The Republican National Committee has debuted a sweeping new Data Center with the hopes of bringing Republicans one step closer to a victory in 2016.
On Monday, the RNC unveiled a revamped version of its data management system that has been made available to all GOP presidential candidates at no cost. With over 300 terabytes of data on voters dating as far as 20 years back, the Committee is hoping to equip GOP candidates with the information they need to rally individual voters ahead of the 2016 general election.
According to the RNC, the updated software system features a tool that allows campaigns to create a “voter walk list,” or a customized index of potential voters located in close proximity to each other. Other updates include additional information on voters like geographic location and contact information, live chat support for campaigns using the data, and a “voter model sliding scale.”
The latter enables campaigns to use predictive analyses to narrow or expand groups of voters they wish to contact based on where each voter scores in terms of partisanship, propensity, and Obamacare affiliation.
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus describes the new Data Center as “the centerpiece of the RNC’s new data-driven political ground game.”
“The user-friendly interface, revamped reporting tools, and live support will give Republican campaigns across the country a state of the art program to match our state of the art data, and it will only continue to evolve with each upgrade,” Priebus said in a press release.
During the 2014 congressional election cycle, RNC chief data officer Jesse Kamzol says the committee was able to use “predictive modeling” to determine Republican voter turnout in North Carolina within a 1.2 percent margin of error. The committee plans to use its revamped Data Center and additional data collection tools to make predictions with the same level of accuracy ahead of the 2016 senatorial and presidential elections.
One way the RNC’s data department plans to collect data on voters is through the committee’s website, GOP.com. Chief digital officer Garrett Lansing describes the website as “a vacuum that sucks up people’s information who come to it.” Users who sign a petition or take a survey on the site will have their information added to a voter profile managed by the data department.
Campaigns choosing to access information contained in the RNC’s Data Center are able to do so using a mobile application. According to the RNC, the availability of the data in real time is intended to help bolster campaigns’ on-the-ground contact with voters.
“When a volunteer walks into a neighborhood, we want to give them as much data as we can about the voters they are about to talk to,” RNC Chief Technology Officer Azarias Reda said in an informational video about the Data Center.
RNC Chief of Staff Katie Walsh says the new system allows campaigns to pinpoint what voters care about, how and when to communicate with them, and what issues they are most likely to engage on. According to Walsh, the RNC’s pool of data is continuously growing since thousands of field staffers are transferring additional information back to the RNC every time they interact with a voter.
The overhauled Data Center is part of a noticeable effort on behalf of the RNC to engage voters early on in the election cycle. In July, the committee launched a pilot program in Ohio that focuses on reaching black and urban voters and collecting data that helps campaigns determine the likelihood of them supporting GOP candidates.
RNC spokesman Orlando Watson previously told the Washington Examiner that the data from its outreach campaign in Ohio will be used to “activate new voters as media surrogates and volunteers.”
To some extent, the RNC’s emphasis on big data in the current election is a reaction to its failure in 2012 to collect and utilize data as effectively as its Democratic counterpart.
Shortly after former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney lost to President Obama in 2012, a group of GOP strategists attributed the party’s unexpected loss to the archaic techniques it was using to gather and interpret data.
Mark Fidelman, a digital marketing expert and Forbes contributor, explained that Obama’s team in 2012 created a “sophisticated feedback system and tested massive amounts of scenarios on potential voters” that allowed them to run a more “adaptive, agile, and intelligent campaign.”
Meanwhile, Romney’s team focused a significant portion of its outreach efforts on a mobile application called Orca which crashed repeatedly on election day and left volunteers unaware of who to target in their last-minute efforts to mobilize voters.
“A big part of the problem in 2012 was that the Romney guys were trying to beat Obama in 2008,” one Republican strategist told Business Insider just weeks after the election. “They weren’t doing what the Obama campaign was doing in 2012.”
The 2016 Data Center mirrors the centralized portal of dynamic data utilized by the Obama camp in 2012 and is intended to operate just as smoothly. The committee has allocated $20 million to the continued expansion of its proprietary voter file throughout the election cycle and has plans to update the software system with additional tools and resources periodically.
