Professor Kazin writes: "Charles jotted down every bit of information he could find about a correspondent: party affiliation, job, religion, even income. He updated the file constantly for the next thirty years and used it to send out regular mailings to the Bryan network. The index contained some 200,000 names in 1897 and grew to half a million by 1912."
STEVE EMBER: In other words, Charles was data mining. He was trying to learn what kind of people supported his brother for president. Then he used the data to guide the campaign.
Did it work well? Apparently not well enough. Bryan lost every time.
These days campaigns hire professional data miners. They usually work for one party, either the Democrats or the Republicans.
Andrew Dreschler is vice president of Strategic Telemetry, a company in Washington that works with Democrats. In two thousand eight, Strategic Telemetry worked for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Mr. Dreschler says his company began by looking for the easiest data to find.
ANDREW DRESCHLER: "To be quite honest, when we first started working for Obama we were only using census data."
BARBARA KLEIN: The Census Bureau provides basic information about an area. It could be a small neighborhood or a whole state. The population data includes things like racial and ethnic percentages, average income, education levels and how many people are married or have children.
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2013-11-25
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2013-11-25