This repugnant Mark Steyn op-ed is merely the most open elaboration of a new meme travelling through the American punditocracy, namely that because an Islamist and a remnant of the Mubarak regime finished 1-2 in the Egyptian presidential election, Facebook has been proved useless (and of course, Egypt is lost to the “Shariah-enforcing, Jew-hating, genital-mutilating enthusiasts of the Muslim Brotherhood”). While the matchup of Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi and former Muberak PM Ahmed Shafiq is hardly ideal, it also not yet a foregone conclusion, as there is a pending court case against Shafiq’s candidacy that may yet disqualify him. There are also credible rumors that Shafiq was illegally assigned 900,000 votes, vaulting him ahead of the third-place candidate, Hamdeen Sabahy (Abel Moneim Aboul Fotouh did not finish third as Steyn mistakenly asserts in his article). Continue reading
Blaming Facebook For Egypt’s Elections
Wanted: Digital Orgs That Can Win Revolutions AND Elections
As the votes of Egypt’s presidential election are counted today, Francis Fukuyama asks on The Daily Beastwhy the young revolutionaries of the Arab Spring did not have a candidate.
This group of young activists, which can still be mobilized for street protests like the recent demonstrations in front of the Defense Ministry, has failed to turn itself into a meaningful player in post-Mubarak electoral politics.
This voter probably doesn't use Facebook.
It is a fair point. In the last wave of democratic revolution, which brought down the Soviet Union twenty years ago, the most successful democratic transitions featured organizations, like the Solidarity union in Poland and Civic Forum in the former Czechoslovakia, which could organize a revolution AND then win power afterwards. Analogous digital organization, like the April 6th Youth Movement, have not had this success.
Does the ease of collective action on social media, which allows effective coordination through loose ties, mean that the strong ties that are needed for durable organization do not form? Can Egypt’s digital movement follow the path of organizations like thePirate Party, which did translate online organization into electoral success? How can the “flash organizations” which facilitate digital revolutions transform themselves into durable political organizations capable of influencing the aftermath?
2012: Clash of the Data Titans
Both the Romney and Obama campaigns are pioneers in the use of big data.
Mitt Romney could be considered the father of big political data. He was not the one pouring over spreadsheets and devising algorithms during his pathbreaking 2001 campaign but, as Rasmus Kleis Neilsen notes in his new book Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns, “the breakthrough at the national level came in 2001 and 2002 when the Republican consultant Alex Gage… introduced what he called ‘supersegmentation’ in Mitt Romney’s lavishly funded campaign for governor of Massachusetts.”
Romney was able to bring data into politics because he was intimate with its uses in business. As Louis Menand wrote in arecent article in The New Yorker, at Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Company, “data crunching seems to have been the main engine of analysis. Virtually everyone agrees that Romney was extremely good at this, and he operates his campaigns in the same way.”
Six years later, when he decided to run for President, Romney was still a data heavyweight. A campaign spokesperson told an Iowa newspaper in 2007 that Romney was “interested in data, and what data mean.” Notes Menand, “it’s not just that Romney doesn’t have good political instincts…. In management consulting, gut feelings are what you work hard to take out of the equation. That’s the justification for all that painstaking analysis.”
Yet neither Romney nor the Republicans won the data wars in 2008. That honor went, for the first time, to the Democrats, historic laggards in big data infrastructure and application due to their new new online database and user interface system, VoteBuilder/VAN. Writes Nielsen, “that year, many of my interviewees argue, the Democratic party for the first time went one better than the Republican party in the targeting and data arms race.”
Which brings us to 2012. We are in store for an interesting race, since two data heavyweights will be facing off. Despite our curiosity, we will know little of how each campaign’s data-crunching methods until long after the election, as these techniques are the political equivalent of trade secrets.
At least to the outside world, the Republicans are playing up – and even over-playing – their underdog status. In an article last week in Politico Drew Ryun, president of a conservative grassroots organizing group American Majority Action, told reporter Kenneth Vogel that “the left has been using this kind of [targeting] technology to beat us for years,” even though up until 2008 most insider’s believed that the Republicans had the advantage.
In any case, it is now Republicans that are following the Democratic lead. While the Republicans were the first to come out with a functional shared online voter database in 1995 (a feat the Democrats did not achieve until 2006), the Obama campaign is now the model to beat. The tea party group has created a mobile phone app “which is similar in some ways to technology being used by the Obama campaign and other Democrats.” The app “allows campaign volunteers while out door-knocking to access reams of data about voters, and to update voter profiles and accept campaign contributions – all from their smartphones.” Says Ryun, “This is a tool that levels the playing field between David and Goliath.”
But smartphones apps are merely a sideshow. A more important Democratic innovation was outsourcing voter file assembly and maintenance to companies like Catalist, NPG, and Voter Activation Network. “The RNC,” reports Politico, “is nearing completion of a plan to hand over partial control of its valuable voter file to a newly formed private entity called Data Trust.” The party list will be crucial to the eventual nominee. “While GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney has been spending heavily on political technology for years, his list alone can’t compete with Obama’s,” writes Vogel.
