News flash: GOP discovers big data

Published 8:58 pm Wednesday, December 10, 2014

For all of the breathless front-loading of big numbers and big names, a new “investigative” piece by the left-leaning Politico.com has remarkably little news. Republicans, it seems, have discovered data.

But instead of a reasoned examination of how the GOP learned from its 2012 losses and upped its game, the article devolves into just another question-begging screed against the villains de jour, the Koch brothers.

“The Koch brothers and their allies are pumping tens of millions of dollars into a data company that’s developing detailed, state-of-the-art profiles of 250 million Americans, giving the brothers’ political operation all the earmarks of a national party,” Politico reports. “The move comes as mainstream Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, are trying to reclaim control of the conservative movement from outside groups. The Kochs, however, are continuing to amass all of the campaign tools the Republican National Committee and other party arms use to elect a president.”

Politico cites a new agent for action.

“The least-known vehicle for the Kochs is a for-profit company known as i360, started by a former adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign after McCain lost to Barack Obama in 2008,” the online magazine says. “Subsequently, it merged with a Koch-funded data nonprofit. The Koch-affiliated Freedom Partners, formed in late 2011, eventually became an investor, officials confirmed to POLITICO.”

Let’s break down some of these claims, the stated ones and the implied ones.

First, you know who else is “pumping tens of millions of dollars” into collecting data on Americans. Pretty much everyone. The Democrats, certainly, but also every retail chain, every online business and every tech firm. That’s the nature of the modern world.

What’s so special about the Republicans suddenly discovering this? That’s a little less clear. Politico has written extensively about the Democrats’ remarkable achievements on the data front. Just over a year ago, the site did a story on the Obama campaign’s data operations being merged into the Democratic Party.

“After nearly a year of discussion over the fate of reams of Obama campaign data, officials have decided to transfer some voter information to the Democratic National Committee, but to retain its email list and rent it out to Organizing for Action, party committees and other groups, a source familiar with the matter told POLITICO,” the site reported in November 2013.

How, exactly, does a new(ish) data mining operation make the Koch brothers like “a national party”? A later paragraph explains, “GOP campaigns can get less-expensive data through the RNC, but happily pay i360 for its superior profiles.”

So the Koch brothers-affiliated group is simply providing a similar (albeit better) service.

Those are the overt claims. How about the implicit claims? The tone of the story seems to imply there’s something wrong with Republicans collecting data, and the Kochs being involved.

There’s nothing in the piece, or in the GOP’s effort to collect data, that’s either new or sinister.

It still comes down to ideas. Data is a tool, but it’s not the message. And the message is what voters respond to.