The Myths of Data-Driven Campaigning

Abstract

Campaigns’ ability to use data and analytics to make informed decisions about the strategies and tactics they deploy is unparalleled, and also understudied. While much has been written about the possibilities of data driven campaigning, the on-the-ground realities are often much less precise and much less novel than journalistic coverage implies. This piece investigates the gap between the rhetoric of data driven campaigning and actual campaign practices, especially as it relates to how the 2016 Trump campaign compares to the 2016 Clinton campaign, other prior presidential campaigns, and down-ballot races in recent years. It focuses on the use of analytics in two channels in particular, social media and email, as those offer many opportunities for targeting and message testing. Ultimately, I argue that despite the great amount of journalistic attention paid to the Trump campaign’s novel use of data and analytics, their email campaign was significantly underpowered, while their use of Facebook analytics was comparable in quality and greater in quantity than other leaders in the field.

Keywords:

• political campaigns
• analytics
• social media
• 2016 election

Notes

^1. Because this number was gathered via submissions from individuals rather than tracking e-mails, the actual numbers are surely higher for each campaign, but they point to a discrepancy in the amount of targeting and testing that would be possible for each campaign.

^2. July saw 212 Clinton e-mails, versus 35 from the Trump campaign; and in the two weeks after Labor Day the Clinton camp sent out 537 to Trump’s 82 (Landsman, 2016a, 2016b).

^3. The campaign claimed to have created and ran 175,000 variations of ads in one day on Facebook (Lapowsky, 2016), but the skeleton staff of the Trump campaign, with only a dozen embeds from Cambridge Analytica joining Parscale’s digital team, makes it somewhat dubious. The sheer amount of labor needed to create that many variants would have crippled what was already an incredibly thin staff.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica Baldwin-Philippi

Jessica Baldwin-Philippi is Assistant Professor, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University.