The central goal of any political campaign is to identify voters that are likely to support you, and motivate them. While campaign expenditures are still mostly dedicated toward broadcast media, print ads and mailings, the use of social media to target voters is starting to catch on in state campaigns.
Say you’re surfing the internet and land on a post about the race for governor — you read a few lines, then move on to funny cat videos. But then you notice the ad feed on your browser features a candidate for governor. Welcome to the world of data mining for campaigns.
“There are a lot of ways to figure out through predictive statistics what sort of vote you are likely to make, what sort of donation you are likely to make,” says James Cook, a sociology professor at the University of Maine at Augusta who has studied the use of social media, including Facebook and Twitter, by political campaigns.
Cook says some are placing ads based on what sites you visit, what posts you read and other information you post about yourself. He says just about every click or comment can be mined by data companies to fashion a strategy aimed at getting your vote.
“Groups like Cambridge Analytica can use that data regardless of whether you volunteered it or not. Predictive analytics is a future in politics that for better or worse is here to stay,” he says.
But while it can be done — and is being done — that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
“If you want to target, you know, University of Maine students who might lean Democrat, then you will need to know exactly how they communicate, when they’re online, when they are paying attention,” says Judith Rosenbaum, a communications professor at the University of Maine who has studied social media use, particularly Twitter.
Rosenbaum says what you tweet and retweet and who you chose to follow can all be mined as part of an effort to determine how you are likely to vote. But, she says, users tend to form their own communities with identifiable hash tags, and collating and analyzing all that data can get expensive.
Plus, she says, social media cannot reach everybody.
“The general claim that a lot of people make about social media being the be-all and end-all, doesn’t apply to everybody,” Rosenbaum says. “This digital divide, both in terms of access and in terms of usage, is still real.”
She says there are still a lot of places in Maine that don’t have affordable broadband access, and many older voters are not online.
Mark Brewer, a political scientist at the University of Maine, says while some state candidates have dabbled in social media advertising, they don’t appear to be as invested in the strategy as are campaigns at the national level.
“Maybe the ads themselves don’t cost all that much, but getting that level of sophistication in access to data, that does cost,” he says.
University of Maine at Farmington political scientist Jim Melcher says the negative publicity around Facebook and third-party data mining apps may have thrown some cold water on efforts to place targeted campaign ads.
“There has been a pushback against social media because of Cambridge Analytica, and I think a lot more people are being more careful about what information they share, so that will undercut how that works,” he says.
Both Brewer and Melcher believe if Maine campaigns are going to benefit from the most sophisticated uses of social media, it will be in the fall, when statewide and congressional candidates have more resources and when the national campaign groups become involved in trying to influence the outcome of contests in the general election.
