The campaign knew very little about the 13 million people who had registered for online updates, not even their age or gender or party registration. Without the ability to filter its recipients based on those criteria, the campaign stuck to safe topics for email blasts and reserved its sharp-edged messages for individual delivery by direct mail or phone call. In those channels, the campaign could be certain of the political identities of those it was reaching, because the recipients had been profiled based on hundreds of personal characteristics—enough to guarantee that each message was aimed at a receptive audience.
This year, however, as part of a project code-named Narwhal, Obama’s
team is working to link once completely separate repositories of
information so that every fact gathered about a voter is available to
every arm of the campaign. Such information-sharing would allow the
person who crafts a provocative email about contraception to send it
only to women with whom canvassers have personally discussed
reproductive views or whom data-mining targeters have pinpointed as
likely to be friendly to Obama’s views on the issue.
As with SuperPACs, its a brave new world out there.
