Filtering your audiences with the filter panel

The Filter Panel helps focus your target population based on political and demographic criteria. Setting filters in the Filter Panel updates the people shown in the Target Summary, District Map, and exports from the Download Tool.

Filters come in two types:

• Multi-select: You can pick one or multiple options, e.g. filtering for “White” and “Black” for Race.
• Range: You can set one or both sides of the range, e.g. filtering for age 25-45.

Each filter in the Filter Panel narrows down your target population using a different factor:

Political filters:

• Party Registration:
  • Filters people based on their registered party (not party affiliation).
  • Only available in states with partisan voter registration where the registered party is known.
• Party Lean:
  • Filters people based on their “partisan score”. This partisan score is included in the voter files RunningMate uses and is an estimate of someone’s political preference based on data models.
  • Score ranges from 1-100, where 1 is estimated as very Republican-leaning and 100 is estimated as very Democratic-leaning.
• Vote History:
  • Filters people based on their known participation in past elections at the federal level.
  • Only available in states that report election participation in their voter files.
• Precincts:
  • Filters people based on the precinct their address is in.

Demographic filters:

• Race:
  • Filters people based on their race.
  • In most states, this is a modeled estimate of someone’s race based on their name, location, and other factors.
  • In some states where race is self-reported as part of voter registration (AL, FL, GA, LA, NC, SC), this is that self-reported value.
  • This field uses Census categories for race. Race and ethnicity are much more complex than what these values capture, but they are a lowest common denominator that can map to other data sources.
• Sex:
  • Filters people based on their sex (referred to as “gender” by some states) as reported in voter files.
  • This field uses “Male” and “Female” as values for sex since these are the values provided by state voter files. Sex and gender are much more complex than what these values capture, but they are a lowest common denominator that can map to other data sources.
• Age
  • Filters people based on their age as reported in voter files.
  • Age can be calculated from date of birth in some states. Other states only provide year of birth, so ages are estimates.

Tags:

• Tags are custom data tags that have been imported by the user. These can be numbers or letters, cannot contain spaces, and can only contain a few special characters: colon, underscore, and dash. For example: donor, recurring-donor, volunteers, teachers, no_vote_plan, vote-plan-eday

Survey Responses

• Support Scores shows the scores imported by the user. These can range from 1 to 5 with 1 meaning strong supporter and 5 meaning strongly opposed.

The Reset Filters button at the bottom of the Filter Panel resets all active filters so you can easily build a new target population.

Export your list

Once you have defined your target audience, you can export that list by clicking Download CSV. Then, get to work contacting your voters, with canvassing, phone calls, mail, or any other method your team is utilizing this cycle.

• Due to the size of many of these files, they will download to your computer zipped as a csv.gz file.
• They will need to be unzipped to open and use. Some computers, including most Macs, will be able to open zipped files without issue
• 7-Zip is a free open-source unzipping tool. Others you may also try are WinZip and WinRar