




































New Challenges to Political Privacy: Lessons from the First U.S. Presidential Race in the Web 2.0 Era


    

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RESHAPING DEMOCRACY: THE IMPACT OF WEB 2.0 ON U.S. 

PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS"  

 

Sarah E. Mitchell and Michael J. Anderson 

Yale Law School  

University of Washington  

 

Abstract: In the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, the Barack Obama campaign harnessed the power of 

digital communication to mobilize millions of supporters. This article delves into the transformative impact of 

technology on political campaigns, focusing on the shift from static websites to the dynamic realm of "Web 2.0." 

The campaign's use of social technologies, epitomized by MyBarackObama.com (MyBO), created an 

unprecedented level of citizen engagement. 

Campaign Manager David Plouffe's message to early supporters exemplified this movement, highlighting the 

vital role played by millions of citizens who rallied from the grassroots level. The campaign leveraged a wide 

array of digital tools, including its own social networking platform, MyBO, and popular commercial platforms 

like Facebook and MySpace. This multifaceted approach empowered supporters to organize fundraising events, 

canvass their communities, and collaborate on an unprecedented scale. 

This study explores the intricate web of connections that underpinned the Obama campaign, challenging 

traditional campaign structures. It highlights the profound influence of technology in fostering voter-to-voter 

interactions, with media theorist Henry Jenkins aptly characterizing the campaign as centered on connections 

between voters. The research sheds light on how digital communication redefined political engagement in the 

21st century. 

 

Keywords: Barack Obama, presidential campaign, digital communication 

 

Introduction  

One month before the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama’s campaign sent an e-mail to its earliest 

supporters, purportedly from Campaign Manager David Plouffe. Plouffe reminded them that they were “one of 

the first million people to own a piece of this campaign” and “helped build this movement when the odds were 

long and Election Day was far in the future” (D. Plouffe, personal communication, September 28, 2009). Over 

the course of the long primary and general election, 13 million people signed up to receive Obama e-mails. They 

too received communication from the campaign a month before the election, and many other days besides, 

tailored to their own involvement.  Indeed, an author of this article received 313 e-mails from the Obama 

campaign in a little over a year.  

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In language that echoes Plouffe’s message to supporters, many pundits and academics argue that millions of 

citizens organizing from the bottom-up were the driving force behind the Obama campaign. In this telling, a 

major technological shift from static Web pages to what in the marketing  

language of Silicon Valley is known as the social technologies of “Web 2.0” (Scholz, 2008) culminated in a 

radically participatory “movement” to elect Obama. Citizens planned fund-raising events and knocked on the 

doors of their neighbors identified by the campaign, all while using an unprecedented array of digital campaign 

tools. These tools included the campaign’s own social networking platform and campaign site, 

MyBarackObama.com (MyBO), as well as an array of commercial technologies, such as Facebook and 

MySpace. All of which led many to agree with media theorist Henry Jenkins when he stated that the Obama 

campaign was “as much structured around connections between voters as it is around connections between the 

candidate and the electorate” (Jenkins, 2008).  

This account of the Obama campaign, however, mentions little about political data. Yet, as Plouffe (2009) makes 

clear in his firsthand account, data was central to the campaign’s ability to take on a well-funded front-runner in 

the primary and trounce the Republican candidate during the general election. Millions of volunteer phone calls 

to voters, click-throughs on the campaign’s Web site, and small donations generated data that the campaign then 

acted upon. Targeted door-to-door voter contacts updated databases so the campaign quickly knew the strength 

of its support in key districts and where to deploy more resources. The campaign continually analyzed user 

behavior on its Web site and made minor adjustments in design and content that increased the percentage of 

citizens who signed up for its e-mail list and donated money. Together, the electoral databases maintained by the 

Democratic National Committee and by the private firm Catalist, in conjunction with a vast array of online 

behavioral and relational data collected from use of the campaign’s Web site and third-party social media sites 

such as Facebook, provided the Obama campaign with data on more than 250 million Americans.  

The Obama campaign was only the fullest realization of trends in the political field toward crafting better means 

of collecting, storing, analyzing, and acting upon data about citizens, their online behavior, and their social 

relationships. At various points over the last two decades, both parties embarked on extensive projects to build 

comprehensive voter files and model the electorate so campaigns would have a good sense of who their 

supporters were, which individuals were open to persuasion, and which citizens were likely to turn out. While 

cable and broadcast television advertising outlays still dominate campaign spending (Miller, 2008), the profusion 

of technologies since the 1990s facilitating more targeted communication to a fragmented electorate—from e-

mail and banner advertising on the Internet to advertising in video games—offer new opportunities for 

campaigns to “narrowcast” persuasive political communication based on media consumption habits (Howard, 

2006). While direct mail attests to the fact that narrowcasting has been around for over 20 years, when combined 

with new social networking technologies, campaigns now have expanded opportunities to use supporters and 

their social networks as the vehicles of strategic communication. Building from the innovations of Howard 

Dean’s primary run (Kreiss, 2009, 2010), campaigns deploy event planning tools, build Facebook applications, 

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and create online calling tools that help make social networks both visible in the form of data and productive for 

fundraising, mobilization, and voter identification efforts.  

