Running an election campaign is no longer just the art of political management; with data mining, psychometric profiling, behavioural analysis et al coming into the picture, Manish Anand and Amit Agnihotri discover it’s now a system of controlling poll outcomes
Prashant Kishor is back at work. Six months on the job in his new assignment as political strategist for YSR Congress, Kishor pitchforked his new paymaster YS Jaganmohan Reddy into the limelight. His strategy to build the campaign on one theme, which for Andhra Pradesh emerged as ‘special category status’, set Chief Minister N Chandra Babu Naidu on a damage control spree, culminating in his party’s exit from the NDA.
In the run-up to the Gujarat Assembly polls last year, Congress social media head Divya Spandana and her team borrowed a worker’s comment, ‘Vikas Gandi Thayyo Chhe’ (development has gone crazy), shared on an internal WhatsApp group, to create a viral campaign that gave BJP a scare and made the formidable Modi-Shah combine launch an intensive counter campaign showing the face of ‘vikas’ for damage control.
Gone are the days when political party leaders led election campaigns, with strategies formulated by their close coterie and loyal workers sweating it out in dusty lanes to win over voters.
In the age of social media, parties are no longer just relying on their leaders’ mass appeal or committed cadres. Electoral battles are now being fought in digital war rooms, with backroom players creating tailormade campaign strategies, based on data mining and psychometric profiling of voters, to ensure a favourable outcome.
These digital warriors select campaign themes for their parties, create Twitter slogans and manage ‘perceptions’ for the leaders — on social media as well as on the ground.
Theme-based campaigns
Who can forget Kishor’s masterstroke of ‘chai pe charcha’ that became the fulcrum of Narendra Modi’s campaign during the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, catapulting him to the seat of power in Delhi?
Ahead of the 2015 Bihar polls, Modi looked unstoppable as he unleashed his magic to wrest power in state after state — Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Haryana. As Modi questioned Nitish’s “political DNA”, Kishor lapped up the remark to build his poll campaign around it. Rest, as they say, is history. The Modi juggernaut came to a stop in Patna.
The BJP, though, asserts that all talk of professional election strategists is mere hype. “When Kishor was given the assignment to organise ‘chai pe charcha’, it was as part of strategies conceptualised by the party leadership only,” said a senior BJP functionary.
Indeed, the Samajwadi Party’s much-hyped similar experiment of hiring Harvard University professor Steve Jarding to micromanage his party’s campaign for the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls in 2017 proved unsuccessful.
Amit Malviya, head of BJP’s IT cell, asserted that professional strategists’ success depends on the ability of the leaders. “Ultimately, it’s political leaders who have to make decisions based on facts presented by the strategists. If the leaders are incapable, then no strategist can work wonders,” he said.
But there’s no denying that campaign themes, if they strike a chord with voters, can play key roles in swinging electoral results.
Even the nature of slogans has changed. Instead of staid slogans hailing their leaders or lampooning rivals, smart one-liners and crisp catchphrases like ‘Abki baar, Modi sarkar’ and ‘Bihar mein bahaar ho, phir se Nitish Kumar ho’ are lapped up by voters.
Backroom teams
Besides searching for campaign themes, the strategists have been seen working with party leaderships on connecting with voters.
“Teams akin to call centres were put in place in each district headquarter in UP during the 2017 polls. They were provided with basic details, including addresses and phone numbers, of voters. Each member of the team was assigned with the task to collect feedback on various issues, besides spreading information about campaign schedules of party leaders in their respective areas,” said an election strategist who had worked with a political party in the recent elections.
The Congress had hired Kishor for the UP and Punjab polls last year to carry out field surveys and boost the party campaign. The experiment worked in Punjab, but it failed in UP.
The backroom teams have a well-oiled machinery as they need to be active 24x7 to keep tabs on every emerging trend or changing voter sentiment and have to decode vast amounts of data to build credible campaigns.
Tapping data
“Electoral data helps understand historic trends and polling patterns. With the advent of technology, data also helps in better communication. It’s important in the sense that facts could be presented to a target audience more efficiently,” said BJP’s Malviya.”
The Congress, too, appears to have taken a fancy to data analysis as the party has been dragged into controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica.
Almost 50 per cent of election management today is driven by technology, a Congress strategist said, adding that data management and effective communication are integral to poll preparations.
Earlier, profiling of voters was done booth-wise physically, based on caste, gender, age and political affiliations. Now, data is digitised and is therefore easier to share through communication devices to either formulate or tweak strategy, Congress managers said.
“Prashant Kishor builds slogans which can galvanise the elections. But he lays more emphasis on building strong teams on the ground. He relies on data on which he can work to the advantage of his masters,” said one of his key aides.
“What’s wrong is breach of privacy, lack of informed consent and misuse of data. If someone uses data for psychometric profiling and tailormakes campaign to accentuate personal anxieties for electoral gains, which can influence voters’ electoral choices, then it’s illegal, immoral and unethical,” said Malviya.
But as the recent Cambridge Analytica controversy has shown, such use of data is happening for poll gains in India.
Social media campaigns
Acknowledging an increased use of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp over the past few years, Congress managers said while most internal communication was through WhatsApp, the other two mediums were used to convey the party’s messages among the voters. “Earlier, we had to organise orientation programmes for booth-level workers. Now technology has made it easier,” said a senior AICC functionary.
He noted that social media platforms provide an alternative to candidates who need to counter-balance slanted reportage in their areas. Social media also offers a variety of materials— pictures, videos, blogs, live-streaming—to maximise impact on the voters.
Congress sources said the party realised the importance of social media strategy after losing the 2014 polls and has now recast their central team under Divya Spandana. A similar effort is on in states ahead of the 2019 polls.
Even regional players, which traditionally relied on the charisma of their satraps, are switching to technology to expand their reach.