What’s in a vote? Only your entire personal profile

You say you enjoy a lobster dinner with a fine wine accompanied by some light dinner jazz? You must be an Obama supporter. Would you rather drink beer, eat nachos, and attend the Fiesta Bowl? Then you are clearly a Romney fan.

If you think I’m being stereotypical, think again. I’m just taking advantage of modern political data mining techniques.

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Charles Duhigg published a piece in the New York Times last week about the data mining efforts of both the Obama and Romney campaigns. It’s worth a read. Both campaigns are collecting massive amounts of consumer data to determine who’s likely to vote, how they will vote, and whether they might be willing to donate money or volunteer their time. To wit:

In the weeks before Election Day, millions of voters will hear from callers with surprisingly detailed knowledge of their lives. These callers — friends of friends or long-lost work colleagues — will identify themselves as volunteers for the campaigns or independent political groups.

The callers will be guided by scripts and call lists compiled by people — or computers — with access to details like whether voters may have visited pornography websites, have homes in foreclosure, are more prone to drink Michelob Ultra than Corona, or have gay friends or enjoy expensive vacations.

So much for my plans to default on my house and move to a Caribbean island with my gay friends so that I can spend all my time drinking beer and surfing porn. Damn you Obama and Romney!

(Personally I’m not entirely convinced campaign workers will know when you’ve visited naughty websites. Mainstream data miners tend to steer a wide berth around things like that, for obvious reasons. So unless you happened to go from DogsWhoLoveCats.com directly to Barackobama.com or MittRomney.com, then logged in, I highly doubt anyone in either place will know about your fondness for interspecies canoodling. But I digress.)

The campaigns know these things about you because they’ve purchased this information from political data mining companies like Aristotle, consumer reporting services like Experian and Acxiom, and online tracking companies like Rapleaf, which in turn sucks data from Facebook profiles. They then mix all of these ingredients into a stew that calculates how you’re likely to vote based on what you’ve bought, seen, or done. Duhigg writes:

More subtle data mining has helped the Obama campaign learn that their supporters often eat at Red Lobster, shop at Burlington Coat Factory, and listen to smooth jazz. Romney backers are more likely to drink Samuel Adams beer, eat at Olive Garden, and watch college football.

See? I wasn’t kidding. And if you like to eat at Hooters, drink Schlitz Malt Liquor, and hang out at truck-pulling contests, you’re probably in the tank for Miller-Bertram 2012, presidential candidates for the American Third Position Party.

Last month Mother Jones took an extensive look at how the Obama and Romney campaigns are hoovering up data so that they can target their appeals to the people most willing to listen. As Mojo reporter Tim Murphy writes:

Campaigns typically draw on data from five sources. There’s your basic voter file, publicly available information provided by each state, which includes your name, address, and voting record. The party’s file, compiled by partisan organizations like VoteBuilder, includes more detailed information. Did you vote in a caucus? Did you show up at a straw poll? Did you volunteer for a candidate? Did you bring snacks to a grassroots meet-up? Did you talk to a canvasser about cap-and-trade? Contribution data, which the campaign compiles itself, includes both public information that campaigns disclose to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and nonpublic data like the names of small-dollar donors.

By the 2000 election, political data firms like Aristotle had begun purchasing consumer data in bulk from companies like Acxiom. Now campaigns didn’t just know you were a pro-choice teacher who once gave $40 to save the endangered Rocky Mountain swamp gnat; they also could have a data firm sort you by what type of magazines you subscribed to and where you bought your T-shirts.

The biggest problem with this scheme is not that our privacy is being eviscerated for crass political purposes — though that’s a significant concern. It’s that candidates can use this data to appear to be whomever that particular voter would like them to be, then be someone else to the next person, and so on down the line. You could conceivably vote for a person you’d probably hate if you knew all of his or her positions on the issues, unless you were diligent about paying attention and watched the debates instead of the baseball playoffs.

The other problem? The only people who can stop this are those who benefit most: the candidates who are ultimately elected into office. You think they’re going to put an end to political data mining? If you believe that malarkey, I have a bridge to sell you.

Got any bridges you’d like to buy or politicians you’d like to mine? Cast your votes below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com. And please, try to keep it civil, OK?

This article, “What’s in a vote? Only your entire personal profile,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.