Tracking the Voters

For John, BLUF:  Tracking the Voters requires a constant update to methods, partly because a fair number of Voters don't wish to be tracked.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Trump’s Digital Advantage Is Freaking Out Democratic Strategists

Here is the sub-headline:

Left and right agree on one point. The president’s re-election campaign is way ahead online.

From The New York TImes, by Mr Thomas B. Edsall, 29 January 2020.

Here is the lede plus four:

In a blog post published in November, a year before the 2020 election, Brian Burch, the president of CatholicVote.org, a socially conservative advocacy group, announced that in Wisconsin alone his organization had identified 199,241 Catholics “who’ve been to church at least 3 times in the last 90 days.”

Nearly half of these religiously observant parishioners, Burch wrote, “91,373 mass-attending Catholics — are not even registered to vote!” CatholicVote.org is looking for potential Trump voters within this large, untapped reservoir — Republican-leaning white Catholics who could bolster Trump’s numbers in a battleground state.

Burch, whose organization opposes abortion and gay marriage, made his plans clear:

We are already building the largest Catholic voter mobilization program ever.  And no, that’s not an exaggeration. Our plan spans at least 7 states (and growing), and includes millions of Catholic voters.

How did Catholic Vote come up with these particular church attendance numbers for 199,241 Catholics?  With geofencing, a technology that creates a virtual geographic boundary, enabling software to trigger a response when a cellphone enters or leaves a particular area — a church, for example, or a stadium, a school or an entire town.

On the one hand this digital digging bothers me.  On the other hand, I am glad that the Trump Campaign is on it.

A word of caution, German Artist Simon Weckert uses a little red wagon, stuffed with 99 second-hand smartphones, to create virtual traffic jams.  This is geo-fencing being hacked.InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff