed strategies to design messages targeting individual voters' "anger points" in the belief that grievance is one of the strongest motivations to get people to turn out on Election Day.

Under the direction of Bush adviser Karl Rove, the RNC and state parties repeatedly tested the voter file and different ways to contact voters to determine which were most effective at boosting turnout.

"They were smart. They came into our neighborhoods. They came into Democratic areas with very specific targeted messages to take Democratic voters away from us," then-DNC Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe said after the 2004 contest. "They were much more sophisticated in their message delivery."

Ickes has quietly raised an estimated $7.5 million in start-up money for Data Warehouse. A prospectus said the company will need at least $11.5 million in initial capital.

In addition to Soros's support, Ickes has the financial backing of some of the wealthy participants in a new fundraising group called the Democracy Alliance. He and Quinn, who will be chief executive of Data Warehouse, have hired technology specialists from internet retailer Amazon.com and a Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer project.

Quinn had worked on the voter file program under McAuliffe, but Dean brought in his own people after he took over in early 2005.

These included former Dean presidential campaign workers who formed a company called Blue State Digital, now under contract with the DNC.