* Infographic: Build * Want to know exactly how many Democratic-leaning Asian Americans making more than $30,000 live in the Austin, Texas, television market? Catalist, the Washington, DC, political data-mining shop, knows the answer. CTO Vijay Ravindran says his company has compiled nearly 15 terabytes of data for this election year — orders of magnitude larger than the databases available just four years ago. (In 2004, Howard Dean's formidable campaign database clocked in at less than 100 GB, meaning that in one election cycle the average data set has grown 150-fold.) In the next election cycle, we should be measuring voter data in petabytes.
Large-scale data-mining and micro-targeting was pioneered by the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign, but Democrats, aided by privately financed Catalist, are catching up. They're documenting the political activity of every American 18 and older: where they registered to vote, how strongly they identify with a given party, what issues cause them to sign petitions or make donations. (Catalist is matched by the Republican National Committee's Voter Vault and Aristotle Inc.'s immense private bipartisan trove of voter information.)
As databases grow, fed by more than 450 commercially and privately available data layers as well as firsthand info collected by the campaigns, candidates are able to target voters from ever-smaller niches. Not just blue-collar white males, but married, home-owning white males with a high school diploma and a gun in the household. Not just Indian Americans, but Indian Americans earning more than $80,000 who recently registered to vote.
Bill and Hillary's pollster, Mark Penn, has been promoting the dream of narrowcasting and microtrends for years (he invented "tech fatales," US women who drive decisions about electronics purchases). Penn was just a cycle or two early. The technology is finally catching up to his theories.