Despite two decades of research into the new media practices of campaigns, the workings of the data and analysis 

“backend” (Hindman, 2007) of electoral politics and the industry that supports it are still largely hidden from 

view, particularly given the press focus on social media. That said, scholars have made some important inquires 

into these practices.  As Gandy (2000) noted at the beginning of the decade, political organizations were 

segmenting and directing narrowly targeted persuasive communication to the electorate based on detailed data 

profiles. As a consequence, scholars have suggested not only how the range of democratic debate will become 

more narrow (Bennett, 2008; Bennett & Manheim, 2006) but that certain people and ideas are likely to be 

excluded from political communication (Howard, Carr, & Milstein, 2005).  These data analyses and 

communication practices mirror changes in other domains of social activity. Turrow (2006), for instance, 

powerfully documents marketing to niche audiences based on consumer data in commercial contexts (see also 

Andrejevic, 2003; Elmer, 2003).  

The uptake of digital media in campaigning is primarily about voter identification, persuasion, and mobilization 

in the service of very narrow electoral ends. This distinguishes these practices from the far more troubling 

consequences of surveillance by a repressive state (Baruh, 2007) and the collection of data by governing bodies, 

which the Supreme Court has found threatens associational freedom (Hunter, 2002). and from the selling of 

commercial wares. Yet, this does not mean that there are not troubling downsides to the way that modern 

campaigns are conducted. While strategic and tailored political communication can increase turnout and electoral 

participation, particularly when compared with broadcast politics (Kang, 2004), as a body of literature discussed 

throughout this article suggests, there are ample reasons for scholars to be concerned about the data and analysis 

practices of campaigns. For example, there is a pervasive lack of transparency around what data political 

campaigns and parties collect, purchase, and generate, as well as how it used in practice. Ironically, this opacity 

regarding the practices of campaigning often comes from the very candidates that are at the forefront of calls for 

open government. Citizens can legally access their FBI files, for instance, but have no legal right to see what the 

Obama campaign knew about them. At the same time, there are widespread possibilities for data breaches, a 

concern that grows with each election cycle, given the increasingly sensitive information stored on citizens and 

the ways it is traded on an enormous, open and unregulated market.  

The general lack of regulation and transparency around this market of personal information also raises concerns 

regarding who has access to this data and how it is used in the context of democratic debate. Data moves fluidly 

across commercial and political contexts. Quasi-state actors, such as parties and campaigns, purchase data from 

commercial providers, just as corporate interests build their databases from a host of publicly available 

information. All of which means an increasing constellation of interests have the ability to track the social and 

intellectual associations of citizens. And, while campaigns have very transactional ends, the lack of transparency 

means that it is often hard to know where data is housed, who has access to it, and where it migrates once a 

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candidate is elected. Finally, data can be used to truncate public debate and narrow political representation. 

Scholars have long feared a “democratic deficit” when campaigns can tailor their communication to particular 

voters, while ignoring sizable portions of the electorate. This means that candidates vie to represent segmented 

and small slices of the public. Furthermore, the ability to compete in modern, data-driven campaigns comes at 

enormous fiscal cost, meaning that only the well-funded candidates can effectively compete.  

The sophisticated data gathering and analysis techniques of contemporary campaigns both catalyze political 

participation and undermine important democratic norms. Given that much of the scholarly account of the 2008 

elections, particularly that of Obama’s campaign, has centered on digital technologies as a boon to electoral 

participation, this article seeks to spark a critical discussion of the data practices that underpin contemporary 

campaigning. This article draws from an older, established body of literature to provide an initial inquiry into a 

set of questions rarely considered in much scholarship on campaigning in the Facebook and Web 2.0 era, where 

networked technologies are celebrated for facilitating new modes of social relationships. We ask relatively 

simple questions: What political data is collected about citizens? What is it used for? Who owns it? How is it 

stored, and with what consequences for democratic practice?  

In doing so, we hope to provide the initial groundwork for a larger discussion about the centrality of data 

gathering and analysis in contemporary campaigns. In keeping with our aim to begin a scholarly conversation, 

we do not provide the definitive theory of political data or a clear set of policy recommendations.  Simply raising 

the issue of political privacy is overdue and timely, particularly given the pervasive celebration of the impact of 

digital media, especially Web 2.0 technologies, on democratic life. We begin by providing a brief history of 

political data practices, focusing on innovations that took shape over the last decade. We then detail the 

regulatory context in the United States around political data. Finally, we issue a call for critical scholarly work 

on the generation, use, and storage of political data, given the potential implications of data for democratic 

practice. Evidence for this article is drawn from a comprehensive review of primary and secondary sources, 

including journalistic reports and academic texts on new media campaigns, as well as the authors’ research work 

in other related contexts.  

