WASHINGTON — Democrats are looking to use President Barack Obama’s campaign database in forthcoming elections, beginning with next year’s gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey and extending to campaigns for years to come.
Obama’s 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 re-election.
The prospect of Democrats redeploying the most sophisticated voter list in American political history 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 primary challenge to Mitt Romney. “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, which was capable of recording hundreds of fields for each voter.
Campaign workers added far more detail through a broad range of voter contacts — in person, on the phone, over e-mail or through visits to the campaign’s website. Those who used the campaign’s Facebook application, 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 seemed 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 Romney, who collected less data and deployed it less effectively, say officials from both parties.
To maintain their advantage, Democrats say they must guard against the propensity of political data to deteriorate in off years.
“If this is all we do with this technology, I think it will be a wasted opportunity,” said Michael Slaby, the campaign’s chief integration and innovation officer.
Tests of whether Obama’s database can be successfully redeployed will come even sooner. Virginia Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a party insider who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2009, already has inquired about the data for his gubernatorial campaign next year, say those familiar with the conversations.
Though McAuliffe is an early front-runner, many in the party contend that individual candidates should get 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.
All the party’s candidates have access to the lists kept by the party, which includes voting and donation histories along with some consumer data. What Obama’s database adds are the more fine-grained analyses of what issues matter most to voters and how best to motivate them to donate, volunteer and vote.
MANAGING DATA A CONCERN
There are serious logistical challenges to handling a database of the size and sophistication of Obama’s, which is why campaign officials are debating how to proceed even though there is wide agreement on the desire to help fellow Democrats and like-minded independent groups.
Slaby, the campaign official, said the database might go to the Democratic National Committee or Obama’s presidential library committee once it is established. Or, he said, it could go to some other new group created specifically to nurture and deploy the database most effectively. No existing group currently has the technical resources to properly manage the data that Obama assembled, he said.
The database powered nearly everything about Obama’s campaign, from fundraising to the identification of likely supporters to motivating them to go to the polls on Election Day. This resulted in an operational edge that helped a candidate with a slim margin in the overall national vote to trounce Romney in the state-by-state Electoral College contests.
Obama collected and used personal data largely free of the restrictions that govern similar efforts by private companies. Neither the Federal Trade Commission, which has investigated the handling of personal data by Google, Facebook and other companies, nor the Federal Election Commission has jurisdiction over how campaigns use such information, officials at those agencies say.
Privacy advocates say the opportunity for abuse is serious, as is the danger of hackers stealing the data.
Chris Soghoian, an American Civil Liberties Union analyst and former FTC technologist, said voters should worry that the interests of politicians and commercial data brokers have aligned, making legal restrictions of data collection less likely.
“They’re going to be loath to regulate those companies if they are relying on them to target voters,” he said.
VOTERS MOST IMPORTANT
Republicans once held the edge in using technology to identify and motivate voters. After Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., lost to President George W. Bush in 2004, Democrats invested in building better voter lists and in developing a new generation of political operatives skilled in the science of persuasion and motivation.
Obama’s 2008 election was hailed for its technological sophistication, and especially its use of social media to cultivate energized communities of volunteers. But campaign officials now acknowledge that the operation fell far short of its hype.
With the benefit of four years of lead time, the campaign was determined to make better use of increasingly sophisticated technologies. Driving this was Obama’s data-minded campaign manager, Jim Messina.
The campaign invested heavily in engineers and technologists, including many who had never worked in politics before, and used Amazon Web Services to host the voter database on its cloud servers.
The key was a program the campaign built — called Narwhal after a predatory whale whose single tusk makes it look a bit like a fat, finned unicorn — that consolidated lists of voters and donors, often collected over years by state party officials and campaigns.
The most important information, officials said, was provided by voters themselves whenever they had contact with the campaign, in person or online, enriching the database with e-mail addresses, cell-phone numbers and, crucially, information about what issues most concerned them.
Despite some glitches, Narwhal proved crucial in helping the campaign allocate resources, especially as voting finally began.
The Romney campaign’s computer system, which officials there dubbed Orca after one of the few known predators of narwhals, crashed so badly on Election Day that many Republicans have derisively rechristened it “the Fail Whale.”
Front Section, Pages 13 on 11/22/2012