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"Crossing Guards, Still Waters, and Barnraisers, Oh My!"

An Exclusive Essay from Stephen Baker, Author of The Numerati

Pity the poor politicos. We're a growing mystery to them. Only 12 percent of us
even take the time to answer the phone when their pollsters call. And when they
put ads on TV, we often zap them or skip over them, through the magic of digital
recorders. How can they reach us.

Through our data. A mathematical elite--I call them the Numerati--is churning
through records of what we buy, where we take vacations, how close we are to
foreclosure on our home. Political consultancies--like D.C.-based Spotlight Analysis-
-are among their ranks. They're trawling through vast records of consumer
behavior, looking for clues to our political feelings. Today, practically all Americans
old enough to vote--more than 175 million of us--have, through data analysis, been
slotted into "tribes" we haven't even heard of. They have names like Barnraiser and
Civic Sentry. And they are like nothing we've seen before in American politics.

Members of each tribe have only a mathematical profile in common. One of the
tribes, for example, is called RightClick. These people, who represent 6 percent of
the population, are tech-oriented (they know how to use the right-click features on
a computer mouse). They appear to be more interested in themselves and their
families than in the broader community. Men in this group outnumber women.
They're distrustful of government and vote Republican more often than Democrat.
But often they are undecided.

Let's say Barack Obama or John McCain wants to appeal to a few thousand of
Spotlight's RightClicks in a crucial swing state such as Ohio. He receives what looks
like a random list of American voters. They come from all races and ethnic groups.
Some live in rich suburbs, others in backwater locations. According to traditional
political demographics, they have nothing in common. But a computer analysis of
their consumer habits and demographics predicts that they'll have shared views
about technology and society.

So the Obama or McCain camp crafts a calibrated pitch just for this technolibertarian
group. It might be dropped into their path as they surf the Web or, for
traditionalists, arrive with a knock on the door. The message might stress that the
government's broad surveillance of the Internet is a Big Brotherly intrusion on
privacy--and that their candidate would push for a more technologically
sophisticated approach to fighting terrorists.

Make no mistake: this type of targeted approach will not corral the 50 million or 60
million votes a presidential candidate needs to win. The traditional methods--
blizzards of TV ads and immense phone banks--will handle the lion's share. But in
races decided by one or two percentage points, the party that pinpoints a few
thousand individual voters in the right places could come out on top. And when it
comes to this vital group, the Numerati are calling the shots.

Stephen Baker has written for BusinessWeek for over 20 years, covering Mexico and Latin
America, the Rust Belt, European technology, and a host of other topics, including blogs,
math, and nanotechnology. But he's always considered himself a foreign correspondent.
This, he says, was especially useful as he met the Numerati. "While I came from the world
of words, they inhabited the symbolic realms of math and computer science. This was
foreign to me. My reporting became an anthropological mission." Baker has written for
many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston
Globe. He won an Overseas Press Club Award for his portrait of the rising Mexican auto
industry. He is the coauthor of blogspotting.net, featured by the New York Times as one of
50 blogs to watch.