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Aping techniques pioneered by businesses to identify and track consumers, the parties are combining the voters’ list with more general demographic data and applying the lessons of behavioural economics to “microtarget” narrow niches of the electorate whose votes they need.

Just as the “Moneyball” application of rigorous statistical analysis to player performance changed professional baseball, the use of Big Data to leverage votes is transforming the way political campaigns are run.

Where once elections were won and lost with stump speeches, leadership debates and TV ads, social scientific methods are now being applied to get out the vote and shake money from supporters.

Most importantly, these “predictive analytics” tell campaigns where to best allocate their scarce resources – online ads? direct mail? live calls to voters? – providing a particularly valuable edge in Canada, with its tight election-spending restrictions.

Over the past three election cycles, the Conservatives held a sharp edge in the big data race by harnessing their own data – gathered in what’s called the Constituent Information Management System (CIMS) – to a muscular telephone contact capacity through a company called the Responsive Marketing Group.

In 2011, RMG’s phone banks made millions of live telephone calls on behalf of Conservative candidates and the national campaign, with data from each logged and fed back into CIMS to help the campaign target its get-out-the-vote and fundraising resources. Records of past candidate support, likelihood of voting, donations, even whether the voter requested a lawn sign – and other information gleaned from calls to voters – are all captured by CIMS.