The GOP Head Start

The Republicans began working on an integrated national voter database nearly a decade ago, a full six years before the Democrats. Like other technology-related campaign innovations that the party pioneered, such as telemarketing and direct mail in the 1980s, the decision reflected an ongoing business problem. Republicans tend to live in suburban and rural areas, which makes door-to-door campaigning expensive, says University of Maryland’s Gimpel. As a result, he says the Republicans pretty much abandoned local grassroots organizing as far back as the 1960s and sought instead to pool more of its resources at the national level.

Ellis, the GOP technology director, says the idea of creating a national voter database (known internally as the voter file) percolated for years, but party officials thought the cost to maintain and track records on 168 million voters was too high. Then, in the mid-’90s, the price of processing power and storage dropped enough to make the project cost-effective. In 1995, the RNC convinced state party leaders to share their voter lists by offering to share the costs of collecting and maintaining the data?the main source of which is voter registration and turnout records from local governments. The states collect the data, which comes in every format from paper poll books to floppy disks to tapes, and turn it over to the RNC. Then, says Ellis, the RNC compiles it and sends it to a vendor who cleanses it by matching it with a database of valid addresses from the U.S. Postal Service. When the data comes back, each voter is assigned a geography-based code that’s used to link their record to census information about the same address. As the Democrats did in Iowa, the RNC enhances the file by contacting independent voters and asking them questions that gauge their support for Republicans, such as whether they’ve voted for the GOP in the past or what they think about an issue.

Ellis says the RNC has unlimited access to the database for its fund-raising and campaigning efforts, while the state parties control access by everyone else. Creating the database and putting it online through a portal created immediate efficiencies when it came to generating mailing and telemarketing lists. But the full power of the system is realized by the field workers for the RNC, state parties and GOP candidates. The Voter Vault interface allows these operatives, many of them volunteers, to generate lists of target voters on the fly, right up until the polls close on Election Day. Because the database is updated on a rolling basis, operatives have a much better chance than they used to of hitting the right targets?voters they can persuade to go Republican. The detail available in the file about each voter helps operatives tailor a personal pitch.