What Do We Do?

Campaigns of all kinds need to answer an essential strategic question: whom should we contact? Our ideological voter clusters offer a targeting strategy beyond the traditional demographics approach.

Traditional Targeting: Demographics

Traditional targeting sorts people into groups by broad categories like age, gender, and ethnicity, under the assumption that members of a group will think and behave in a similar way. Does ideology follow strict demographic lines? Do people of a similar demographic always hold the same sociopolitical views, and do people of differing demographics necessarily hold differing views? No! We all know this from real-world experience. What if you could target directly by ideology? We do exactly that!

Our Targeting: Ideology

We use a statistical unsupervised learning technique called “clustering” on HaystaqDNA’s issue scores, which are continuous features modeled on real L2 survey data, to identify ideological clusters in the national voter file. There are six “superclusters”: Conservative, Center Right, Center, Center Left, Neoliberal, and DemSoc/Socialist. The divergence between “Neoliberal” and “DemSoc/Socialist” is most notably with respect to capitalism; the former supports it more and the latter supports it less.

We further divide each supercluster into component clusters as the clustering algorithm suggests; the final result is a set of 21 ideological voter clusters. These clusters cross-validate very well with respect to registered partisanship, historical primary & general election turnout rates, geographic location, political donation habits, and more.

The Ideological Targeting Advantage

The main advantage of our targeting strategy versus demographics-based targeting is greatly improved ideological resolution. Broad demographic categories convey certain information about a community, but they do not reliably explain ideological differences within that community. Two voters of the same age, race, gender, and income can have very different sociopolitical priorities. Alternatively, voters from different demographic groups may share a common sociopolitical ideology and respond similarly to the same political messaging.

The national voter clusters illustrate these similarities and differences without using demographics as a proxy for ideology. The ideological approach of course does not preclude end users from using demographic information in later stages of targeting; it can be used as-needed once an ideological cluster(s) is chosen for focus.

Targeting via ideology helps reveal strategically meaningful differences hidden in traditional targeting universes. It can greatly assist with decisions regarding field deployments, persuasion and mobilization targets, tailored messaging, fundraising, and more. Since the framework is national, you can examine clusters’ behavior in other places for reference, as well.

We are here to discuss the possibilities with you! Email us: contact@volsweep.com