ABSTRACT
The 2000 presidential election represented a turning point in political data and targeting. Al Gore, the Democratic nominee, famously won the national popular vote but lost the Electoral College to George W. Bush, with Florida's decisive electoral votes finally allocated to Bush by the United States Supreme Court. President Obama's reelect campaign in 2012 represented a leap forward in the use of data and analytics on a campaign. Data-driven decision-making, or "targeting" in the parlance of the campaign world, is founded upon the idea of maximizing limited resources. Campaigns have, from the beginning of people democracy, been about altering voter behavior to the campaign's benefit. But contextual changes have fueled the evolution of campaign targeting of that persuasion—data-driven campaign decisions the fragmented media landscape presenting challenges toward reaching target voters, while at the same time media platforms allowing for addressable communication to individual voters, and the rise of "big data.".