A Brief History of Political Data in the United States  

A series of institutional changes beginning in the 1960s are at the origins of the modern data practices of 

campaigns. One change was the move to direct primaries in the wake of the 1968 Chicago Democratic 

Convention, given the crisis in democratic legitimacy (Polsby, 1983). A second shift was the rise of political 

consultants as a distinct class of professionals independent of parties. This professional field helped develop new 

polling techniques, more sophisticated broadcast advertising and ways of working with television news, and new 

modes of fundraising, given that campaign finance reform in the 1970s capped the amount of money citizens 

and corporations could give to campaigns. Together, these changes helped produce a new electoral environment 

with independent candidates, autonomous campaign organizations, and a thriving class of political consultants 

operating independently of, yet servicing, political parties.  Meanwhile, powerful advances in computing during 

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the 1970s made data management skills and raw datasets stored on mainframes newly bankable assets for 

consultants and parties (Howard, 2006; Sabato, 1981; Whitman & Perkins, 2003). During this time, political 

professionals began thinking more seriously about their knowledge of the citizenry and the ways that it could be 

leveraged in the service of electoral ends.  

The important turning point towards more portable, national, and comprehensive data, however, came with 

“prospect direct mail,” developed in the 1980s. Driven by Republican innovations, direct mail enabled 

consultants and party operatives to micro-target political communication to discrete individuals, based on 

sophisticated knowledge of the electorate. Consultants used small desktop machines to gather public and 

commercial information, such as magazine subscription lists, and to identify prospective donors and voters. By 

the 1990s, direct mail was a potent fund-raising and communications tool, and political marketing of this sort 

became a professional undertaking distinct from political communications and polling work. With elected leaders 

perpetually on the campaign trail, a constant flow of data about fundraising prospects and voter intent was crucial 

for dynamic image management (Lees-Marshment, 2002; Scammell, 1996). Republican Party databases of the 

electorate during this time became much more national in scope. The Democrats, however, lacked many of these 

systems. Throughout the 1990s and well into the 2000s, the Democratic Party’s collection, storage, and analysis 

of data on the electorate was largely a haphazard affair, coordinated mostly by state parties or the stewards of 

local precincts.    

During this time, the Internet emerged as a new technology for political campaigning. Its use by campaigns was 

halting throughout much of the 1990s, as communications staffers and consultants largely appropriated it as a 

broadcast medium to push information out to undecided voters (Foot & Schneider, 2006). By the 2000 

presidential election, however, it was increasingly clear to campaigns that many visitors to campaign Web sites 

were already sympathetic to, if not supporting, the candidate (Bimber & Davis, 2003). In response, candidates 

began using the Internet as a tool for mobilization, providing supporters with opportunities to contribute to 

finance and communication efforts.  

It was during this time that the twin features of Internet campaigning emerged that defined the online efforts of 

the 2008 presidential cycle. Both features were pioneered by Democrats. The first came with respect to 

campaigns creating expanded opportunities for supporters to participate in the electoral process as active fund-

raisers, canvassers, and communication agents. Al Gore’s online campaign, for instance, enabled supporters to 

create and circulate their own personalized Web pages to their friends and family.  Howard Dean’s campaign 

explicitly made supporter participation in fundraising and electioneering a central part of the campaign’s strategy 

(Kreiss, 2009). The campaign used commercial sites such as MeetUp and developed their own event planning 

tools to help supporters host fund-raisers and other events. Dean’s Internet staffers also developed and deployed 

tools that enabled supporters to create their own affinity group sites for Dean, as well as an application that 

enabled supporters to create personalized fund-raising goals and reach out to their friends and family for 

contributions.  

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The second feature was the development of the data infrastructure that helped campaigns coordinate this 

supporter involvement and reach the electorate. In this sense, the Internet has largely “amplified” (Agre, 2002) 

institutionalized campaign practices extending back over 40 years. After the 2004 election cycle, the veterans of 

presidential bids, especially those of Dean and Wesley Clark, became political professionals specializing in 

digital media (Kreiss, 2010). With lessons learned during 2004 in hand, they set out to develop better systems to 

manage interactions and communicate with supporters. After 2004, the firms founded by these professionals 

developed dedicated “customer relations management” (CRM) systems for political purposes that enabled 

campaigns to keep better records on supporter involvement, including tracking donations and volunteer actions. 

These systems also provided campaigns with the capacity to send targeted e-mails to supporters based on any 

number of individual characteristics, from their ZIP codes and demographics to their level of involvement with 

the campaign.   

