When President Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012, he did so by making the most of a strong ground game targeting his voters and getting them to the polls. It was something that the Republican National Committee took notice of and set out to address.
"We just weren't up to par," said Brian Parnitzke, RNC Director of Turnout and Targeting. "We took a good hard look at what went wrong and what went right for them and where we could improve."
One of the major findings was the RNC needed to improve its data operations and since 2014, they've invested $200 million in its Voter Scores program wanting to make sure that they would have as Parnitzke said "the most sophisticated data operation in politics."
The results he said were immediate as they were able to project against public polling within a couple of points what the outcome would be in a couple of key mid-term races that year so that by the time 2016 rolled around they ramped up their investments.
"We doubled down, we invested more, we started earlier and we really saw the prescriptive side of our voter scores where we were able to say not just what the outcome was going to be, not just who was going to win on election day but rather how to get to victory on election day," he said. "Use our modeling and our targeting to make sure that we were able to go after the right voters, with the right message at the right time."
So while the Real Clear Politics polling average on election day had President Trump leading Hillary Clinton by 2.2 percent, Parnitzke said their polling was within 0.2 percent of his eight point win.
"One of the cases that we love to point to is in Ashtabula County, a county that hasn't voted for a Republican in a presidential election since 1984 we were able to correctly call that shot."
They were able to jump to that conclusion because in this internet age the data the parties have legally at their fingertips tell them more about how you're likely to vote even if you yourself hadn't given it much thought.
"We actually have over 3,000 consumer variables on every single voter in the country and that's what primarily does our modeling that along with a whole host of surveys that we're regularly updating in the field with and so we're able to build out a profile of what a Trump supporter looks like, what a Clinton supporter looks like."
RNC Regional Communications Director Ellie Hockenbury said it's information the party makes available to candidates down the ticket.
"It's available to anyone with an R behind their name and we want to make sure that this isn't a one candidate operation and it's available for anyone and everyone to use and it just gets stronger the more people that we have using it," she said.
While the information is helpful Parnitzke stressed it still comes down to a ground game and people in the communities.
"Data has never created a new vote, data has never persuaded a voter to vote with us it's people who do that," he said.
News 5 Political Analyst Dr. Tom Sutton of Baldwin Wallace University said the ability of the parties to have access to analytics likes our likes, our subscriptions our habits represent the future of campaigns.
"The consumer data that they're using, the kinds of strategies, the sort of micro-targeting, really this is kind of becoming standard practice and not just in politics but really across the board in business, consumer affairs, etc.
"But to see how they're using this and really tying consumer demographics, voting preferences and stands on issues together to build coherent campaign strategies not just at the national level but at congressional and senate campaign level state by state really is an interesting twist that I don't think we've seen quite to this degree before," Sutton said.
