Gov. Perry’s ‘eggheads’ figure out what voters want

Dear voter, now is the time to relish the attention paid to you.

Never before have you been a more studied individual. The news media, for instance, is constantly asking you what you think, who you think about and even how much you think about them.

Our curiosity is nothing compared to the intense fascination you hold for politicians.

Never before have so few wanted to know so much about so many.

Surveying voter intentions is nothing new, but now a new team of social scientists is discovering what makes voters vote and whom they will vote for.

In a new book about how politicians use the immense collection of information about voters in shaping campaigns, it is clear that there is something new happening. The book, "Victory Lab," by Victor Sasha Issenberg, is a well-regarded look at how campaigns are changing and what works.

Interestingly, much of the study was launched by a series of social experiments rounded up by Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Don’t laugh. While Perry campaigned and won three terms as governor by mocking and tormenting university professors, he also was calling them up to dispassionately and scientifically examine what makes voters vote.

Perry’s political strategist is Dave Carney, who offered four political scientists, including two liberals from Yale, the chance to join the inner working of the Texan’s campaign to empirically study voting behavior.

They asked questions about whether yard signs actually work; does it matter if you get a call reminding you to vote; what influences you more — a TV commercial or a visitor at your door?

Texas, being rich enough for this sort of thing, was partially divided into different demographic markets by the Perry campaign.

Remember, Perry had a campaign budget in 2006 of more than $40 million and he put some of it into pure academic research. The "eggheads," as Perry and Carney called them, came up with randomized political ad buys to test their theories and determine what sort of appeal to voters would work. They also measured the frequency of ads. Did lots of ads move voters a little or a lot?

The work by Perry’s "eggheads" showed that mainstream media is not the vote-switching powerhouse politicians think, but the simple act of knocking on doors is an effective campaign strategy.

"All of this closely parallels the developments in media and advertising about data mining for patterns of peoples’ preferences. Political or non-political, the approach is the same," says Neal Milner, University of Hawaii emeritus political scientist.

A local political consultant who offered his thoughts on the condition of anonymity said while a data-driven campaign can work, a lot of voter characteristics are already known in a small place such as Hawaii.

A good consultant, he said, should already be able to tell you the voting differences between voters in Upper and Lower Kalihi Valley without a ream of spreadsheets.

"I was at a conference and one guy argued that you can actually dive down too far with the data. He asked if we would get to the point of knowing the voting behavior of left-handed nuns," the consultant said.

Still, the future is not so much candidates selling themselves like detergent; it is candidates actually knowing if voters are against "ring around the collar" or in favor of "whiter whites."

And the political power of all those yard signs? Not so much.

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Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.