These online systems powerfully came together during the 2008 campaign cycle, especially on the Obama 

campaign. Whereas John Kerry, the Democratic nominee in 2004, lacked the basic capacity to e-mail all of his 

supporters, the Obama campaign built an e-mail list of 13 million members that was continually segmented, 

depending on the action the campaign wanted supporters to perform. This e-mail list, in turn, was synched with 

both the log-in data on the campaign’s main BarackObama.com site and with the 2 million profiles that 

supporters set up on the campaign’s MyBarackObama.com platform. Supporters used MyBO to set up personal 

fund-raising pages and to plan visibility and other events for Obama. The campaign then tracked this supporter 

involvement, telemarketing and e-mailing standout volunteers, and first-time donors to increase their 

involvement.  

The affordances of the Internet offered new opportunities for the Obama campaign to know its supporters and 

craft effective appeals. The analytics team within the new media division of the campaign—many staffers of 

which were engineers and analysts with extensive commercial experience— continually ran statistical tests on 

use of the site and on communications with voters to determine optimal content and design. For example, 

“cookies” installed on Web browsers helped the Obama campaign deliver content on BarackObama.com tailored 

to each individual.  Analytics lay behind everything, from the shape, color, and content of the buttons asking 

individuals to donate to the content that first-time, repeat, and active users encountered on the site. The campaign 

continually tested the design and content of its e-mails by sending different versions to small samples of 

supporters. They then tracked the “clickthrough” rates of these e-mails, enabling the campaign to see which 

message resulted in more donations.  

All of these online data practices, in turn, were backed up by extensive databases on the electorate, which was 

behind Obama’s extraordinarily successful field campaign.  Democrats finally caught up to the Republicans in 

voter data during the 2008 cycle. The Republican Party had developed a national voter database in the mid-1990s 

called Voter Vault that integrated various direct mail databases. It went online for the 2002 midterm elections, 

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providing a common interface for Republican field organizers throughout the country to access and update the 

database based on field efforts. By 2004, it was reputed to have information on 168 million citizens.  

Republicans were the widely acknowledged leader in voter identification and field turnout efforts throughout 

much of the 1990s and onward until Dean’s tenure as the chair of the Democratic Party began in 2005. After 

evaluating a number of firms, Dean hired Voter Activation Network to develop VoteBuilder, an advanced 

interface launched in 2007 for field organizers to use in canvassing, event organizing, and volunteer 

management. The DNC subsequently provided this technology to state parties, while retaining their data. This 

arrangement ensured that one central national voter database, stewarded by the Party, was being continuously 

updated with the on-the-ground data gained across election cycles. During the 2008 presidential cycle, candidates 

supplemented this Party-supplied data with other voter databases of public, commercial, and generated data. The 

Obama, Clinton, and Edwards campaigns, for instance, utilized the services of Catalist, a private firm founded 

by prominent Democratic political consultants and backed by George Soros (Edsall, 2006). The Catalist database 

is reputed to encompass 450 points of data compiled from public and commercial sources on more than 250 

million people in the United States. To a lesser extent, these campaigns used the services of Aristotle, the most 

well-established and largest bipartisan provider of data, which is also often the subject of investigative journalists 

(Verini, 2007; Zetter, 2003).  

Campaigns use these vast troves of data to generate profiles of their likely supporters and then build their voter 

contact operations around this modeling. These voter databases capture an extraordinary range of public, 

commercial, and generated information. Public information includes voter registration, party identification, 

turnout records, vehicle registration, and ZIP code-based census data. Commercial data entails everything from 

magazine subscriptions to credit card and grocery store “club-card” purchases. Firms such as Strategic Telemetry 

poll groups of likely voters and then work backwards to figure out the demographic and lifestyle characteristics 

of likely supporters and undecided voters. For example, the Obama campaign utilized Strategic Telemetry to 

develop complicated correlational data models that assigned each member of the electorate an overall score of 

1–100 that indicated the voter’s predicted preference for Obama.  Based on these scores, the firm generated a 

universe of targets that campaign volunteers then followed up with door-to-door or via phone. The data generated 

from these contacts were then used to test and update the models.  

These data and analysis practices in turn shaped everything from the campaign’s marketing and communications 

efforts to candidate visits to swing states. They were also behind a big innovation of the Obama campaign: the 

merging of field efforts and new media. The campaign took the first, fraught steps toward integrating the national 

Democratic Party voter database with the online tools created for the campaign by the consulting firm Blue State 

Digital. In doing so, the campaign was better able to direct its distributed network of volunteers toward field 

efforts. For example, during the general election, the campaign opened up its voter files to volunteer canvassers 

across the country through calling tools such as “Neighbor to Neighbor,” which the Democratic Party had 

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commissioned Blue State Digital to build for the nominee. This online tool enabled volunteers in uncontested 

states to call voters the campaign had targeted.  

Campaign volunteers using “Neighbor to Neighbor” could access voter profiles through Webbased systems.  

