The answer to Democrats’ dominance in voter targeting was distributed in a Target parking lot on a recent afternoon.
A staffer for Americans for Prosperity’s North Carolina chapter handed a small group of volunteers iPads loaded with the conservative pressure group’s i360 technology. The software takes the state’s voter file and overlays consumer data in an attempt to place voters on a left-right continuum when it comes to fiscal conservatism, school choice and other issues.
Then AFP contacts those voters by phone or at their doors with surveys designed to “make that middle pile smaller and move people to the left or to the right” to figure out which ones are worth AFP’s efforts, state director Donald Bryson said.
Since President Barack Obama’s technology-powered 2008 victory, Republicans and conservatives have been playing catch-up on cutting-edge ways to find and turn out voters.
Bryson, who grew up in Georgia’s Habersham County, says the new version of i360 is faster than ever, as canvassers set out into the cul-de-sacs of suburban Raleigh.
Canvassers start with a group of houses highlighted on a map, in a walkable configuration. When they speak to a voter, they upload the results into the iPads, and the targeted house quickly changes colors on everyone’s tablet. The information culled from the person is added to the person’s file.
AFP deploys the technology in all of its 34 states, including Georgia.
The technology has caused some tension between AFP, part of the billionaire Koch brothers’ sprawling political network, and the Republican Party.
"I think it's very dangerous and wrong to allow a group of very strong, well-financed individuals who have no accountability to anyone to have control over who gets access to the data when, why and how," Republican National Committee chief of staff Katie Walsh told Yahoo News in June.
But the two organizations have agreed to collaborate. And this month the RNC rolled out its own updated "GOP Data Center" platform, which it will provide to Republican candidates free of charge — while incorporating the data those campaigns collect.
While i360, an independent for-profit company, sells the data to GOP campaigns, AFP uses the data against Republicans at times in policy fights.
On a recent Wednesday, it was targeting state Rep. Nelson Dollar, R-Cary, who backs a House spending plan with a slight spending increase. Canvassers were supposed to urge key voters to call Dollar and express their desire for the more-conservative Senate budget.
The few people who did answer the targeted doors agreed with AFP’s low-tax pitch, presented as a quick survey that helped the group further profile the voter. But the volunteer canvassers did not always remember to tell voters to call Dollar.
The group will probably enter the electoral fray again in 2016, having aggressively attacked then-U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan, a Democrat, in 2014. And each door knock and phone call adds to the group’s knowledge about who is on its side.
It’s something “the left has done very well long before we started doing it,” Bryson said. “And no reason not copying a good idea.”
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