Romney's Data Cruncher

Some people are not convinced. Skeptics think that splicing the electorate into small subgroups does not tell a campaign anything it can't learn from a traditional poll.

"It's harder and harder to reach voters these days, so the desire to cut corners is understandable," said Steve Murphy, a Democratic media consultant and campaign manager for former congressman Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) during the 2004 presidential campaign. "But it still comes down to shoe leather. I have NASCAR's Hot Pass on DirecTV, and I read the New York Post. What microtargeting category does that put me in?"

And in a presidential primary, in which voters are far more homogenous than in a general election, can microtargeting find meaningful distinctions between groups? Gage and Romney are convinced that it can.

From Business to Politics

Using consumer data to predict buying behavior is nothing new in the business world. Bruce I. Newman, a professor at DePaul University and editor of the Journal of Political Marketing, said the term "microtargeting" began popping up in marketing textbooks in the 1960s, when the field of consumer behavior began gaining popularity.

Pat Caddell, pollster for Jimmy Carter, employed a rudimentary form of microtargeting during the 1976 presidential campaign when he set up a chart with issues on one axis and regions of the country on the other. Caddell used the chart to advise Carter on what issues to emphasize as he stumped across the nation.

Today, companies of every size use microtargeting on a "very regular basis" to make basic decisions about how to market and sell their products, Newman said. Also, whereas the political world has long copied the techniques of the business world, that dynamic is changing.

"What's beginning to happen now is that the commercial side is looking at the political side," said Newman, asking such questions as "We would like to know what you did with George W. Bush in 2004."

Gage said that when he pitched microtargeting to the Harvard MBAs advising Romney in his gubernatorial campaign, they were stunned that the idea had never been used in politics. "You guys don't do this already?" they asked, according to Gage.

For Gage, using the same consumer information employed by corporate marketers to figure out voter behavior was a logical step. His career had been spent crunching numbers as a pollster, much of it with two pillars of the Republican survey research establishment -- Robert M. Teeter and Fred Steeper.

By the 1990s, Gage was spending most of his time on corporate work. "I was pretty burned out" on politics, he acknowledged. But Gage had also begun to mull the rudimentary elements of political microtargeting.

Working with a few Michigan-based operatives -- direct-mail consultant Fred Wszolek; Michael Meyers, executive director of the state GOP; and Brent Seaborn, who is now director of strategy for Giuliani's presidential campaign -- he came up with a methodology he called "supersegmentation." Later, they borrowed the term "microtargeting."

Around that time, Michael Murphy, then Romney's campaign strategist, became intrigued by the high number of independent voters in Massachusetts, seeing them as the key to winning in a Democratic stronghold. He sought out Gage for help.