{"id":2703887,"date":"2026-11-11T08:35:59","date_gmt":"2026-11-11T13:35:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaigninside-the-targeting-game-dems-use-to-win-votes-and-how-the-gop-can-start-playing-it\/"},"modified":"2026-11-11T09:00:38","modified_gmt":"2026-11-11T14:00:38","slug":"utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaigninside-the-targeting-game-dems-use-to-win-votes-and-how-the-gop-can-start-playing-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaigninside-the-targeting-game-dems-use-to-win-votes-and-how-the-gop-can-start-playing-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside The Targeting Game Dems Use To Win Votes"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">18<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Futm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaigninside-the-targeting-game-dems-use-to-win-votes-and-how-the-gop-can-start-playing-it%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2703887&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Democrats\u2019 two-decade data-and-testing revolution-field experiments, message testing, and targeted digital ads-has measurably increased votes and produced major wins (notably 2012 and Texas\u2019 Talarico). Republicans still rely on outdated polls and intuition, lack experimentalists, and waste donor money on guesses. Randomized message testing and machine-learning targeting identify persuasive messages and can shift outcomes by 2-3% on average (more in places like rural Latino Texas). Republicans must adopt these methods to compete. Joe Arlinghaus founded Valor America to apply ML and econometric analysis to voter behavior.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Democratic political scientists in Washington are happy with their many midterm victories. Meanwhile, no Republican campaign professional understands how this victory was largely due to Democrats\u2019 20-year-old data and analysis revolution.<\/p>\n<p>Democratic campaigns nationwide have transformed their electioneering in a consistent and measurable way, increasing their votes. They also know that not one major campaign on the right has even begun the work of duplicating this.<\/p>\n<p>The development of new methods of testing was first highlighted in a 2010 New York Times <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/10\/31\/magazine\/31politics-t.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">article<\/a> called \u201cNudge the Vote: How Behavioral Science is Remaking Politics\u201d and then more significantly in the 2012 book, <em>The Victory Lab,<\/em> by leftist reporter Sasha Issenberg.<\/p>\n<p>There is a giant chasm between the usage of data in the Democratic world and its use on the right. The only data operations on the political right are gathered through polls. These are tools first developed in the 1930s, and little they give us is as reliable or as sophisticated as the data work of the modern Democratic Party.<\/p>\n<p>Polls are useful but inexact and backward-looking. They measure the static reality of yesterday \u2014 what <em>is<\/em> \u2014 but not what <em>could be<\/em>. They don\u2019t predict how new messages can impact tomorrow; how new messages can change behavior in the voting booth.<\/p>\n<p>The new methods of the left are more precise and can determine in advance ways to change the opinions of substantial numbers of voters. This leads to the acquisition of new voters through persuasion. It transformed the Democratic election world.<\/p>\n<p>My team of data scientists has studied these Democratic methods, and we have been able to duplicate their successes in some key tests. We saw in real time this year how they were very effectively being applied in Texas by James Talarico. We also saw the guesses by Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton\u2019s campaigns and several massive outside Republican efforts. It was clear to us that the guesses of the right were not making any difference in the massive battle for Latino voters in Texas.<\/p>\n<p>I spent the last 12 years studying the revolution in testing and targeting ads now used in about half of Democratic federal campaigns. My team has been able to duplicate these kinds of experiments in exciting ways, but we have also watched countless Republican efforts that simply shoot blindly in the dark with stubborn refusal to even study the way the left does it differently.<\/p>\n<p>These methods on the left are a secret weapon which they are growing better at deploying. Yet almost no political consultant on the right has used or even studied these same methods. Republicans do lots of basic campaigning well, but they leave this advanced weapon untouched and unused. That\u2019s like bringing a club to a gunfight and thinking you\u2019re sufficiently armed.<\/p>\n<h2>The Message Testing Weapon<\/h2>\n<p>The exploitation of modern social science research in the Democratic world began in the early 2000s with famous field experiment studies of Doctors Alan Gerber and Donald Green, Yale scientists widely published for their efforts to study the power of social pressure to change action. Gerber and Green were recruited by the political team at the AFL-CIO after the John Kerry loss in 2004 and they guided the development of a massive new Democratic operation that eventually was called The Analyst Institute.