Politics Election 2016: December 2015 Archives

The Hillary Clinton-Bernie Sanders data fight, explained - The Washington Post

"We've established before and will reiterate here that there is nothing more important to a campaign than knowing as many details about you, the voter, as it possibly can. In most places, obtaining a list of registered voters and their vote history is trivial. (For example, the state of Ohio's full voter file is online.) That data usually includes other important details: Your address, your gender, your political party, your age, etc. But in an era when political candidates have the ability and desire to target ads to 45-year-old car enthusiasts who are recently divorced and live in the suburbs of Cincinnati, the more data the better.

"Since there's not much utility in, say, a senatorial campaign investing lots of money to build this thing out every six years, businesses stepped in to fill the void. There's a company called NGP VAN which runs a system that allows campaigns easy access to voter databases. Those databases are put together with the help of companies like TargetSmart, which helps the DNC take voter data from state parties (which get it from the state), cleans the data up, layers in consumer information and then slots it, in the case of the DNC, into the NGP VAN system."