I Am Not Big Brother

[Commentary] Numerous avenues of listening, combined with the digital capacity to hold on to qualitative feedback, make campaigns aware of the differences among voters’ motivations, attitudes, protestations — not just their demographics and voting history.

In a nation of over 200 million eligible voters, technology is allowing campaigns to finally see through the fog of the crowd and engage voters one by one. In other words, there is no giant blue computer sitting on the 101st floor of a sleek skyscraper, surrounded by bubbling tubes of illuminated liquid, spitting out the manifest destiny of America’s voters. Campaigns are moving away from the meaningless labels of pollsters and newsweeklies — “NASCAR dads” and “waitress moms” — and moving toward treating each voter as a separate person. In 2012 you didn’t just have to be an African-American from Akron or a suburban married female age 45 to 54. More and more, the information age allows people to be complicated, contradictory and unique. New technologies and an abundance of data may rattle the senses, but they are also bringing a fresh appreciation of the value of the individual to American politics.