And money from the Koch brothers, big tea party funders, may be doing more harm than good. While Data Trust is struggling to raise money, the Koch brothers put $2.5 million into a competing system, Themis. Building competing databases – rather than a single authoritative one – is likely to disadvantage Republicans since the eventual nominee may need to use both, increasing costs and decreasing efficiency. The cost is real. Federal Election Commission records show that Democratic data companies have been paid about $36 million by liberal candidates and causes since 2001 and the costs for Republicans are likely to be similar. As in elections, the tea party and its donors continue to provide both resources and division to the Republican party.
How Big Data Entered American Politics
One of the major stories this election cycle has been “big data”: campaigns combining voter files, consumer records, and response data collected by their own volunteers to individually target voters. This practice is at once exciting because it allows campaigns greater precision than ever before in how they interact with individual voters, yet it also raises privacy concerns as citizens are often unaware of the amount of personal data available to third parties or how it is being used.
Right or wrong, big data is now a part of our political process. But how did it enter American politics in the first place? This history is recounted in Rasmus Kleis Nielsen’s new book, Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns, which looks at how campaigns conduct field operations (door-to-door canvassing and phone-banking). Though these activities take place offline, computers are never far away, for it’s the analysis of digitized data that directs volunteers which doors to knock and which phones to call.
The Republicans Strike First
While consumer data has been used since the 1970′s to calculate credit scores and since the 1980‘s for direct marketing, political campaigns didn’t get into the digital data game until 1995, when the Republicans created the Voter Vault, a shared and continuously-updated voter file hosted on a server available to Republican state parties and campaigns.
This was quite an improvement over the previous data system. “In the absence of a shared voter file,” writes Nielsen, “every new campaign would have to start from scratch, building their own voter files by collecting public records on registered voters, buying commercial data to enhance it, and making identification calls.” After each campaign, “the entire painstakingly constructed database typically simply disappeared”.
The Democrats Slowly Respond
As soon as the Republicans had a shared voter file, the Democrats had to have one too, though their effort to create one was far bumpier. It was not until 2002 that the Democratic National Committee (DNC), under chairman Terry McAuliffe finally invested in their own system. The result, Demzilla, was distinctly underwhelming. In a 2003 article in Roll Call, one anonymous Democratic consultant complained that “the quality of data is far from a level that would make it immediately useful…. [and] the system is overly cumbersome.” It was hard to use and not worth the effort.
Also, many of the state parties did not even donate their data to the project, afraid that the system would be used more for the 2004 presidential race that for their local campaigns. (This perception was not helped by the fact Demzilla was part of Project 5104, McAuliffe’s campaign to win at least 51% of the presidential vote in 2004.) Notes the Roll Call article, “Demzilla is an idea on paper makes a lots of sense… the problem is that [the DNC] took the idea and let the technology run ahead of the relationships….”
Howard Dean to the Rescue
Howard Dean did not win the presidency in 2004, but he developed enough of a grassroots following that he was able to take the DNC chairmanship in 2005 against the wishes of party leaders. His two big projects were the 50 State Strategy to put DNC-salaried organizers in every state to help the local parties and to hit reset (almost like an Etch-a-Sketch…) on the party’s voter database.
This time the party’s electoral and technological projects complemented rather than undermined one another. While Project 5104 had sown distrust in the state parties, the 50 State Strategy increased it, making the parties more likely to contribute their data. As a result, the new database, VoteBuilder, grew quickly, and VoteBuilder achieved the same data participation in one year that Demzilla achieved in three. Demzilla was abandoned and VoteBuilder rose from the ashes. A single online interface, known as the VAN (Voter Activation Network) was added in 2007. Also, while Demzilla allowed 300 hundred data points to be added for each voter, VoteBuilder allowed 900, a recognition that more data was both available and useful for voter targeting.
Business to Politics: Mitt Romney Shows the Way
This realization about the usefulness of data was largely due the example set by Mitt Romney. In 2001 Romney ran for governor of Massachusetts and his consultant, Tom Gage, used data to “supersegment” voters as never before. Using sophisticated statistical techniques, he created predictive models which determined the probability of future voting behavior based on information about their past political and consumer habits. (Gage’s term eventually loss ground to the term “microtargeting,” possibly because of the divisive connotation of “segmenting”).
In his book, Neilsen quotes Gage as saying that the businessmen who were Romney’s advisers “were flabbergasted when they learned that such techniques, mainstays in many parts of corporate America, were not already widespread in politics.” However, Romney himself likely played a role as well in the centrality of data in his campaign.
In a recent articlein the New Yorker, Louis Menand points out that at Boston Consulting Group and Bain Capital, Romney’s employers from 1975 to 1999, “data crunching seems to have been the main engine of analysis.” Menand draws the link between Romney’s business background in management consulting and his pioneering role in bringing big data into American political campaigning. “Virtually everyone agrees that Romney was extremely good at” data crunching, writes Menand, “and he runs his political campaign in the same way.”
Obama Steals the Data Crown
Though the Republicans clearly got a head start on big data, Nielsen notes that in 2008, many observers believed that the Democrats took the lead. VoteBuilder and the VAN “were built by experienced vendors… and were subject to repeated field testing… before they faced the ultimate test during the general election of 2008″ notes Nielsen. “That year, many of my interviewees argue, the Democratic Party for the first time went one better than the Republican party in the targeting and data arms race.”
Coming Soon…. 2012: Clash of the Data Titans