In an article published before the UK elections, NewScientist explored the newly popular strategy (paywall) for getting the vote out, pioneered by Team Obama, courtesy Jacob Aron:
WITH just one week to go until the most unpredictable UK general election in a generation, you’d think that every vote counts.
Not so. If you have already decided who to vote for, know when you’ll be going to the polling station, and plan to stay up all night to watch the results come in, the politicians don’t care about you. …
“There is a lot of opportunity to be increasingly clever,” says Andrew Whitehurst of Wess, a London-based firm that runs digital campaigns for all three major UK parties. His colleague watched both sides in the last US presidential campaign drumming up support on the same street. “The Romney camp knocked on every single door, and the Obama camp knocked on about seven.”
In essence, if you’re already committed to voting for a particular party or candidate, or if you’re completely apathetic, then the data teams want to identify you so they don’t spend any resources on you at all.
But if you’re undecided, or decided but perhaps not really inclined to vote, then you’ve a target on your backside. If you use Facebook and have filled out enough of your profile, the next election could feature a lot of targeted advertising.
But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this article is this:
“Winning elections nowadays is not really about convincing people, it’s about mobilising people,” says Whitehurst.
Which is to say, we’re no longer about the debate of ideas in the public square, but about tribalism, about student body right, as they used to say? Have we really come to hate each other that much? Or is this just a UK thing?
