Catalist is the database Democrats keep which contains information about every American. If we thought the NSA was scary, this is worse because it isn't just a nosy bureaucrat snooping into our life stories, it's a zealous progressive hell bent on advancing the lefty agenda.
They use this information to determine who might be persuaded to vote for Democrats, especially those who don't normally vote, and they target a very persuasive campaign directly at them. They were calling it Big Data in the 2012 election. It worked then, and it's getting bigger and better.
But the amazing part is that they don't target moderates or independents. They target people they determine would be sympathetic to the lefty agenda. So Democrats constituents ultimately turn out to be hard core lefties. Little wonder there's so much divisiveness these days.
Republicans don't have anything like it, at least not yet. And Republican candidates end up trying to appeal to moderates and independents but not conservatives. So far that's a strategy for failure.
Information about Catalist comes from J. Christian Adams. See CATALIST: Obama’s Database for Fundamentally Transforming America. Here are a few select excerpts:
During the 2012 election, a producer for a conservative news network received a knock at his door in a key swing state. Two neighbors were standing on his stoop campaigning for Obama. They weren’t there to talk to him — they were there to talk to his wife. They knew that she was employed in a profession which the Obama campaign had decided to microtarget: folks who deliver services to special needs children. The two neighbors were already armed with this personalized information. The Obama campaign didn’t just send a direct mail piece to the target or make a telephone call. Instead, the campaign matched a microtargeted demographic (special needs service providers) with a highly motivated Obama volunteer in close neighborly proximity to the target. Then they armed the neighbor/volunteer with data to visit the target. ...
Similarly, the data feeding the central Catalist database are coming from a wide swath of sources. Public records, pollsters, campaigns, non-profits, activist groups, unions, parties, commercial data — scores and scores of sources are feeding the central database data. ...
Not to mention databases probably made available to them by sympathetic social media types like Facebook.
You have your own individual voter file in Catalist. Everyone does. Under that file might be a massive amount of information about you — more than probably exists in any other database in the world. ...
Catalist allows customers to identify potential voters on the far ideological fringe, but who are usually unmotivated to vote. Catalist allows the left to then identify issues, concerns, or other lifestyle facts which would permit a customer to motivate the usually unmotivated on that fringe to vote.
Obama won reelection because he drove deeper into his ideological base than any Democrat ever had. His campaign largely ignored the middle and instead used Catalist data to wring out nearly every possible far-left vote they could.
Sigh. A few years ago the book 1984 was frighteningly prophetic. The present day equivalent is Idiocracy.
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