Steve Parkhurst Interviewed by French Newspaper About Big Data

Steve Parkhurst was recently interviewed by Elisabeth Guédel of the conservative French newspaper l’Opinion. The two discussed Big Data in America in 2016 and in the French Presidential elections of 2017. The writer reached out because of Steve’s report on Big Data, free for download.

Note: The translation from French to English was done using Google Translate, so take that with a grain of salt.

In the US, the “profiling” of still further constituents

The strength of the digital teams Barack Obama contributed to the difference in 2008 and especially in 2012

In the US, everyone remembers “the victory of Big Data,” as the newspapers headlined at the re-election of Barack Obama in 2012. The US president had been able to target 15 million indecisive and broaden its base Election compared to 2008, particularly among young people. The digital campaign has become a model of its kind which today inspire presidential candidates next year.”The tools are not exactly new for 2016, but they are refined, said the political advisor big data expert, Steve Parkhurst, the Texas firm American Renaissance. The campaign teams develop a multitude of tablet and smartphone applications to better achieve and identifying potential voters. “64% of Americans today have a mobile phone, according to Pew Research, against 35% in spring 2011, when the presidential election campaign began.

. Swing states The “profiling” method evolved: there four years, voter identification was based on geolocation, defined from residential areas. Today, it is a “get people where they are, that is, anywhere,” said Steve Parkhurst yet. Although residents of “swing states” – those American States which can switch in the Democratic camp or the Republicans one election to another – are still targeted, research is no longer based on an address or postal code but on the tastes, preferences and conversations. It is crossed with the analysis of data available on social networks, the number of users in the US is expected to exceed 186 million in 2016 against 160 million in 2012, according to estimates. Seven US ten Internet users today have a Facebook account.

The strength of the digital teams Barack Obama was their ability to “track” the BarackObama.com website could leave up to 87 different cookies while browsing, MittRomney.com, website Republican rival candidate, not included as 48, revealed the Wall Street Journal in November 2012. The information collectors have informed accurately about the habits of Internet users – what read newspapers, or favorite foods charities supported by example and helped to customize the messages that whether in emails to solicit donations and volunteer hours or in political commercials.

“Massive data are not sufficient in themselves, Steve Parkhurst notes, however, you also have the right person asking the right questions.” Barack Obama had attracted a genius  cloud  as Harper Reed, key man of his campaign 2012. Not sure Hillary Clinton, despite the help of Groundwork, a start-up created by the Executive President of Alphabet (parent Google) Eric Schmidt to help the candidate to hire talent, also has an attractive candidate.

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Big Data, Republican Campaigns and 2016

By Steve Parkhurst

I have just written a special report called Big Data, Republican Campaigns and 2016.

The report goes into detail about Big Data and its application in the political process, both past and present. As 2016 starts to unfold, it will be worth watching the various moves of Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and a few others who have a shot at the 2016 nomination. Will you be able to see what these candidates are really up to? You will have a much better grasp after you read the special report.

Please download your free copy of the special report on Big Data today, and let us know what you think about it.

 

SAP: Big Data And The 2016 US Presidential Election

By Steve Parkhurst

I was recently interviewed for this piece by business and IT writer Debra Donston-Miller about Big Data and 2016. I’ll have more to say about the subject soon enough, but for now, enjoy this article.

 

Big Data And The 2016 US Presidential Election

By Debra Donston-Miller, May 7, 2013

If big data was something of a secret weapon during the presidential election of 2012, it promises to loom large as we run up to 2016.

There’s no doubt that big data is playing an increasingly big role in business, politics, healthcare, education, retail and numerous other industries. With the right tools and expertise, organizations can slice and dice data to reveal trends and other information that will inform decisions about future strategy and direction.

“[Big data] is the idea that we are finally able to do with a huge body of data things that were impossible to achieve when working with smaller amounts, to uncover to new insight and create new forms of economic value,” said Kenneth Cukier, co-author with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of “Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think,” and data editor of The Economist. “So, for example, the reason we have self-driving cars or very good computer translation is not because of improvements in processors or algorithms, though they are useful, but because we have vastly more data from which the computer can calculate the probability that a traffic light is red and not green, or which a word in one language is a suitable substitute for a word in another.”

During the 2012 election, big data was used to great advantage—namely, by Barack Obama, in his re-election campaign.

A November 2012 article in Time magazine, “Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win, reported, “Data-driven decision making played a huge role in creating a second term for the 44th President and will be one of the more closely studied elements of the 2012 cycle. … In politics, the era of big data has arrived.”

Cukier said campaigns have always been run on information, but in 2012 big data helped optimize that information and activities around it.

“Obama’s data scientists made pioneering innovations on applying big data to politics,” said Cukier. ”They learned through testing what the optimal sum was when requesting a donation. Every piece of promotional literature online and offline is tested before it goes live at scale. They micro target down to subgroups of the population that were otherwise not picked up by campaigns in the past because it was hard to get granular information on those groups and what moved them to vote a certain way. As a result, campaigns try to tailor their activities down the seemingly ‘individual’ level — not  broad, lumpy categories like the ‘soccer moms’ used in Clinton’s campaigns in the 1990s.”

The role of big data will only increase in the 2016 presidential election, with practitioners using technology to hone in on data much more granularly than ever before. In addition, say experts, the use of big data will overlap with social media and other platforms.

“For the 2016 presidential election, we can expect big data to play a much more central role than ever before,” said Cukier. “[We’ll see] micro-targeting of individuals and narrow subgroups of the population, tailored messages over social media platforms, instant feedback loops to the campaign about what works and what doesn’t to move voters, and data collected from the private sector to build predictive models of what works best for fundraising, activating the base of supporters and the get-out-the-vote activities.”

Pay attention to some of the hotly contested issues and the preparation for 2014 Senate elections, and you will see big data at work and a preview of what’s to come in 2016.

“There will be data testing in the run-up to 2014,” said Steve Parkhurst, political consultant, GPH Consulting. “There have already been debates this year on issues like the sequester, the Second Amendment and immigration, for example, and I’m sure the big data databases are filling up with usable data. The data drill-down is no doubt tracking where voters are looking and what those voters are saying, especially online.”

All of this is not to say that the process will be easy. Analysis of big data is a highly complex task, and at this point in time it requires a very specialized—and often expensive–skill set.

“Not just everyone can set up a big data shop,” said Parkhurst. “The people who are really good at it are going to charge a premium price.”

Luckily, technology providers are heeding the call for products and services that can tame the big data beast. Indeed, said Cukier, two of the biggest barriers to big data are narrow thinking and a dearth of leadership.

“The only real obstacle is one of mindset,” said Cukier. “We need to think creatively about what we can do with the data and how important it is. It takes both ingenuity and leadership.”