The Independent View: The Struggle for Big Data in Today's Politics

On January 26, 2015 the Koch brothers announced their plans to spend close to $900 million on the 2016 presidential election. In recent weeks, the brothers have quietly taken steps to reinforce their own operations. They poached the RNC's chief digital officer, Check DeFoe, who said in an e-mail that he will join i360, the data and analytics operation the Kochs created to help conservatives win without the backing of the Republican establishment.

The competition for talent shows how Republicans are increasingly focused on data as a campaign weapon. To compete with the Kochs' i360 database, the RNC is opening up access to its rival analytics shop, the Data Trust. This year, the party will make its voter files and analytics available to all Republican primary candidates. In return, campaigns will be obliged to share records of their interactions with individual voters once the primaries are over. That typical includes voter feelings about candidates, position on issues, and priorities, along with updates contact details. The goal is to have the information harvested from primary campaigns merged into a single giant party database in time for the Republican National Convention in July 2016, to give the presidential nominee a head start in the general election.

Mastery of data has become one of the parties' greatest campaign assets. Candidates and political parties rely on voter databases to develop mathematical predictions about how individual voters will behave. Just as ratings agencies assess potential borrowers for creditworthiness, campaigns score American adults on how likely they are to vote, which candidates they'll likely support, and what issues will shape their decision-making. The goal is to figure out which citizens they need most to engage, and in what way. In the most sophisticated campaigns, algorithms play a role every time there's a knock on the door or a phone ringing during dinner.

Last August the Data Trust and i360 announced a data sharing partnership to expand the range of information available to candidates or PACs for the midterm elections. The deal proved temporary. As soon as the midterms were over, the Kochs and the RNC resumed their battle for control of the Right.

For the Kochs, bulking up i360 in opposition to the national Republican operations allows them to increase their influence over the party. Holding all their voter contacts in i360 servers, out of the RNC reach, is the best way to maintain leverage when it comes to the inevitable haggling over a running mate and the party platform.

For a decade, Democrats also had dueling databases. Not long after the Democratic National Committee completed its voter file, known as the Co-op, in 2004, major donors led by Goerge Soros established their own operation called Catalist. It became a favorite of groups wary of giving the party a monopoly on reaching liberal voters. That included labor unions, which consider information on their members a key resource that gives them bargaining power with the Democratic Party. The Co-op and Catalist grew in parallel, each with different sharing arrangements with their clients.

In the summer of 2008, Jim Messina, then Obama's deputy campaign manager, negotiated an information sharing deal with Catalist, which had close ties to Hillary Clinton's campaign operation. Catalist launch was inspired partly by Clinton's loyalists' distrust of then DNC Chairman Howard Dean. The two data warehouses are fierce rivals. Today, Democratic candidates typically rely on Co-op, while many left's most influential outside players, including labor, woman's and environmental groups, use Catalist.