
Josh Syrjamaki, the Minnesota Director of America Votes, was showing off the organization’s new voting technology to a Minneapolis reporter. As an example he demonstrated on his computer screen data about a Minneapolis-area suburb that had a reputation as a Republican stronghold. In former years it is an area that Democrats would have probably ignored or given only token resources to. However, the computer has found 1,800 voters that might lean Democrat. According to reporter Patricia Lopez, “Minnesota is one of five states where liberal interest groups are road-testing their own micro-targeting system that allows them to pinpoint the lone Democrat living in a suburb full of Republicans.” Perhaps the most intriguing part of this system is that the computer may give these potential voters strange sounding names like “Fast Track Families,” “Digerati,” amd “Sunset City Blues,” always in caps as if they named real people.
I knew Josh when he worked for Paul Wellstone so it doesn’t surprise me he is using this state-of-the-art system to track down potential voters. In the past, Syrjamaki said, “We wouldn’t even have bothered with a place like Carver County. We wouldn’t have known where to start.” But the question was, how did he know that if he found a pocket of ‘Digerati” they would be Democrats? He knew because those names were uncovered with a computer program that uses a statistical modeling technique known as clustering, a technique that may not necessarily tell if someone is a registered Democrat, but will tell you how they might vote on various issues. Matthew Dowd, former senior campaign strategist for President Bush and architect of the system Republicans call “Voter Vault,” explains, “We had 180 pieces of information on every person in our system. If it shows up on a commercial database, it comes into the modeling.”
The best explanation I ever heard of clustering was from a marketing person who once told me, “If I know your zip code, I know more about you than you think.” That was almost fifteen years ago. Today he would say, “If I know your address, I can probably tell you who you voted for and what issues you favor.” The simplest way to explain clustering is that it is a statistical technique for grouping people with like interests, tastes and beliefs. You know all those warranty cards you fill out, the phone surveys you answer, even the very purchases you make in virtually every store every day combine with increasingly complete and sophisticated census and other survey data to yield a picture of who buys what kind of car, who is likely to purchase a new high definition television or what kind of beer you drink.
Rather than try to explain all the details of clustering, let me refer you to a web site, that will actually give a cluster analysis of your own zip code. Claritas, one of the oldest and most respected companies in cluster analysis maintains the site which will tell you everything you want to know about your neighbors. You will notice each of these “taste groups” has a catchy title that expresses not only an image of the people who make up the cluster but tells you about what kind of car they are likely to drive and what television programs they like to watch.
In my zip one group is called the Country Squires. Their “lifestyle traits” include, “order from online retailers, go skiing, read Family Fun magazine, watch pay-per-view movies and drive a Lexus SUV.” Most big corporations that produce things for consumers subscribe to a service like Claritas, paying lots of money to get information a lot more refined and detailed than this simple example. For advertisers willing to pay the price, cluster technology has become so precise that researchers can target consumers down to city blocks and specific consumer preferences.
Politicians now are increasingly willing to pay that price, because it may make the difference between winning and losing. The Republicans, of course, were the first to discover the virtues of clustering, perhaps because of their cozy relationship with the corporations who form one part of the Counterrevolution. Karl Rove justly deserves his title as a master at using these data which he first learned while in the direct mail business. Democrats like Syrjamaki have only recently become attuned to using clustering to plan and manage campaigns. Remember the famous “soccer moms” from the Clinton years? They are a cluster group. Then it was NASCAR dads.
Cluster technology has exerted a tremendous influence on campaign management. The ads you see, the speeches you hear, the sound bites that make the news, the literature you get in the mail (or whether you get any at all), the evening phone calls all owe a considerable debt to clustering. Once strategists have identified their target clusters, the rest of us might as well be anonymous or just turned off. Fall into the wrong cluster and you might as well be invisible or as uncomfortable as a monster pickup ad on Oprah. And if you are invisible or don’t see the issues you care about discussed in any of the ads you are probably going to think about not voting. Perhaps that is why estimates for the turnout for this mid-term election are in the 30-40% range, making nonvoters now the nation’s largest party and meaning almost three-quarters of the country will not weigh in on important issues like Iraq.
If clustering is helping to lower the voting percentage, that is bad enough, but what should really have us all worried, is that not only does clustering help shape campaigns it shapes the very map of our politics. It is no coincidence that the rise of clustering parallels the rise in the number of safe seats. Clustering allows politicians to draw electoral districts favorable to their point of view with incredible precision, making it a lot easier now than it was 10 or 20 years ago to create districts you KNOW will vote not only for your party but also your programs.
The safer the seat, of course, the less the incumbent has to compromise with his or her colleagues. So the rise of clustering also parallels the rise of what I term the Era of Bad Feelings with Congressional rancor burning through the Capitol as if fed by a foul gas. Fair Vote reports in its 2005 study Dubious Democracy, “In each of the four national elections since 1996, more than 98% of incumbents have won, and more than 90% of all races have been won by non-competitive margins of more than 10%.” They go on to note, “These measurements clearly indicate that the problem of lack of voter choice is getting worse, not better.”
Think about that as we go into this election. The reason the press is focusing so intently on only as handful of seats that could go either way is because they are the only seats really in play. The others are already decided. So a recent New York Times cover story on the election listed less than two dozen seats that were competitive. Is it really an election when out of the entire House of Representatives less than two dozen incumbents face any meaningful opposition? You can bet the next time those competitive seats come up for redistricting that the party in power will do everything it can to make them less competitive. Pretty soon there may not be any real races to report. The real struggle for power will be in the state legislatures that control redistricting.
The combination of redistricting and clustering leads to some thorny dilemmas with no easy solutions. If the number of safe districts keeps rising what will happen to America? In the famous Federalist Ten, James Madison wrote about the evils of faction and of a majority riding roughshod over minorities. He could not imagine a technology like clustering which enables political parties to put together Congressional majorities based on gerrymandered voting districts of citizens so alike they might as well be clones. This is Madison turned upside down–with clustering and clever gerrymandering a minority can actually cointrol a state delegation (Texas anyone?).
Do we want America to be ruled by the “Digerati” or the “Country Squires?” Do we want voting districts to become so safe the country resembles a feudal kingdom where House seats are life-long fiefdoms? Right now no one has the answers because not many are raising the questions. As the flames lick closer the Constitution’s parchment our eyes are turned elsewhere, like those of a couch potato glued to television footage of Iraq while a blaze rages out of control in the kitchen.
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