The MAGA Equivalent of the Obama Coalition

It has become widely accepted that Trump beat Hillary in 2016 because his campaign focused and spent heavily on social media. Think Cambridge Analytica. Today in "Trump’s Digital Advantage Is Freaking Out Democratic Strategists" Thomas Edsall explains how the Trump reelection team is broadening the scope of the 2016 digital campaign:

Experts in the explosively growing field of political digital technologies have developed an innovative terminology to describe what they do — a lexicon that is virtually incomprehensible to ordinary voters. This language provides an inkling of the extraordinarily arcane universe politics has entered:

geofencing, mass personalization, dark patterns, identity resolution technologies, dynamic prospecting, geotargeting strategies, location analytics, geo-behavioural segment, political data cloud, automatic content recognition, dynamic creative optimization.

Geofencing and other emerging digital technologies derive from microtargeting marketing initiatives that use consumer and other demographic data to identify the interests of specific voters or very small groups of like-minded individuals to influence their thoughts or actions. Microtargeting first had a significant impact on American politics in state level campaign work by Alec Gage, a Republican, and his firm TargetPoint in 2002.

Now, political operatives are exploiting commercial techniques to correlate microtargeting data with the identification numbers of cellphones. This allows campaigns to mobilize, persuade and turn out — or to suppress turnout among — key voters.

Beneath the cloak of neologisms the gist of the new microtargeting strategy is that it will allow Trump's reelection campaign to push his non-voting supporters to the polls:

On Monday, Parscale boasted on the conservative website Townhall that Trump rallies are providing a gold mine of data for the 2020 election:

"Out of more than 20,000 identified voters who came to a recent Trump rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 57.9 percent did not have a history of voting for Republicans. Remarkably, 4,413 attendees didn’t even vote in the last election — a clear indication that President Trump is energizing Americans who were previously not engaged in politics."

Similar findings are coming out of other rallies, according to Parscale:

"Nearly 22 percent of identified supporters at President Trump’s rally in Toledo, Ohio, were Democrats, and another 21 percent were independents. An astounding 15 percent of identified voters who saw the president speak in Battle Creek, Michigan, has not voted in any of the last four elections. In Hershey, Pennsylvania, just over 20 percent of identified voters at the rally were Democrats, and 18 percent were nonwhite."

Consider this the MAGA equivalent of the Obama Coalition.

I'm skeptical. Getting people to vote for the first time is a lot harder than sending an ad to a smartphone. Plus, I think a lot of the nonvoters in attendance at a Trump rally are there not because of some sort of political awakening but because it's cheap, novel entertainment.

Geofencing might not be effective in turning out Trump's non-voting base, but I do think it will be effective in suppressing turnout for the eventual Democratic nominee. Negative campaigning generally works.