What data do you need to run for office?
When you are working on a campaign, the data in your district matters. Consider these questions:
- Where is my district? How large is it? What is the shape of it?
- How many registered voters are in my district?
- How many potential unregistered voters are in my district?
- Where do my voters live?
- How many voters are registered with each party?
- Which voters lean Democratic?
- What is the demographic makeup of my district?
- How does my data break down into precincts?
These are just a few of the important data points for a campaign. Knowing who is in your district is vital because your resources and time are limited. Targeting your efforts towards known and likely Democratic voters will help you make the most of your campaign and reach the people most likely to help you win.
How can you find this data?
If you are using RunningMate, you can find this data within the product! RunningMate includes multiple data sources for voter information. Today, RunningMate supports Civitech’s Source voter file, PIR unregistered voters, and TargetSmart’s voter file.
Civitech obtains Source data primarily from Secretaries of State. It is important to note that each state offers different fields and not all states track the same information. We then use data models to supply fields estimating partisanship and turnout. In addition to Source, PIR contains Civitech’s Database of likely unregistered voters. We collect data from untapped public records and compare them to voter files in order to identify millions of potential voters likely not included by traditional data vendors. Keep in mind that this is not an exhaustive list of unregistered voters in your district. There are limitations to data on unregistered voters, which impacts the ability to model it fully. Use this data to help target your approach to unregistered voters, and know that it's only a portion of the possible population of unregistered voters!
If you have access to TargetSmart’s vote file, Voterbase, we can use it as your base for RunningMate. We do not currently support Cellbase or any other add-ons.
If you are not using RunningMate, you can access data about your district through NGP VAN. Alternatively, you can work with your county or state party to buy voter files directly.