When Gov. Rick Scott met last month with his supporters at The Fish House, his deputy campaign manager, Tim Saler, said the governor’s re-election campaign was going to be data driven.
Saler said the campaign would bypass the media and communicate directly with the voters. The campaign will promote Scott’s record of success and achievement. Scott will win the election because of his forward-thinking campaign team and record-setting finance team.
The message is “the job isn’t done.”
To target the voters most likely to vote for Scott, the campaign has set up a sophisticated data collection system that uses “billions of data points,” including consumer-marketing data. Every registered voter has been given a score on his likelihood for voting for the governor. Those with the highest scores will be targeted, according to Saler.
The campaign will use micro-targeting to focus on which voter it needs to get to the polls. Voter surveys will identity likely voters who need more information to vote for Scott.
Saler said the Mitt Romney presidential campaign had a similar system, but they failed to update the database after the GOP national convention.
“We will constantly collect new data about the individual voters,” Saler said. “We will use the data to update assumptions based on that data.”
Saler is a campaign veteran. He has served as deputy executive director for political strategy for the Republican Party of Florida (RPOF), responsible for guiding RPOF efforts on voter data, targeting, analytics and voter contact programs. Before that, he was the executive director of the Mississippi Republican Party. Saler was also regional field director for Chris Christie’s gubernatorial campaign in South Jersey.
He said the campaign has ranked every voting precinct in the state. They will focus on the top 3,000 precincts that will give them 75 percent of the votes needed to win re-election.
“This will not be an easy race,” Saler said, hoping to motivate the crowd to fork over campaign checks. “It will be a tight race, but we’re going to win.”
