Republican and Conservative political analysis and commentary

Technology is changing politics, and The Washington Post today has a must-read story on "microtargeting" and the guy who perfected the strategy for the Bush 2004 re-election campaign, Alex Gage. He's now working for the Mitt Romney campaign, and the story explores not just the history of microtargeting but whether or not it can be used to segment voters for a primary election, who are much more politically homegenous.

In late 2002, Alex Gage sold his share of a well-established polling firm and set about convincing Karl Rove that he had the answer to ensuring President Bush's reelection.

His pitch was simple: Take corporate America's love affair with learning everything it can about its customers, and its obsession with carving up the country into smaller and smaller clusters of like-minded consumers, and turn those trends into a political strategy. The Bush majority would be made up of thousands of groups of like-minded voters whom the campaign could reach with precisely the right message on the issues they considered most important.

Now Gage is working for another Republican presidential candidate entranced by the possibilities of microtargeting -- Mitt Romney. A Harvard Business School graduate who went on to head Bain Capital, Romney has made a point of adapting modern business techniques to politics, and it was in his successful 2002 campaign to be governor of Massachusetts that Gage's methods were first tried.

"The governor believes in accountability, benchmarks and metrics," said Beth Myers, Romney's campaign manager, explaining his interest in microtargeting. "He believes in using data when it comes to making decisions."

Romney's not setting the national polls afire, but with his money and business experience and his campaign's collection campaign expertise, don't count him out.