<\/p>\n<p>More than any one other Democratic organization, the Analyst Institute has revolutionized the process of message testing and has spread its ideas rapidly within the Democratic campaign world. Their new methods dramatically improved the effectiveness of advertising and are gaining wider and wider usage. Victories this year on Nov. 3 will be celebrated in the egghead world of Democratic experimentalists as their crowning achievement.<\/p>\n<p>The Analyst Institute\u2019s preeminence comes as a result of challenging campaign consultant orthodoxy on the left. This has lead to a fundamental change in how ads on the left are researched, tested, and distributed.<\/p>\n<p>In his book <em>The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns<\/em>, author Sasha Issenberg touts this change:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFinally campaigns are learning to quantify the ineffable \u2014 the value of a neighbor\u2019s knock, of a stranger\u2019s call, the delicate condition of being undecided \u2014 and isolate the moment where a behavior can be changed, or a heart won. Campaigns have started treating voters like people again.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There is a simplicity to the Democratic tools. In theory, people on both sides do testing of messages and ideas, but the Democratic methods of testing simply work where older methods did not. Democrats determine in advance which messages persuade the other side and which messages are counter-productive, and forge winning margins in narrow races.<\/p>\n<p>The greatest victory with these tools came in 2012 after a blowout 2010 Democratic \u201cShellacking\u201d much like the Republican losses this week. The adoption of new message testing tools and an even more innovative process of using big data and machine learning to then find the best targets in the electorate for those ads, allowed an overwhelming and surprising 2012 Democratic victory.<\/p>\n<p>Massive spending guided by guesses used to be the norm for both parties. Then the Democrats adopted new tools. These tools make it possible to spend less money and consistently secure more votes.<\/p>\n<h2>Talarico\u2019s Targeting Success <\/h2>\n<p>I have studied the Talarico campaign for the last six months. I saw how clear analysis forged a pathway to victory through innovative targeting. I watched as both Paxton and Abbott responded anemically to these targeted efforts.<\/p>\n<p>The greatest success came from a smart campaign among Hispanic Texans who had moved quite strongly to the right since 2012. Numbers are not clear yet, but preliminary analysis by my team shows a 24 percent shift toward Talarico and the entire Democratic team, including coattails in four U.S. House races along the Mexico border.<\/p>\n<p>The hunches that guided the Abbott and Paxton team went against significant testing my team has done across rural Texas with Latino voters over the last 12 years. This is the problem with hunches.<\/p>\n<p>A study by David Shor of Blue Rose Research showed an almost perfect inverse correlation between what consultants believe will work versus what really does work to persuade Republicans to come over to vote Democratic.<\/p>\n<p>Shor explained how the process of testing corrects consultant guesswork in a 2020 Democrats Abroad <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/BeFDqw_AHZI?t=1369\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">video<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cWe put together tooling to rigorously test whether or not advertisements work. We\u2019ve tested over 200 different ads, <strong>one in five ads that we make actually make people want to vote for Republicans<\/strong>. Political professionals are not like swing voters.<\/p>\n<p>We did a test where we asked the staff what ads they liked the most, and it turned out <strong>it was negatively correlated with how they tested<\/strong>. Something that we really found was that ads that try to <strong>tie Democrats to popular stances on concrete economic issues<\/strong> that people care about, you know, things like mental health, things like teacher salaries, or affordable housing, do a lot to make these kind of persuadable white voters support us, while attacks on Trump, on average, have been much more muted. <strong>I think that our ads that have tried to tie Democrats to issues, on average, have been about three to four times as effective as personal attacks on Donald Trump<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Writing for the <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20171120012949\/https:\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/monkey-cage\/wp\/2017\/10\/11\/our-research-shows-that-persuading-voters-is-hard-that-doesnt-mean-campaigns-should-give-up\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Washington Post in 2017<\/a>, Dr. Joshua Kalla of University of California Berkeley and Dr. David Broockman of Stanford Graduate School of Business underscore: it\u2019s not just about data collection and analysis. It\u2019s also about testing:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cBut to succeed, campaigns will need not only to try new ideas but also rigorously test which ones work. Just as in medical trials where doctors randomly assign patients to different treatments to see which ones improve patient health, campaigns will be most successful if they randomize their persuasive contacts and measure the effects against a control group to know whether their efforts actually make a difference.