When South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham was fighting to avoid a bruising primary runoff against a more conservative challenger, his allies reached out aggressively to find potential new supporters who fit Graham’s target demographics: people who shopped for a new Lincoln but not a new Mazda, beer drinkers with a taste for Michelob and anyone who recently bought golf clubs or cured hams.

Meanwhile, Gov. Dan Malloy’s reelection campaign in Connecticut bought data on where the Democrat could find voters who purchased recycled toilet paper, Catholics hooked on inspirational books and retirees who visit casinos and take cruise vacations.


They joined the likes of Jim Inhofe, the long-serving Oklahoma senator, who sought out conservative Democrats by tracking down those with hunting licenses or new lawnmowers.

In the 2014 campaign, many voters expressed outrage over the National Security Agency’s collection of telephone metadata, and others complained about retailers using tricks to get their emails and other personal information. But by far the most sweeping violator of privacy wasn’t the government or big-box stores: It was the very political leaders to whom the voters were appealing.

Data mining has become so sophisticated that campaigns can now target voters by mashing together public records with much more personal information from Facebook feeds and consumer reports that offer such nuggets as who has sterling credit ratings but hasn’t purchased a car in seven or more years. One company even wants to get into the political market by selling campaigns data that identifies which voters sought information on Viagra and other erectile-dysfunction drugs.

But while privacy activists and campaign watchdogs are raising concerns, virtually everyone in the political establishment of both parties — even those who, like Sen. Rand Paul, trumpet the cause of personal privacy — is fighting to avoid any restrictions on campaigns over data mining.

Ann Ravel, the incoming chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, published a recent opinion in a deadlocked online advertising case declaring a “need to consider the changing role of technology in our elections and recognize how technology is changing our politics.” But instead of support, Ravel claims she got threatening online comments and emails.

Now, she cautions in a recent interview, “You know, we’re not thinking about it in terms of regulation at this point. I mean, for one thing, that word just scares everybody.”

Indeed, the incoming Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, all but rules out any action against campaigns: “I think what you got to do is you’ve got to look at the people that collect the information, not the politicians that use them,” said Grassley.

Paul, the Kentucky Republican considering a 2016 White House run, said his criticism of NSA eavesdropping didn’t extend to political campaigns. “I think there’s a difference between the government collecting things without a warrant and people voluntarily allowing their information to be used,” he said.

But privacy activists point out that most voters have no idea that political campaigns are digging around in their personal data for grocery receipts and club memberships. Most would be shocked, they say, if they learned about the ever-fattening dossiers that their local and national candidates are preparing about them — a smorgasbord of information collected when people make online and in-store purchases, answer surveys, sign up for loyalty cards, post on social media or just generally surf the web.

“There’s almost nothing that they won’t know about you — especially if you use credit or debit cards most of the time,” said Pam Dixon, founder of the World Privacy Forum.

Ira Rubinstein, a senior fellow at the New York University School of Law, recently published a 76-page report concluding that political campaigns have “the largest unregulated assemblage of personal data in contemporary American life.” But while he’d like to see greater transparency, including mandatory disclosure of all political microtargeting practices, he’s doubtful anything will get done about it until something goes haywire.

“This whole issue awaits a really good scandal before it becomes a matter of public debate,” he said in an interview.

Indeed, there is a lot of reason to believe that voters are ready to turn against a candidate whose data mining is perceived to go too far. A 2012 poll by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication found 86 percent of respondents didn’t want political campaigns to tailor advertisements to them. And once people learned that the campaigns were doing exactly that, large majorities said they would not be as inclined to vote for such politicians.

There’s almost nothing that they won’t know about you — especially if you use credit or debit cards most of the time.” Pam Dixon

But candidates and their tech advisers are unperturbed. The digital consultants readily admit it’s still the wild west in their business. Two years after doing the Annenberg poll, lead author Joseph Turow said political campaigns and consultants have made data-driven efforts a routine part of the business.

“In an almost arrogant way, there’s a sense they’re bulletproof” to voters’ privacy concerns, he said. “They feel they have the First Amendment on their side.”

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While data mining has grown by leaps and bounds in every recent campaign, the 2014 election represented not only a new peak in activity but also the moment when even blatant privacy intrusions became a normal part of plotting a campaign.

Everyone from Ready for Hillary to the Republican National Committee spent the past cycle scraping up data from their supporters’ Facebook networks — from birthdays to favorite restaurants. At the music site Pandora, more than 400 political campaigns bought ads targeting people by matching them up with their entertainment preferences: listeners of Bob Marley and Daft Punk, for example, got synced with Democrats, while Republicans were often connected to fans of Dolly Parton and Yanni.

Privacy experts note that even their issue’s champions, like Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have used cookies on their campaign websites to vacuum up information about a visitor’s web habits.

Both parties this cycle mined public databases to find out who voted early or via absentee ballot and then used the information to shame people into turning out on or before Election Day. Some of the mailers they sent out told people which neighbors had already been to the ballot box.