Volunteers typically could see the address, age, gender, size of household, and primary language of a prospective 

voter. They could also see the results of previous canvasses.  The volunteer was instructed to speak only to the 

targeted voter in question and was provided with an online script soliciting the voter’s preferences. The volunteer 

then recorded the outcome of the call instantly on MyBO, according to predetermined response categories. The 

door-to-door canvas of voters to ascertain their likely poll behavior was thus supplemented with an online tool 

that enabled supporters to collect data on the national electorate from the convenience and comfort of their own 

homes.  This not only increased the number of potential volunteers available for Obama but also provided data 

on voter contacts to the campaign nearly instantaneously. Field organizers, for instance, could dispatch 

volunteers based on the results of these calls.  

The integration of online, Web-based tools, and voter databases is expected to become more sophisticated in the 

years to come. A number of early forays in this direction were pioneered by the Obama campaign and other 

advocacy organizations. For example, the campaign gathered data from individuals who “friended” the campaign 

on commercial social networking sites such as Facebook. This data was then synched with voter databases and 

used to organize youth volunteers in early primary states. The campaign’s Facebook Connect application, 

meanwhile, enabled supporters to urge their friends in early primary states to vote. This merging of voter 

registration files with social network data in such a way that leverages the data about links between people, not 

just variables about people (Ambinder, 2008), is also taking root outside of electoral campaigns. MoveOn.org, a 

progressive advocacy organization, built an application called “Vote Poke” in partnership with Catalist that 

allowed citizens to find out if friends in their online social networks were registered to vote and then reach out 

to them if they had not (Stoller, 2008).  

Finally, campaigns took initial forays into online advertising during this electoral cycle. Spending on traditional 

cable and broadcast ads still dwarfed the online advertising budget, but the Obama campaign used new media to 

deliver messages to targeted demographic and geographic groups. Through online advertising networks, his 

campaign also targeted advertising based on browsing behavior. This targeting, in turn, was integrated across 

sites. A profile of the online advertising practices of the 2008 presidential campaigns describes it this way:  

For example, when people visit the volunteer section of the Obama Web site but click away without signing up, 

the campaign puts a cookie on their Web browser.  Then, as surfers move around the Web, the campaign looks 

for opportunities to bring them back. If they go to a parenting blog, Obama can deliver an ad about education 

policy. If they read a story on a tech news site, the campaign can serve up something about technology policy. 

(Green, 2008)  

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These data practices can spur turnout in elections, and they amplify citizens’ ability to participate in 

institutionalized electoral activities. Yet, as the next section reveals, the data practices of campaigns are generally 

unregulated and proceed almost entirely without public attention.  

The U.S. Regulatory Context  

Despite the massive amount of political information generated by political campaigns and parties in the United 

States, these entities face almost no regulation with respect to the collection, use, storage, and dissemination of 

data on citizens. In contrast to the greater restrictions on the use of data for expressly commercial purposes 

(Turow, 2006), provided they remain non-state actors, candidates and parties enjoy broad latitude with respect 

to their data practices, generally on the grounds that their ability to speak to citizens is protected by the First 

Amendment. This section provides an overview of the patchwork of regulations that govern political data in the 

United States, then makes the case that scholars and citizens should be concerned about this lack of oversight, 

given advances in gathering, storing, analyzing, and acting upon data.  

There have long been distinctions between the use of data by official state agencies and representatives in the 

course of governance versus quasi-state agencies, such as parties and campaigns for the purposes of 

electioneering. There is, for instance, an extensive body of privacy law that governs the executive branch. The 

1974 Privacy Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, for example, restrict the types of data that 

federal agencies can collect while mandating how it is to be used, stored, and disclosed.  

Outside of the executive branch, there are rules that govern other state actors. The Franking commissions of the 

House and Senate regulate congressional representatives by distinguishing between and setting separate rules 

for official governance and electioneering activities. For example, the rules issued by these commissions place 

restrictions on the types of content permitted in publicly funded messages to constituents, on the databases that 

can be used for e-mail communications, and on the information that can be posted on official Web sites.  

The fear of potential abuse of data and of office is the logic undergirding these rules for state bodies and 

representatives concerning the use of data on the electorate.  Congress passed the Privacy Act in the wake of 

Watergate, which revealed the pressing need to protect the citizenry from governmental surveillance. Franking 

rules, which date from the earliest days of the republic, balance the need for representatives to communicate with 

their constituents on matters of state affairs with the value of competitive elections. In restricting some of the 

ways that Congressional members may communicate with constituents, Franking helps ensure that incumbents 

do not have an insurmountable electoral advantage.  

While there are defined data and communication rules for official state actors, these do not extend to the actions 

of candidates. The logic here is that candidates for higher office, as well as political parties, have a general right 

of free political expression.  Along these lines, lawmakers and courts have generally protected candidates and 

parties’ use of databases to know who to speak to and what to say. Indeed, public information collected by state 

agencies serves as the foundation of the voter databases used by campaigns and parties. As noted, these databases 

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include information on voter identification and party affiliation, voting history, division of motor vehicle records, 

and campaign donations.  

