Texas Democrats unveil technological ‘X factor’ for 2020 election

The Texas Democratic Party Thursday unveiled its new “Texas Partisanship Model,” which party officials say will allow them to predict with greater accuracy the partisan leanings of virtually every registered voter in Texas.

Party officials said that includes some 600,000 registered voters for whom they previously lacked so-called partisanship scores but nearly two-thirds to three-fourths of whom they believe to be likely Democratic voters.

“We are building the biggest Democratic movement this state has ever seen. Our Texas Partisanship Model is going to be our X factor in November,” said Texas Democratic Party Targeting Director Hudson Cavanagh.

“By making these innovative and unique investments, we built our own machine learning model that will help campaigns across the state prioritize their precious resources and time,” said Cavanagh, 28, who started last fall and previously worked in New York City for BounceX, a global behavioral marketing company. “We are proud to reimagine what a state party data team can achieve. Simply put, this is how we win.”

A partisanship score is a number from zero to 100 that indicates the partisan leanings of a voter. It is used by the party and individual campaigns to best target both persuasion and get-out-the vote efforts.

For Democrats, the most partisan Republicans would rate a zero and the most partisan Democrats would score 100.

‘Rich data’

Cavanagh said that in the past, Texas campaigns relied on national data based on national trends. The new model, he said, incorporates in real time voter contacts by Democratic campaigns up and down the ballot in Texas, and can adjust to fast-changing circumstances in the political environment in Texas.

“Our campaigns on the ground have been knocking on so many doors and sent so many texts that we have this incredibly rich data set we’re able to leverage into partisanship predictions,” Cavanagh said.

“Trends that might have held in 2018 might not be holding in 2020 and having real time feedback is really powerful,” Cavanagh said.

“No other state has ever built one of these in house and maintained it for just the purpose of applying it to one state,” he said.

So far, he said, “On every single axis by which we’ve evaluated it, it’s outperformed the national models. This is because we are asking a fundamentally clearer and simpler question than the national models. Instead of trying to predict the entire United States’ partisanship, and then applying that method to Texas, we said, let’s focus just on Texas.”

Republican skeptic

But former Texas Republican Party Chairman Steve Munisteri, who is now advising the party as well as the reelection campaign of U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said the announcement sounded like more of what he said has been the relentless hype from Democrats about all they are doing to make Texas competitive in 2020.

“I'm surprised to hear that they are just now doing that, that they are just now acquiring Texas-specific information for Texas voters,” Munisteri said.

“The Republican Party uses RNC (Republican National Committee) voter scores for virtually anyone who has ever voted,” Munisteri said. But he said that data has always been augmented by Texas-specific data gathered on the ground by Texas Republicans.

“Everything they’re describing is Politics 101,” Munisteri said. “We do it. They do it. We just don’t talk about it. So enough already. Let’s just see who wins.”

“At the end of the day, the election is not a technology contest, it’s a contest about mobilizing your voters to the polls,” said Joshua Blank, research director at the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas. “Whether or not the Democrats have made an advance in the technology underlying that process, ultimately the real work is actually getting voters to vote, something that the Democratic Party, particularly the Democratic Party in Texas, has had a challenge with in the last 20 years.”

Jeremy Smith, who worked with the state party to develop Register2Vote, a nonprofit he heads that created a method of streamlining voter registration in Texas and nationally, said of the latest party effort, “I think what they are doing is wise and smart and aggressive and interesting.”

“Whether or not it is better is unproven but my supposition is that it has to be better than the national models and it could make a very big difference in Texas,” Smith said.