“I think it’s awesome,” said Mitch Stewart, who ran the battleground state operation for President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign. Peer-pressure mailings make a difference, he added, because “what research shows is people want to be seen as good citizens.”

House Democrats also pushed the envelope in their urgent fundraising emails to the point that “The Daily Show” dedicated a segment just before Election Day to mocking the strategy as overly desperate. Jon Stewart especially questioned one of the campaign’s most common messages: how their records indicated he hadn’t donated any money yet.

“Their records?” Stewart quipped. “I guess now we know what the NSA data center is for.”

Campaigns respond that they get so personal with their emails because the approach brings in more cash. After all, they don’t want to lowball a request when they know someone has given more money in the past. They also have no intention of slowing down on many of their other hyperpersonalized methods, either — not when the other side is trying to innovate too.

“If you want independent women over the age of 50 who live in a certain county and have made donations to animal rights organizations and write left-handed, we can get those people,” Steven Moore, managing director at the Republican digital firm CampaignGrid, boasted earlier this year at a political technology conference in San Francisco. Moore added in a later interview he was being flip about the part where campaigns could really target southpaws.

In Lindsey Graham’s case, the super PAC backing the senator used commercial data on beer drinkers, golfers and recent car shoppers to find Republicans in the state who don’t normally vote. Their efforts were especially helpful in South Carolina — which doesn’t register voters by party — for mounting a major GOTV effort ahead of the GOP primary last June that included phone calls, door knocks, Facebook messages and peer pressure at churches, country clubs and barbershops.

“We harassed them is what we did,” said Walter Whetsell, a South Carolina-based GOP consultant working for the pro-Graham super PAC West Main Street Values, which helped the senator top the 50 percent threshold he needed to avoid a costly runoff.

Aristotle, a nonpartisan political data company that in 2014 counted among its clients Inhofe, California Gov. Jerry Brown, Moveon.org and Sarah Palin’s PAC, touts on its website how it rents out lists that can make every one of a candidate’s constituents “only a mouse click away.”

“Take Microtargeting to the Next Level with Lifestyle Information,” the company says of its lists, which include a range of details on a person’s home, including the purchase price, estimated current value, recent refinancing rates and whether it has a swimming pool, fireplace and air conditioning. Also available: who owns a computer, reads books, travels, exercises, gardens, cooks, hikes, invests and prefers cats or dogs. Credit card information reveals recent merchandise purchases, including whether the products were “upscale” and related to males, females, gardening, gifts, books, crafts and food. Magazine subscriptions are broken down by genre (family, female, male, religious, gardening, culinary, health, do-it-yourself, financial, photo).

“It’s very valuable to campaigns, and that’s why they pay for it,” said John Aristotle Phillips, co-founder of the firm, which in 2012 sold to all of the major Republican presidential primary candidates. For 2016, there are plans to offer even more data points on individuals to help campaigns ensure they are getting the right supporters to the polls, including high school and graduation year, automobile type and year and opinions on immigration, LGBT rights and marijuana.

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Campaign consultants acknowledge their hyperfocus on data drilling down to the individual level could jeopardize their standing with voters.

“People don’t know they need to be creeped out, and then some of us who do know are just like, ‘Screw it,’” said Ned Ryun, head of the GOP data firm Voter Gravity, whose 2014 clients included Mississippi Senate candidate Chris McDaniel and Maryland House candidate Dan Bongino.

Added Ken Strasma, a longtime Democratic data expert who worked on Obama’s 2008 microtargeting strategy: “Anytime you’re talking about something like this, I think it’s important to not be blatant about why the people are being targeted. … You don’t want to imply that you know something that is going to cross the creepy threshold.”

Campaigns also argue that they follow the same ethical standards used by Madison Avenue. As pushy as they may sometimes seem, their efforts are designed to start a conversation that potential voters might otherwise not start. And having so much data helps them track down the right set of people — following them onto social networks like Facebook, as well as their tablets and smartphones.

“It’s a cat and mouse game,” said Eric Wilson, who worked as digital director for Ed Gillespie’s 2014 Virginia GOP Senate campaign. “People are getting off of TV. We’re figuring out where to get them. They’re spending three hours on Facebook every day, so let’s go get them on Facebook. We’ll figure out where they are.”

Rubinstein, who has spent the last two years at NYU studying privacy issues in campaigns, said politicians are getting more aggressive with their data mining as they construct ever more elaborate profiles of people based off public information like ethnicity and race that then gets layered in with consumer data and details provided to Facebook and other social media. It’s a much different approach compared with commercial advertisers, who typically are leaning on a smaller range of data — whether someone is a beer drinker or stay-at-home mom.

“The ordinary rationale of the advertising industry is we don’t care who you are,” he said. Political campaigns, by contrast, “want to get to that individual.”

Campaigns and consultants maintain that they protect voters’ most sensitive personal data. When they approach an advertising firm to buy time for a TV or online commercial, for example, they strip out personally identifiable information but provide other key descriptors for the people they want to target. When volunteers knock on doors or make phone calls, they have access to online databases to help guide their conversations but can see only basic information like someone’s name and what they said the last time they’d been contacted by the campaign.