While the availability of much of this information is determined by each state in lieu of a federal standard for 

accessing and purchasing public data, there is a general lack of regulation and broad protection for its political 

use. The California Voter Foundation, for instance, produced a comprehensive report detailing the public 

information collected by each state and subsequently made available to third parties (Alexander & Mills, 2004).   

They found that most states do not restrict the use of this data by even commercial entities.  

In the meantime, expressly political organizations, such as campaigns, advocacy organizations, and parties enjoy 

broad exemptions from any restrictions under these state laws―as do the commercial companies that furnish 

their data. For example, in 2003 the California Secretary of State created a Voter Privacy Task Force, the only 

one of its kind, charged with looking into the risks of potential misuse of this data. California more generally has 

been at the forefront of protecting data, both public and commercial. It even implemented the nation’s first 

mandatory data breach law. Nonetheless, even in California companies such as Aristotle, the Washington DC-

based political data company, occupy a gray area in state law. California courts have held that even though firms 

such as Aristotle are commercial, the ultimate end users of the data are political campaigns, which enjoy broad 

exemptions from regulatory efforts (K. Alexander, personal communication, March 4, 2009).  

As is clear, campaign organizations, parties, consultants, and the firms that provide services to them enjoy broad 

latitude with respect to their use of political data.  With exemptions from even the minimal laws governing the 

use of public and commercial data, these quasi-state entities have a free hand to collect data on and target the 

electorate. At the same time, the federal government is inadvertently making the job of firms, such as Aristotle, 

even easier. The federal “Help America Vote Act of 2002,” designed to help prevent the election chaos in 2000 

from happening again, requires states to create statewide voter databases for administration purposes. While 

many states have been slow to implement the law, eventually it will result in the creation of one central site in 

each state to which parties and commercial data providers can go to receive public information on voters.  

While maintaining voter lists and targeting the electorate are practices that date to the earliest days of party 

politics, the increasing sophistication of database technology is raising significant new concerns for democratic 

practice. Few could have foreseen how the storage capacities of digital technologies, coupled with the ability of 

new media platforms to generate real-time social and behavioral information, have exponentially multiplied the 

data collected on citizens.  

As detailed in the next section, the lack of transparency with respect to data practices, the possibility for data 

breaches, the potential for deeper intrusions into the privacy of voters, and the thinning of democratic deliberation 

and representation all suggest the need to rethink the regulatory context around political data.  

Campaign Data and Democratic Citizens  

Contemporary political campaigns are built around data. And, in many respects, citizens endorse its use in 

conjunction with the electoral process. Many supporters not only voluntarily give data to political campaigns, 

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but also, through canvassing, quite consciously generate data on their fellow citizens to help the candidates they 

support get elected. Consultants and scholars alike suggest that knowing and speaking to the issues that most 

concern voters increases political engagement and voter turnout.  Given this, why should citizens and scholars 

care about the profusion of political data?  

The Lack of Transparency in Political Data  

As previously detailed, changes in political technologies greatly amplify the possibilities for collecting, storing, 

and acting on citizen data in electoral politics. Yet, few citizens or scholars know about the information practices 

of contemporary campaigns because this work is generally hidden from view.  With wide latitude to collect, 

process, store, and share data, these entities and digital political consultants pursue their informational work 

without much in the way of oversight or accountability.  

This basic lack of transparency exists at a time when, as our research suggests, political data is among the most 

valued commodities in the market for consultant services. Candidates hire consultants who have access to data 

or contract out to firms, such as Catalist and Aristotle, for information on the electorate. Meanwhile, through 

new media tools that make online behavior and networks visible and that support virtual canvassing, campaigns 

are generating and capturing more sophisticated forms of data on supporters and voters.  

Given this, with the proliferation of data has come a widening gulf between what is collected and what citizens 

know is being catalogued and stored. Political data receives scant public attention, in part because elected 

officials have little interest in holding hearings on practices that benefit them, and campaign consultants seldom 

speak to the press. Journalistic reports are far and few between and tend to focus on high-profile incidents, such 

as a Web site getting hacked or a breach in a database (Stephey, 2008; Zetter, 2003), rather than on the routine 

functioning of data systems. Many kinds of political organizations, including political parties, lobbyists, industry 

associations, non-profit groups, and political action committees, reveal little about their use of political data.    

Even as there is little in the way of transparency with respect to data practices, much suggests that very few 

people have the expectation that campaigns will collect records of their grocery store purchases to profile them 

ideologically. Yet, the linkages between our credit card purchases, demographic profiles, and voter registration 

records are increasing as is the use of this information by actors we do not know for purposes that we cannot 

control (Clark, 1994; Howard, 2003). For example, credit card records about contraceptive, gun, and magazine 

purchases are valuable data for lobby groups working on abortion, firearm control, and other political issues 

(Howard, 2006; Carr, & Milstein, 2005; Sides & Karch, 2008). Even if citizens know about the information that 

has been collected on them―exceedingly rare, given the lack of transparency―there is no clear way for them to 

“opt out” of political datasets or manage the circulation and use of their private data.  

