The Independent View: Science is Remaking the Art of Political Campaigns

There is a new book by Sasha Issenberg called "The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns"

The modern science of politics is were voters have become lab rats informed by principles of behavioral psychology. Campaigns today are now awash in data and insights that allows campaigns to act on this new data.

As the 2012 election day approaches, here are five ways that campaigns are using new tools to sway voters:

1. Make them visualize going to the polls
A new concept called "the plan-making effect": that has people who are induced to rehearse an activity are more likely to follow through. They found voters who were asked to talk through their voting plans turned out at a larger rate. Spouses and roommates often engaged in collaborative plan-making. For singles, a campaign volunteer stepped in.

2. Make them think voting is "cool"
Randomly assigned voters got a phone call with one of two messages. In one, the caller's script said that "in the most recent election, voter turnout was the lowest in 30 years." The other reported that "in last year's election the vast majority of eligible voters actually voted. It was the highest election turnout in decades." Those who heard the second message turned out to vote at a rate 5 points higher than those who were presented with the dismal view. The lesson for candidates: stop begging your supporters to do their duty and instead direct them to join the crowd.

3. Predict what they're going to do
The most valuable data in modern campaigning comes from statistical "microtargeting" models, the political worlds version of credit scores. Campaigns gather thousands of data points on voters, from what they put on their registration forms, what they tell canvassers, and information on their buying and lifestyle habits collected by commercial data warehouses. Campaigns then run algorithms trawling for patterns linking those demographics characteristics to the political attitudes measured in their polling. Campaigns are interested in predicting political behavior. So they generate individual scores, presented as a percentage likelihood, that a voter will cast a ballot, support a party, be pro-choice or pro-life, or respond to a request to volunteer. These scores now stick to voters as indelibly as credit scores. A field director won't send a volunteer to a voter's door without knowing their relevant number.

4. Get them to confess (indirectly) to bias
Through 2008, the Obama's advisers never entirely trusted the polls. The challenge was separating voters who resisted Obama, or remained undecided, because of his race from those who had other reasons. So the campaign focused on a small group of white voters who reported themselves to be supporting McCain at a much higher rate then the campaign's scores predicted they should. They looked for variables that defined this group and found one when they tried a new question in their surveys: "Do you think your neighbors would be willing to vote for an African American for president?" People who answered "no" were likely to be problem voters. Everything their database signaled about political attitudes, based on their: partisanship, age or socioeconomic status, suggested they would be likely to support Obama, but they said they planned to vote for McCain. So the campaign added a new category in their database called "openness score". It measured the likelihood that someone was open to vote for a black candidate. The campaign could isolate those with low scores and deal with them in two ways: ignore them or if they looked like habitual voters who were likely to turn out, the campaign could approach them with targeted communications that focused on economic themes rather them "hope and change".

5. Let them know (gently) that they are being watched
Few campaigns want to be associated with tactics that threatened to expose nonvoters to their neighbors. But campaigns have figured out how to soften such approaches. One version widely used tells a voter "our records indicate you voted in a prior election" and says that the candidate hopes to be able to thank the voter again after this election day for their "good citizenship".