Before radio and television, every campaign depended on personal contact with voters. The most important investment a campaign made was in shoe leather. "People would show up on the doorstep," says Laurie Moskowitz, a consultant who ran field operations for the Democrats in 2000. But in the 1960s, the mass media began to interpose itself between campaign and voter, particularly in national elections. Candidates, advised by a growing mob of media consultants, tailored their messages for TV and built campaign strategies around advertising markets. They used consumer and census information to target voters by demographic slices?middle-class white men, African-Americans, suburban soccer moms and so on. "There was a de-emphasis on old-fashioned, grassroots campaigning," says James Gimpel, a political scientist and voter behavior expert at the University of Maryland, who consults with Republicans on how to use demographic data.

This media-focused strategy resulted in sweeping demographic slices, which led to homogenized messages that failed to inspire a lot of voters. Consequently, they tuned out. Between 1952 and 1972, 60 percent or more of the electorate regularly voted for president. But since 1972, the turnout of eligible voters for presidential elections has reached 60 percent only once, when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 (60.6 percent of eligible voters went to the polls that year). Voters, sophisticated in the ways of mass marketing, "find it easy to blow off slick advertising," explains Gimpel.

Virtual Shoe Leather

Today, technology brings campaigning full circle and reintroduces shoe leather?virtually. Modern relational database technology makes it easy to compile an unprecedented amount of information about voters that can be used to create customized messages. From local election records, the campaigns can access data on party affiliation, age, gender and how often someone votes. From the census and polling, they can derive information about race, household income and family status. The Internet and fast, inexpensive servers enable the state parties and campaign operatives to keep millions of records current in near real-time. And with that data, Web-based tools allow campaigns to segment voters quickly and efficiently so that campaign workers can make on-the-spot decisions about where to advertise, whom to call or e-mail, which doors to knock on and what messages to send. Last year, Kerry, Sen. John Edwards, Howard Dean and others campaigning in Iowa shelled out $65,000 each to the state Democratic Party for a database of 1.8 million Iowa voters (under campaign finance laws, candidates and party organizations don’t get anything for free; they have to pay for each others’ services).