Data Security  

To an alarming extent, an increasing number of political databases are lost, accidentally exposed online, or 

hacked.  

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A decade of journalistic coverage suggests that breaches in political data occur (Businessweek, 2006; Grossman, 

Novak, & Roston, 2004; Sanders, 2001; Tynan, 2004; Zetter, 2003). Between 1990 and 2006, there were some 

600 high-profile incidents of compromised data records in commercial and political contexts internationally, 

most of which occurred in the United States (Erickson & Howard, 2007). These breaches occurred due to such 

factors as administrative errors, accidental posting to Web sites, insider abuse or theft, missing or stolen 

hardware, and hacker attacks.  

While most of these incidents involved private firms, since 2000, a number have involved the information 

infrastructure of political parties. In the United States, political data has been sold to shore up the finances of 

failing firms (Sanders, 2001), campaign Web sites have been hacked (Newsweek, 2008; Glendinning, 2008), 

questionable data practices have been exposed (Tynan, 2004), and American voter data has turned up in 

surprising places overseas (Grossman, Novak, & Roston 2004).   

While breaches in data are a concern in any context, political data is particularly sensitive and a unique order of 

security threat and violation of voter trust. The data held by campaigns and parties is explicitly used for political 

purposes, and thus reveal levels of detail about policy preferences and ideological perspectives that are less 

relevant to the advertisers of consumer goods. Moreover, given that most people do not realize the degree to 

which the world of campaigns, elections, and political discourse is data driven, a breach is not just the loss of 

personal privacy but also an occasion for diminished faith in publicly supervised political processes.   

Political Privacy and Freedom of Association  

Political privacy, and with it a freedom of association, is uniquely at risk with the increasing sophistication and 

use of voter databases. As Hunter (2002) argues, a tradition of Supreme Court jurisprudence developed over the 

last half century protects anonymous speech and associational privacy. In doing so, the High Court articulated a 

general value of “political privacy” that protects “a space apart, free from the gaze and influence of other citizens, 

political parties, the government, and business interests, where individuals can develop and experiment with their 

political views.”  

In each of these domains, privacy helps ensure robust public debate by providing the opportunity for citizens to 

form their own viewpoints, craft arguments, and develop political identities free from state surveillance and 

public pressures to conform to social norms. The logic is that if citizens are constantly being watched, they will 

be less likely to state their opinions or freely choose with whom to associate. At the same time, privacy also 

provides a secure environment for social movements and activists to prepare for engagement with the state. A 

number of striking cases demonstrate the consequences of the loss of political privacy and the value of remaining 

anonymous. The Red Scare in the United States during the 1950s, for example, laid bare the hazards of providing 

the state with associational data.  

While candidates and parties do not engage in these types of state-sponsored repression, given the lack of 

transparency around the data practices of campaigns, it is not always clear how data travels across legal contexts 

and organizational boundaries.  Theoretically, the rules that separate constituent service data from voter profiling 

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data are designed to prevent the state from building an organizational memory of citizen associations (C. 

Hoofnagle, personal communication, February 20, 2009). Yet, even while there are restrictions on how elected 

representatives can communicate as agents of the state, the massive amounts of data collected for electoral and 

advocacy campaigns does not simply disappear when a candidate wins office.  

Perpetual campaign organizations and political parties hold the political information generated during electoral 

campaigns and make use of it to achieve policy aims, given that they are not considered arms of the state under 

the law. This is illustrated by the way that President Obama's extensive database of voter information, built up 

over the course of his primary and general election campaigns, changed hands soon after his election. This data 

is estimated to include the widely reported 13 million e-mail addresses, 7 million cell phone numbers, and data 

on 2.4 million Facebook and 2 million MyBO users, alongside the 223 million pieces of information that citizens 

volunteered about themselves to canvassers during the course of the election.   

While the White House cannot directly use this information for political purposes (Rutenberg & Nagourney, 

2009), Obama’s campaign team built an entirely new organization within the Democratic Party to house this 

data. Organizing for America is an independent organization that coordinates its activities with the 

communications team of the administration in using the e-mail list to speak directly to the campaign’s supporters 

on policy matters (ibid.). To date, Organizing for America has used the list to mobilize Obama’s campaign 

supporters in conjunction with pressing Congress to pass Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan and 2010 health care 

reform. This suggests the ways in which political data exists in perpetuity and can migrate to other contexts—

often with little transparency to the movement of these databases and without the consent of those who are 

profiled. This is particularly troubling with respect to the ways that the affordances of digital media give strategic 

actors the ability to track social and intellectual associations.   

