[Mb-civic] Democrats' Data Mining Stirs an Intraparty Battle - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Democrats' Data Mining Stirs an Intraparty Battle
With Private Effort on Voter Information, Ickes and Soros Challenge Dean 
and DNC

By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 8, 2006; A01

A group of well-connected Democrats led by a former top aide to Bill 
Clinton is raising millions of dollars to start a private firm that 
plans to compile huge amounts of data on Americans to identify 
Democratic voters and blunt what has been a clear Republican lead in 
using technology for political advantage.

The effort by Harold Ickes, a deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White 
House and an adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), is 
prompting intense behind-the-scenes debate in Democratic circles. 
Officials at the Democratic National Committee think that creating a 
modern database is their job, and they say that a competing for-profit 
entity could divert energy and money that should instead be invested 
with the national party.

Ickes and others involved in the effort acknowledge that their 
activities are in part a vote of no confidence that the DNC under 
Chairman Howard Dean is ready to compete with Republicans on the 
technological front. "The Republicans have developed a cadre of people 
who appreciate databases and know how to use them, and we are way behind 
the march," said Ickes, whose political technology venture is being 
backed by financier George Soros.

"It's unclear what the DNC is doing. Is it going to be kept up to date?" 
Ickes asked, adding that out-of-date voter information is "worse than 
having no database at all."

Ickes's effort is drawing particular notice among Washington operatives 
who know about it because of speculation that he is acting to build a 
campaign resource for a possible 2008 presidential run by Hillary 
Clinton. She has long been concerned, advisers say, that Democrats and 
liberals lack the political infrastructure of Republicans and their 
conservative allies. Ickes said his new venture, Data Warehouse, will at 
first seek to sell its targeting information to politically active 
unions and liberal interest groups, rather than campaigns.

As it stands now, the DNC and Data Warehouse, created by Ickes and 
Democratic operative Laura Quinn, will separately try to build vast and 
detailed voter lists -- each effort requiring sophisticated expertise 
and costing well over $10 million.

"From an institutional standpoint, this is one of the most important 
things the DNC can and should do. Building this voter file is part of 
our job," Communications Director Karen Finney said. "We believe this is 
something we have to do at the DNC. Our job is to build the 
infrastructure of the party."

In the 2003-2004 election cycle, the DNC began building a national voter 
file, and it proved highly effective in raising money. Because of many 
technical problems, however, it was not useful to state and local 
organizations trying to get out the vote.

The pressure on Democrats to begin more aggressive "data mining" in the 
hunt for votes began after the 2002 midterm elections and intensified 
after the 2004 presidential contest, when the GOP harnessed data 
technology to powerful effect.

In 2002, for the first time in recent memory, Republicans ran better 
get-out-the-vote programs than Democrats. When well done, such drives 
typically raise a candidate's Election Day performance by two to four 
percentage points. Democrats have become increasingly fearful that the 
GOP is capitalizing on high-speed computers and the growing volume of 
data available from government files and consumer marketing firms -- as 
well as the party's own surveys -- to better target potential supporters.

The Republican database has allowed the party and its candidates to 
tailor messages to individual voters and households, using information 
about the kind of magazines they receive, whether they own guns, the 
churches they attend, their incomes, their charitable contributions and 
their voting histories.

This makes it possible to specifically address the issues of voters who, 
in the case of many GOP supporters, may oppose abortion, support gun 
rights or be angry about government use of eminent domain to take 
private property. A personalized pitch can be made during door-knocking, 
through direct mail and e-mail, and via phone banks.

This approach is designed to complement the broad-brush approach of 
television and radio advertising, which by its nature must be addressed 
to large, and often diverse, audiences.

Traditional get-out-the-vote efforts operated crudely, such as by 
canvassing neighborhoods in which at least 65 percent of residents voted 
for a particular party. It was often deemed too inefficient to focus on 
neighborhoods where the partisan tilt was less decisive, and it ran the 
risk of doing more to turn out the opposition's vote.

The advantage of data-based targeting is that political field operatives 
can home in on precisely the voters they wish to reach -- the 
antiabortion parishioners of a traditionally Democratic African American 
church congregation, for instance.

Consultants working for the Republican National Committee developed 
strategies to design messages targeting individual voters' "anger 
points" in the belief that grievance is one of the strongest motivations 
to get people to turn out on Election Day.

Under the direction of Bush adviser Karl Rove, the RNC and state parties 
repeatedly tested the voter file and different ways to contact voters to 
determine which were most effective at boosting turnout.

"They were smart. They came into our neighborhoods. They came into 
Democratic areas with very specific targeted messages to take Democratic 
voters away from us," then-DNC Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe said after 
the 2004 contest. "They were much more sophisticated in their message 
delivery."

Ickes has quietly raised an estimated $7.5 million in start-up money for 
Data Warehouse. A prospectus said the company will need at least $11.5 
million in initial capital.

In addition to Soros's support, Ickes has the financial backing of some 
of the wealthy participants in a new fundraising group called the 
Democracy Alliance. He and Quinn, who will be chief executive of Data 
Warehouse, have hired technology specialists from internet retailer 
Amazon.com and a Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer 
project.

Quinn had worked on the voter file program under McAuliffe, but Dean 
brought in his own people after he took over in early 2005.

These included former Dean presidential campaign workers who formed a 
company called Blue State Digital, now under contract with the DNC.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/07/AR2006030701860.html
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