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Enough is enough.<\/p>\n<p>Republicans must adopt the far more effective messaging tools of their opposition to compete. Some races cannot be won, but Democrats learned that better quality in their ad deployment, and especially highly targeted digital advertising, can shift almost every election by at least <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.vn\/M48Ny\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">2 <\/a>to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/journals\/american-political-science-review\/article\/how-experiments-help-campaigns-persuade-voters-evidence-from-a-large-archive-of-campaigns-own-experiments\/FF5BE6ED1553475F8321F7C4209357F7\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">3 percentage points<\/a> on average.<\/p>\n<p>In certain places like rural Latino Texas, there is an ability to see a shift of over <a href=\"https:\/\/campaignsandelections.com\/industry-news\/what-texas-revealed-about-predicting-voter-behavior\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">10 percentage <\/a>points. Consistent use of better tools results in Democrats outperforming Republicans. The result is more seats in Congress and other victories.<\/p>\n<p>The old ways, especially of the well-funded campaigns in easier to win states, wastes donors\u2019 money. Donors are asked to fund untested and untargeted guesswork. Donors deserve more effectiveness and efficiency.<\/p>\n<p>The top 5 Republican SuperPACs collectively spent $900 million on hunches. If that were the only choice \u2013 if there was no modern social science research revolution on the Left to study and imitate \u2013 then it would be the best we can do. But it is not.<\/p>\n<p>In this election there were over 200 trained political scientists on the Left embedded in nearly every major electioneering vendor and most statewide campaigns.<\/p>\n<p>The quantity of jobs in that Democratic world has led to their dominance in all major PhD programs in political science. These are programs specializing in statistics and machine learning and other experimentation needed to conduct similar sophisticated work.<\/p>\n<p>In the Republican world, we have many pollsters with a decent understanding of statistics, but we have less than 20 experts who have received the same training and who understand this sophisticated kind of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/u-c-berkeley-advised-chinese-government-on-economic-decisions\/\" title=\"U.C. Berkeley Advised Chinese Government on Economic Decisions\">data research<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Fewer than ten people do this \u201cexperimentalism\u201d full-time in the Republican world. Such jobs don\u2019t even exist on the right because the Republican election establishment does not even know about these tools.<\/p>\n<p>Not every aspect of elections can be influenced but Republicans refuse to control the controllable. 2028 is close at hand and we cannot repeat a loss of this magnitude.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      Joe Arlinghaus founded a Texas based Republican data and analytics operation, Valor America Election Research. in 2016 after leading an independent campaign among Texas Hispanic voters in the 2014 race for Governor in Texas which saw an 18% shift in the Hispanic vote. He and his team used machine learning and econometric analysis to measure the impact in the 2020 election of the so-called \u201cZuckBucks\u201d on several swing states won narrowly by Joe Biden.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dems&#8217; data-driven strategy outpaces GOP campaigns<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4490,"featured_media":2703888,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/50564517847_341add3e43_k.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[52453,3685,6571,32504,81015],"class_list":["post-2703887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-campaign-tactics","tag-democrats","tag-elections","tag-political-strategy","tag-voter-targeting"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/50564517847_341add3e43_k.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2703887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4490"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2703887"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2703887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2703895,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2703887\/revisions\/2703895"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2703888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2703887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2703887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2703887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}