Why Did The Democratic Party Use Big Data

2008 the Democratic Party used Big Data to analyze the public sentiment, which helped it with favourable results in the election. It analyzed vast public data and engineered social, television, and other media outlets to create a targeted campaign to persuade young voters for the elections. The campaign proved effective in swing states, where Democrats won a resounding victory. The Big Data analysis also allowed Democrats to connect to campaign voters, which enabled them to generate over $1 billion in revenue. During the initial phases of the campaign, the data analytics team realized that the various departments such as the campaign office, website department, and area departments were working from different sets of data. The data was not

The analytics team helped to create a massive single system that could act as a central store for data. This data store enabled the Democrats to collect data from fieldworkers, fundraisers, and public consumer databases for analysis. This centralized store helped the campaign office to find voters and to create targeted campaigns to get their attention. Analytics on the vast datasets allowed the campaign office to find out what exactly appealed to the voter in a particular segment. It allowed campaigners to predict which voters were likely to give online. It enabled them to see who had cancelled their subscriptions from their campaign lists, which indicated voters which may have switched to their political rivals. It also allowed them to evaluate things such as how the people would react to a local volunteer making a call as opposed to someone from a non-swing state. The data indicated that the people who had signed up for the quick donate program were four times more likely to give than others. This information enabled them to create a better donation system, where people could contribute with much less hassle, leading to increased

With regards to technology, they evaluated Hadoop for driving the Big Data analytics engine, but they were unable to do so as it required highly specialized skills to develop applications to interpret the Big Data. Another problem that they faced was that Hadoop, in its initial versions, was not designed to handle real-time queries. The team ultimately used Vertica, a large Big Data appliance that was scalable and easy to implement. Vertica is a column-oriented database that provides a standardized interface and SQL tools to access the data, hence existing tools and users can easily work with it without specialized skill sets. Hadoop is an open-source framework for Big Data which is complex to implement as compared to Vertica and requires specialized skill sets. The central data repository for the campaign was created on Vertica, which enabled the analysts to get a 360-degree view [7, 8].
The difficulties that the Democratic campaign faced with technology are very common with other political campaigns around the world. People may not have the resources to construct an analytical engine similar to that used by the Democratic campaign. All over the world, people may have data that they wish to use, not just to persuade voters, but also to identify problem areas for their respective constituencies.