A more obvious solution, privacy activists say, is a strict set of guidelines on just how far campaigns can go: forcing them to tell the public whenever they are using public and consumer data to microtarget voters through advertising or other methods.

But lawmakers have, to date, shown no interest in disarming the very campaigns that get them elected. And federal regulators have run into their own legal and political obstacles just seeking to investigate the issue of data mining by campaigns. The Federal Communications Commission, for one, is focused on policing campaign robocalls to landlines and mobile phones.

The Federal Trade Commission can go further. After an investigation of commercial data brokers, including how politicians use personal information, the FTC concluded in a report earlier this year that there’s a “fundamental lack of transparency” across the industry. But the department’s call for legislation to better protect consumers hasn’t resulted in any major action on Capitol Hill.

And within the FEC, debate has been heated over whether the commission should even have a debate on the future of electronic campaigning.

Outgoing FEC Chairman Lee Goodman, a Republican commissioner appointed by Obama, criticized his Democratic colleagues, including Ravel, during a Fox News interview in October after she released her opinion suggesting the panel should explore the question of where technology is taking political campaigns. He claimed that Democrats were considering the creation of a “government review board” that could lead to regulations on everything from blogs to YouTube posts to the Drudge Report.

“The Internet has democratized political discussion like no invention,” Goodman said. “And I think we need to leave hands off and the government needs to know when to leave well enough alone.”

Afterward, Ravel said, conservative emailers filled her inbox with threatening messages — even though she insists she has no intention of regulating the Internet. In mid-February, Ravel is planning a symposium in the San Francisco area — partnering with local law schools — to discuss a range of issues related to politics and technology, including voters’ privacy. Goodman and the rest of the FEC are expected to attend at least part of the event, along with FCC enforcement chief Travis LeBlanc.

“I think people, when they talk about privacy interests they are very concerned about the fact that their toaster is picking up private information about them and sending it somewhere that’s being amassed for potentially political campaigns and others,” Ravel said. “I think it’s startling to people. It certainly is. I honestly just don’t know what the remedy is going to be.”

Goodman said in an interview that he bore no responsibility for the threatening messages Ravel received and urged her to pass them on to federal law enforcement. On the privacy issue, he said, it would be up to Congress to expand the FEC’s jurisdiction into that area but doing so would raise “significant First Amendment problems.” Using data to encourage Americans to participate in elections, he added, is a “virtuous activity.”

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For their part, politicians say their campaigns are emboldened to get more personal, especially if the payoff can be a bump at the polls of as much as 2 or even 3 percentage points.

“What campaigns are doing are what other businesses have done and perfected. That is, they get to know their consumer in a remarkable way,” said Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.), a former governor and Bush-era agriculture secretary who will retire in January. “And campaigns are trying to catch up with that phenomenon and try to get to know their voter in phenomenal ways. The whole thing is concerning just in terms of an individual’s privacy. But it is the reality of where we live today.”

But there are also plenty of risks for campaigns that build and store vast amounts of information about Americans’ preferences.

Jules Polonetsky, the executive director of the Future of Privacy Forum, said any serious 2016 White House hopeful should be prepared for the downsides in digging so deep into voters’ lives. Carrying so much information on millions of Americans not only presents thorny legal and ethical questions: It also makes the campaign itself a prized target for cybercriminals. He suggests that all of the major presidential campaigns would be smart to make one of their earliest hires a senior privacy officer.

“Campaigns are major hundred-million-dollar enterprises with one core asset: data about people and about voters. They are going to need some degree of infrastructure,” he said. “Imagine a presidential campaign having a well-publicized data breach a week before the election.”

University of North Carolina technology professor Zeynep Tufekci also warns that the “long-term health of democracy” is at risk if campaigns keep using technology to target their messages to ever narrower slices of the electorate: There is less reason to cast appeals in terms of the broader good of society.

But technologists and data experts say they won’t back away, either, from building more informed political campaigns.

Among the potential new frontiers: mobile-phone location data and the 1,000 or more information bits each phone sends out daily when in urban areas. Even list brokers with detailed data on Americans’ medical information, which shows interest in diabetes, cancer, depression, erectile dysfunction and athlete’s foot, are wondering why they didn’t get any business in a cycle where GOP-sponsored ads repeatedly targeted Democrats over Obamacare.

“The capitalist in me was a little disappointed,” said Tim Burnell, principle owner of Complete Medical Lists, a Franconia, New Hampshire-based firm. He said he has occasionally rented more general business lists to political clients from both parties.

With so much at stake every election, Katie Packer Gage, a deputy campaign manager for Mitt Romney in 2012, said there’s little reason for campaigns on either side to pull their punches. “Does it creep people when you start making phone calls and they’re very specific? Maybe,” she said. “But I think the envelope is going to continue to get pushed on that front.”