With a big mouth, plenty of buzz, and a yuuge media presence, does Donald Trump still need a data-driven get-out-the-vote operation to win in Iowa and New Hampshire?
The real-estate developer has disrupted the presidential campaign like few other candidates in history and has shown an amazing ability–through the sheer forces of his personality and a populist movement receptive to his message–to survive the outrage over some of his offensive statements and to dodge bullets fired at him by powerful politicians and “fair and balanced” media outlets. But now that there’s a real likelihood of him winning the nomination, the Trump campaign is being forced to suffer the tedium and drudgery of the ground game, which involves hiring geeks to crunch the data and comb through voter lists.
The Trump campaign has been secretive about the extent of its get-out-the-vote operation in those two key states, but insiders believe that it’s far from the high-tech enterprises of the Cruz, Bush, and Rubio campaigns and that they’re playing catch-up. True to form, the Trump campaign declined to comment or provide information on its high-tech campaigning apparatus to Fast Company.
“The silence is deafening,” said one insider. The person said the community of campaign data scientists is a small one, and one usually knows who’s working for whom, and generally what they’re doing–especially in presidential races. The consensus among data scientists and digital strategists is that only last October did Trump begin seriously assembling his data ground game.
Politico reported earlier this month that the Trump campaign started discussions with the voter data provider L2 in October and “ultimately entered into an agreement.”
Regulations require the Trump campaign to report money spent to license any voter database. No such line item appears in any filings for the first three quarters of 2015. The most recent filing show expenses up to September 30, so we can be sure that the campaign did not formally contract with L2 or any other voter database company before October. The campaign will have to file its expenditures for the fourth quarter of 2015 by January 31, so we’ll soon know for sure if it’s paid L2 for data.
Separately, the campaign acquired a voter list from the Republican National Committee (RNC), which it will combine with the L2 data. Such lists are provided free to GOP campaigns, with the agreement that the campaign adds to or corrects the data in the list, then provides the updated list back to the RNC to lend to other GOP campaigns.
