Making Voter Contact Data and Systems in California Elections Personal and Progressive

These approaches aren't exclusive. It's just a question of emphasis - which, given the currently limited resources available to the movement, is an unfortunately critical question. Lists need some kind of system to use them, and systems obviously need lists. The question is just which side you put more time, money, thought and effort into improving.

Republican candidates have access to their Voter Vault system. In Schwarzenegger's case this year, Steve Schmidt and his band of overpaid operatives enhanced their Voter Vault data with lots of commercial data for their much ballyhooed microtargeting campaign, which may have given Arnold a bit of a tailwind that he didn't need and did practically nothing for them downticket. While there are examples of this approach working out well (i.e. in this year's MI-gov race for our side), there are serious issues to consider: besides being extraordinarily expensive, going this route tempts campaigns to deemphasize the hard, critical work of creating a broadly appealing message.

Not having a widely available national voter file, while clearly an electoral disadvantage for Democratic candidates, may yet prove to create some significant advantages for the progressive movement overall. The absence of a centralized national project has forced states and organizations to build their own home-grown systems and try different approaches. Many system providers on our side (including VAN, the Voter Activation Network, and VoterConnect as well) have taken what's called a no lock-in approach with their customers: at the end of a contract period, a customer can choose not to renew, get their data out of the system and take it elsewhere. In fact, in VAN at least, the customer can bulk export their contact data at any time. This has created fertile ground for innovation and generated a number of different systems with various strengths and weaknesses.

The reasons that organizations - be they state parties or nonparty infrastructure projects like VoterConnect - choose to invest in or work with list-based or more system-based solutions seems to have to do with what they perceive the biggest problems with data to be. If they think the big problems are data quality and availability of commercial data, they're going to be more inclined towards a list-based approach. If they think the big problems are keeping data from cycle to cycle and building a distributed, bottom-up movement by empowering lots of organizations to run their own field operations, that's going to move them towards an interest in the systems-based approach.

Both approaches have benefits. I'm firmly in the system-based camp because I believe losing contact data and lacking the capability to empower organizations are in fact the big problems and the ones that should be first addressed. But one of the further advantages of the system-based approach is that, over time, it has the capability of generating data even cleaner than would ever be possible to purchase from a commercial vendor. No commercial entity is ever going to be as knowledgeable as a friendly neighbor.

National Journal's Hotline and other sources have reported that access to the VAN system through the Iowa Democratic Party will cost the presidential hopefuls $85k each for 2007. Why would they pay that, when they could get lists for much less elsewhere? The reason is that the historical contact data that's accruing in the database in incredibly valuable. To understand this, think about it from a campaign perspective: would it be more helpful to know whether someone was an ardent John Edwards supporter in 2004 and what local candidates they liked in 2002, or what magazines they subscribe to? It might be nice to know about the magazines for sending them offers for a good deal on a car. (or maybe for more magazines) But as far as building a progressive movement goes, even a cluster based approach (where the commercial data is correlated to how people are likely to vote with a series of market-research style interviews) is going to be less valuable than the historical contact data.

Wise investments in the right kind of data systems are a force multiplier for the progressive movement. One of the structural advantages of our side is that we do generate lots of volunteer energy. Thousands and thousands of volunteers donate the only thing they can't get more of - their time - to campaigns and organizations throughout the state every time there's an election on. Utilizing that time as effectively as possible is a practical and moral imperative for our movement.

According to the Secretary of State's most recent figures, there are 15,837,108 registered voters in this state, and a truly mind boggling 6,815,082 known eligible citizens who aren't registered. I believe practically every single one of them would potentially support the right progressive issues and candidates. (Admittedly, the conversations with some of them are going to take a little longer than with others!) VoterConnect took the first step towards investing in a data system that will support a movement that will eventually be able to deliver a personal contact from a trusted person or group during every election cycle to all of them. We're looking forward to making that vision more of a reality and further solidifying the progressive voting bloc that's going to move this state forward in 2007 and beyond.

Dan Ancona is the Project Director for California VoterConnect. He is a technologist, visualization engineer, progressive activist and house DJ. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Jen, and cat, Oscar.