Publications

The New Republic, 03.01.2008, The Plank.

James Verini has a genuinely fascinating piece in Vanity Fair about Aristotle, Inc., the premier political data-mining firm in the country. (As Richard Viguerie tells it, "It's not just that their list [containing detailed information on 175 million voters] is good -- they're considered to have the only list."):

Back in 1999, Dana Milbank wrote a TNR piece on the dawn of the "customized campaign" that described Aristotle as a small startup working with AOL to "create ads that appear only on the screens of those computer users the campaigns wish to reach." Since then, the firm's grown massively: playing a key role in Bush's '04 victory (helping, for instance, the campaign march into union neighborhoods in Ohio and identify voters upset about gay marriage); tilting the 2001 mayoral race in Los Angeles for James Hahn at the last minute (really); and helping Viktor Yuschenko uncover election fraud in Ukraine's 2004 election.

...

Sadly, we never learn which candidates in '08 have the best micro-targeting shops (for the record, most of Aristotle's clients are Republicans). All we really know is that the technique's advanced far beyond what happened in '04: "Obama and other candidates now have the ability to custom-tailor cable-television ads down to the Zip Code in Iowa, or send a canvasser to a voter's doorstep armed with a computer-generated picture of that person's political personality." Good times. Of course, those hefty databases raise all sorts of concerns about privacy and "political redlining" -- the ability of campaigns to ignore voters who either don't donate or vote in dependable blocs.

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