The Republican National Committee (RNC) is arming itself for the digital war that will be the 2016 presidential campaign by launching an internal tech incubator modeled after those belonging to tech companies, and it is seeking to build a data platform that will be available to the party’s entire slate of candidates. The goal is essentially to create a Republican version of Narwhal, the data platform that powered the 2012 Obama campaign.

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Obama for America (OFA) launched what amounted to an internal Internet startup to power its digital campaign. The effort was remarkably successful, especially in comparison to the efforts of the Mitt Romney campaign—as evidenced by the meltdown of Team Romney’s “Orca” get-out-the-vote effort on Election Day.

Now the RNC wants to leapfrog the Democrats technologically by building an infrastructure that will not just help their next presidential contender, but Republicans across the board—instead of leaving candidates to their own devices.

The incubator, called Para Bellum Labs, opened this week and is led by the RNC’s new chief data officer, Azarias Reda. Part of Reda’s plan, he told Ars, comes from the playbook he used at the Web startup the RNC lured him away from. “We want to establish a culture where people can take ownership of problems and can innovate faster,” Reda said.

Preparing for war

For those of you a bit rusty on Latin, the name of the RNC’s incubator comes from the adage Si vis pacem, para bellum—“If you want peace, prepare for war.” It’s also the name of a German World War I machine gun. And what the RNC is looking for from its incubator could easily be viewed as a weapon—a toolkit that will give every Republican candidate a way to leverage the party’s vast stores of voter data and allow the party itself to capture and converge even more data about both the party faithful and potential swing voters.

While the RNC’s effort is just getting under way, it could give the party a needed boost in 2016—and perhaps even give some Republican candidates an edge in this year’s mid-term elections. While there was a good deal of talk after the last presidential election of transferring the technology built by OFA to the Democratic National Committee in some form, it’s not clear that anything has been done since Inauguration Day by the DNC to leverage all that work. Cir.cl CEO and former Director of Integration and Media Targeting for OFA Carol Davidsen, who was responsible for the “Narwhal” identity data integration platform, told Ars she was unaware of any effort by the DNC to do anything with Narwhal or the other tech developed by OFA’s technology team.

Lessons learned

A few months ago, Reda was running Meritful, an Austin-based Internet startup focused on helping companies pull together college campus recruiting programs. When he visited his family for Thanksgiving in November, he told Ars in an interview, he was introduced to some people connected to the RNC.

"I heard about what they were trying to accomplish over the next couple of years, to build infrastructure that will end up powering elections and campaigns,” Reda said. “It felt like a very interesting thing—a short period of time, almost what you consider a startup environment to be like. That's how I ended up at RNC about a month and a half ago.”

Para Bellum is an attempt to give that idea structure. “This is a startup incubator within the RNC. The idea is to drive the data engineering and the digital side of our operations.” While it takes pages out of the Obama campaign’s digital playbook in some respects, Para Bellum is an entirely different beast—it doesn’t have the fixed duration of a particular presidential campaign. And because of the RNC’s status as a national party and its role in campaign coordination, Para Bellum will be able to serve all the party’s candidates.

The RNC has had a data-gathering operation for years, maintaining a database of the national voter rolls that it had built long before the Democratic Party had one in 2008, according to Kirsten Kukowski, the RNC’s press secretary. The party also has built its own digital outreach programs, including social media and e-mail campaigns. “If you look at Bush-Cheney 2004, the [Republican] party was soaring high with micro targeting and other things the Democrats had never done,” Kukowski said.

But the database operations and RNC’s digital marketing operations have, until now, been largely separate. The fusion of the two has usually been left to individual candidates’ campaigns, who get the voter roll data from the RNC and typically turn to outside consultants like Targeted Victory—and to telemarketing and list companies—to build atop it.

Para Bellum pulls together the data and digital arms of RNC’s operations in an effort to create a development platform atop the party’s existing data warehouses. Most of what the incubator is trying to drive is the conversion of those warehouses into a more flexible development platform.

“We're focusing on the data layer, the infrastructure, and how that combines with our digital operations," Reda said, “and creating an API platform that our applications, and hopefully, in the future, applications from candidates' campaigns, can use. I think the Obama campaign did some great things, but the main difference isn't that we haven't had big data to use. A lot of it is in making the data accessible and actionable for the entire campaign in different applications. That's something we can do.”

