Your Vote Ohio

Political campaigning and ads are getting more personal than ever, thanks to big data. In Ohio, the Senate campaigns of Rob Portman and Ted Strickland have volunteers whose job is to go door-to-door with iPads and collect data that will be used to create ads specifically targeting you this fall. The Beacon Journal’s Doug Livingston has been researching big data's role in political ads. He says the way campaigns approach voters has become even more tech-savvy and intimate this election year. The roots of big data Livington says the emergence of big data in campaigning started about 10 years ago, when former Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean said each state needed to build a unified strategy at the grassroots level. That led to state parties developing and maintaining voter files by compiling a sketch of all the likely Democratic and swing voters with information about how they behave and how they’ve voted in the past. "It’s much more than what you can download from the secretary