As he went door-knocking up and down Hawkwood Drive in Ward 2, Joe Magliocca didn’t spend much more than a minute at most doors.

He greeted residents by the name on his list, gave his own quick pitch, asked if he could put up a campaign sign, took their phone and e-mail details, and jogged to the next door.

“Data,” Magliocca said, mid-jog. “It’s all about data.”

With each passing election, this more and more often becomes the smart campaigner’s mantra. Elections that used to be won by the best ideas, most charismatic candidates and snappiest advertisements are now won with the biggest databases, best robodialling strategy and best-deployed team of volunteers to harvest all those votes.

Candidates with a shot at winning any given ward will have a list of thousands of identified supporters they know will vote for them, and on Monday will do everything they can to reach them and coax them to the polls.

Those lists have been carefully cultivated through doorknocking, phone calls and website visits. Some will develop databases of issues that individual voters have, and then directly micro-target them when a particularly hot-button issue comes up.

When the controversy over the giant blue public art ring came up, Ward 9 hopeful Jordan Katz opened the list of voters fed up with government waste, and they were phoned with a message that Katz’s is as outraged as they are.

Micro-targeting is a better way of spending campaign cash than on large advertisements which yield no data, he said.

“If there’s a crowd of 50 people, and for some crazy reason you want to kill one person in the middle of the crowd,” Katz said, “we can shoot that person, or we can throw a bomb into it, blow it up and hope that among all that carnage we happen to get the person that we want. The difference between having data and not having data is the difference in how you target that individual.”

Armed with a city-provided voter list and a clipboard at the doors, Katz feeds all the data into a program called CivicTrack to track voters’ likeliness to mark an X for him.

In Ward 11, James Maxim’s campaign uses Track and Field, the program that Toronto Mayor Rob Ford used to dominate his rivals in 2010. Maxim manager Troy Wason said it produces a score for each identified voter, with higher scores for people who have taken a lawn sign, offered to volunteer, donated or reached out in some other way.

Then, on Monday, Maxim campaigners will start their get-out-the-vote phone calls to those with the highest scores, through the lists of “very favourable” supporters and then through “favourable.” If there’s time before polls close at 8 p.m., they’ll work on the database’s list of neutral voters.

“I’m going to start with the ones that are going to come out in a blizzard,” Wason said. “You hope they do (anyway), but you don’t take chances.”

Especially when political apathy is in the air and low voter turnout is expected, drives to get out the vote — GOTV, as campaign geeks know it — is the alpha and omega.

“Everything we’ve done for the last four months is just play,” Wason said.