And it’s something that the RNC can scale, it hopes, well beyond a single campaign. “We kind of looked at the model that Obama's team did, and they were obviously pretty successful,” said Kukowski. “But what you're seeing now is all of the people they brought inside around one candidate are now off making money doing their own startups to do what they do. And that will only help some candidates."

Para Bellum and the RNC, on the other hand, will be a continuous operation—and provide a technology platform to all the party’s candidates, from presidential races all the way down to local mayoral elections. “It's just a concept nobody has really tried before in politics,” Kubowski said.

Party platform

The foundation for this platform is in early development—a unified data layer that combines the national voter roll with other information the RNC captures. “We have additional sets of data points, things like the social graph,” Reda said. “We want to know how people are connected to each other, which helps us with questions like what do people care about, and for what they care about, who influences who. So we have things like Neo4J for capturing the social graph of the folks we have in the roll file.”

The unified data architecture will also include a data store of document-like data—including e-mails and other unstructured information like “consumer data, home ownership, auto ownership, etc.”—in a MongoDB key-value database for analytics. The result will be “a hybrid data warehouse that tries to connect the dots that we have about voters, which is at the core of what we care about.”

The RNC’s analytics team will tap into the data warehouse, Reda said, through a unified set of interfaces. But the setup will also be used to create a set of applications that leverage analytics data and add more to the store. “A lot of our investment is going to be on top of this, building a paradigm to access it, to both write and read from it to power applications.”

For example, Reda said, he wants to see the RNC’s GOP.com site “increasingly tied to our data layer. When somebody comes to GOP.com, we want to be able to say this person—because of our past interactions or because they clicked on an e-mail that we sent them—cares about this set of issues, and we should be able to surface the things that matter to them."

In many ways, that mirrors what the OFA team did with Narwhal. “It makes sense to have a conical source of data and access points about your constituents, their relationships, interests, and behavior patterns,” said Davidsen. “At a high level, creating a conical data store with an API layer on top of it, with a series of queues and automated processes for creating, pulling in, and matching data sets is exactly what the Obama campaign did.”

Rather than trying to disrupt the ecosystem of companies that have been the digital arms merchants to the party’s candidates in recent years, “we want the entire ecosystem to get better in terms of what they provide to Republican candidates,” Reda said.

Kubowski echoed that statement: “For a long time, we've been in the business of having the only national voter file. Every time that there's data going in or coming out—candidates using Targeted Victory or another vendor—those are all the same data points we need as a party to make ourselves better. So that's the concept of working with some of these vendors and being kind of a team.”

Part of that relationship, Reda said, is leadership by example. “In addition to creating the service layer, we’re looking at creating some models for best practices when you are providing some sort of product or services to a campaign,” he said. “The best way to build an API is to eat your own dog food, and we want to create applications that take advantage of the services we have to show others and raise the standards for the kind of services that campaigns and candidates expect from their vendors as well.”

Getting the party started

The incubator is more than just a wrapper for a tech project. It’s supposed to be an engine for internal culture change as well. “It’s an internal signal to people who work for the committee, and it's an external signal to people that this is the way we're going to be going forward,” Kubowski said.

In addition to creating a new culture within RNC to try to change how the party does business, “it’s also very helpful when we try to go out to recruit people,” said Reda. He sees the creation of a “startup” culture within RNC as key to bringing in the talented people needed to reach the party’s goals.

But Para Bellum Labs is not exactly a startup. “A true startup is one that has an exit strategy to either get acquired or to go public,” Davidsen said. “This doesn't seem to be that. For context, I hated the term when it was applied to the tech and analytics leg of the OFA campaign. Anything that has a known end date is the exact opposite of a startup. I find it funny that we now use this term to describe environments where beards, jeans, Macs, and bouncy balls are in the room.”

Just how attractive a creative incubator within the RNC will be to people who are looking for the lifestyle (and the payoff) of a startup is an open question, as is how the RNC will keep those people between campaign cycles. Para Bellum Labs is just really getting started. But if it’s successful, it could be a game changer for the party at all levels and could give Republican candidates a national edge.