The data-leak headache is lingering far longer than it should for Bernie Sanders and the DNC, and maybe also for the Hillary machine (though it seems to be doing just fine).
It’ll be a colossal headache for NGP VAN, the company that manages the voter database and accidentally dropped some safeguards on their data.
But most of all, it’s a headache for data nerds, who have had to explain over and over and over exactly what happened, and then endure the glazed-over expressions of everyone around them as it becomes clear that the details are highly technical and confusing.
“It’s been really surreal,” a former NGP VAN employee told me. “It’s not exactly how you want to make headlines.”
I spoke to the former employee — let’s call him Chris — on background. He hasn’t been at the company for some time, and now holds an unrelated job with a government agency. “I’ve tried to explain to my friends and parents the system,” he said. “People are like, ‘What the heck is that?’ and all of a sudden it’s above the fold in the New York Times.”
Here’s the terrible truth about the data leak, and the information the Sanders campaign might’ve glimpsed: it’s not particularly useful to anyone.
“What could the Sanders campaign do with the data that they couldn’t before?” I asked.
“No much, to be honest,” said Chris. NGP VAN has a ton of demographic data on every voter in the country — stuff like survey responses, whether you’re a homeowner, what magazines you subscribe to, how often you vote. All of this information is easily accessible, and often public record.
Individual campaigns pay to gather more specific information (for example, how voters feel about a particular candidate) and then NGP VAN is supposed to keep that information hidden from anyone who didn’t pay for it.
But that’s easier said than done, because absolutely everyone on the left side of the political aisle uses the company’s data. “Everyone in the progressive organizing world,” said Chris — national campaigns, local dogcatcher races, labor outreach, environmental nonprofits. Every race, local and national, in the US and abroad. I’m in there. You’re in there. Clinton knew a bunch of stuff about us, and now Bernie might know it too.
But what, exactly, do they know? Well, the leaked data is actually fairly bland. It looks like at most it indicates how likely a person is to support Hillary. The Sanders people might be able to use that data to purge strong Hillary supporters from their lists, so they’re not wasting time reaching out to people who won’t support them; or they might use it to target people whose support for Hillary is weak.
Either way, even under the best-case scenario, they don’t have very much information that they didn’t already have before.
For their part, the Sanders campaign tried to spin the leak and subsequence lockout by the DNC to their advantage, running ads in Iowa about how Sanders is fighting the establishment. How’s that working out for him? Ehhhh, not so great. Polling indicates that voters don’t really care much about the whole dust-up. Clinton, meanwhile, boasts high-profile endorsements in Iowa, and she’s been highlighting her progressive credentials to siphon support away from the actual progressive candidate.
On balance, the data leak controversy has mostly been a loss for Bernie — hardly the holiday miracle he might have hoped for.