Data and the Democratic Deficit  

Outside of concerns over political privacy, in the hands of political consultants, data are a potent tool through 

which to segment the electorate. Public debate may be becoming more narrow as campaigns use detailed data 

on citizens to craft narrow political appeals to receptive audiences, while ignoring those either ideologically 

opposed to their message or unengaged in the political process. Public discourse suffers whenever political actors 

segment the population and narrowcast information, because such fragmentation allows them to decide which 

citizens are worth engaging. This is occurring to such an extent that Bennett & Manheim (2006) argue that digital 

media are facilitating a “one-step flow” of political communication. In their assessment, elite actors are 

“increasingly less likely to ‘lead’ because they are more likely to reinforce latent opinions than to reframe them” 

(p. 213).  

This is clear in the ways that candidates and parties are most interested in identifying the people who will support 

them on Election Day. They will spend resources to engage citizens who might lean their way on a given issue 

and focus on creating narrow appeals that will have a maximal effect, given the political preferences they have 

identified through analytic modeling.  

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The corollary to this phenomenon is that candidates are free to ignore entire slices of the electorate. Campaign 

consultants have demonstrated that they will not spend significant resources engaging citizens who tend not to 

vote—often the urban poor and ethnic minorities (Howard, 2006). Why attempt to educate and energize people 

who have no history of voting and may seem politically marginal? In essence, while targeted communication 

may increase turnout among certain segments of the population, data also allows political actors to identify which 

citizens should be left entirely out of the conversation.  

On another level, contemporary data practices narrow political representation.  One way that this happens is 

through affecting electoral competition, as the best voter data files and analytic services are often only available 

to wealthy candidates and parties. While networked technologies have made it easier to collect vast amounts of 

information about people, integrating, storing, and analyzing that data remains expensive. This means that data 

(and knowledge) itself is a form of campaign asset that is most often available to incumbents and large parties. 

Less well-funded and insurgent candidates challenging their party’s standard-bearers often do not have access to 

the same intelligence on the electorate. Meanwhile, the power of well-financed lobbyists, advocacy 

organizations, and incumbents is greatly amplified by large relational datasets.  

Another consequence of increasingly sophisticated data on the electorate is a problem that has drawn increasing 

scholarly attention: gerrymandering. Geographic information systems afford the layering of electorate data onto 

maps to allow elected officials to redraw congressional districts. A classic dilemma in democratic theory 

concerns the role of elected representatives: Should she be simply a mouthpiece for constituents, or does her 

election empower her to speak of her own views? With expansive political data on individual citizens, this 

dilemma is solved by enabling elected officials to actually embody the represented, creating districts that 

faithfully resemble officials’ own views, as they can meticulously group voters in geographic space according 

to ideology, affiliation, and demographics.  

Conclusion  

There is little to suggest that data transparency and regulation will come about on its own.     

The interests of our political leadership and large data mining firms are closely aligned against the state regulation 

that would secure transparency in data practices.  Indeed, these actors pay much lip service to information 

security to avoid discussion of the much more troubling undermining of political privacy.  

At the same time, the scholarly literature has celebrated the seemingly new forms of collective action and 

uncoordinated, bottom-up types of political participation made possible by digital media. Yet, the technical 

infrastructure that underpins this online action, and the professionals who work behind the scenes with data to 

identify voters and coordinate collective action, remain largely unanalyzed. Interfaces, databases, and 

consultancies form the largely invisible backend to Web 2.0 politics. The opaqueness of this industry has meant 

that there is little discussion of the consequences of these data practices for democratic life. Yet, this discussion 

could not be more timely. The lack of transparency and security in political data raises significant concerns for 

citizens. Political privacy and freedom of association have the potential to be undermined as databases grow 

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more expansive, enduring, and centralized. We also have to seriously worry about a democratic deficit where 

only the wealthiest candidates can seriously compete, and where vast swaths of the citizenry remain unengaged 

in the political process.  

While this article is intended to start the scholarly conversation on the generally invisible back end of Internet 

campaigning, based on a comparative work on political privacy (Howard & Kreiss, 2009), we have identified 

some first steps for policy makers and scholars. For example, as a start, data practices and storehouses of 

information should be made transparent and accessible. Citizens should have the means to find out what data is 

collected and stored about them and have the ability to opt out of political databases. Parties and candidates 

should be required to develop privacy statements that cover the full range of personal data they manage and 

clearly state how political information is used, who it is shared with, what it entails, and how it is gathered.  

Political data should be subject to the same breach reporting requirements that many states currently mandate of 

commercial providers. Together, transparency and security would help to ensure that databases of citizens are 

more accurate, secure, private, and reliable, while raising public awareness of the flow of information about 

them.  

Meanwhile, much more scholarly work is needed into the democratic effects of the data-driven polity. As this 

article suggests, advances in networked technologies have not only brought about opportunities for political 

participation in some domains but also the explosion of political data on individual citizens. As this data is carried 

across electoral cycles and continually updated, our profiles evolve alongside our political beliefs. In the process, 

we are marketed to and monitored to an unprecedented extent. Our social and intellectual associations are tracked 

for the political marketers and elected officials who can tailor their appeals to us, based on some of our most 

intimate characteristics.  

Accordingly, we lose opportunities for inclusive and substantive democratic debate.  

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