Thread by @JessLivMo

Political Data World, you are my last nerve today. Let's talk about anti-blackness in the Political Data community.

Honestly, part of me doesn't even need to do this thread so much as I just need to point out at you that one tweet led to a flurry of replies and some DMs from operatives of color. So.

The era of Big White Data (for my purposes, let's say roughly started in 2006 or so and is still ongoing) is inherently anti-Black. It was started to enforce "efficiency" around "cost per voter" and to maximize "persuasion vs. mobilization" resources.

(Notice also I am talking about ANTI-BLACKNESS, not generally racism. So don't show your ass and come up to this thread talking about something else. Of course its all racist. I'm not talking about that today.)

This obsession with efficiency has good intentions. Campaigns cost money. Money needs to be spent wisely, especially if you want to win. And it was true in the last decade and now that there are a ton of grifters of all stripes in politics.

What happened with "efficiency" and "cost per voter," however, is that they became the way that mostly White leadership, companies, and institutions measured success or failure, without any recognition of implicit bias, prejudice, or colorism.

It was determined, early on, that Black voters were not "efficient" for outreach. Their cost per voter was "too high." They were "sporadic" voters, not "reliable," so they couldn't be "counted on to show up." Thus, they became the "mobilization" cohort.

If you look not that closely, there are racial dogwhistles in all of this. Black people, in service of mostly White candidates, are sort of "lazy" and "unreliable" and thus need to be "prodded" by a pep rally of mobilization to turn out. There's no agency for voters here.

"Persuasion" voters, on the other hand, became a very coveted cohort of voters. These are voters that could, in theory, be with us, with the right mix of message/messenger/amount of touches/etc. For the most part, this fell along racial lines.

More and more, persuasion became a huge focus of our efforts, and it's where most of the money went. You see this particularly in paid ads, where the really big bucks were moving and where the consultants/staffers were rewarded with more prestigious/lucrative jobs.

And the unbearable Whiteness of this became more and more pronounced. The staffers and consultants were white -- pollsters, ad firms, media buyers, digital buyers, analysts. The companies were white -- and even when they had PoC leadership, it was rarely, if ever, Black.

This world became increasingly important after the 2012 presidential election. No one loomed larger than Dan Wagner + Civic Analytics, whom were lauded in a series of fawning profiles, did the lecture circuit, famously had Schmidt investment from Google.

*Civis, typing too fast

Dan + his crew were, rightly, held up as a new era in political data, and the worldview they represented became a major force in Democratic politics. They were not, the only people who created that culture or lead in it, then and now. But they are excellent archetypes for it.

If you are in Democratic politics these days, this worldview is inescapable. It is dominated by highly educated White people, mostly men, who use data as a crystal ball of truth only they can peer into, all the while claiming complete impartiality because numbers/math.

At entire ecosystem in tandem around and inspired by this worldview, which is now deeply embedded in the work of the community on a parallel timeline, like TargetSmart, VAN, Analyst Institute, etc.

I remember (I was so young and naive!) making waves at a post 2012 press avail because I went on the record saying that VAN was racist. I got so much shit for that and I was legitimately surprised. Was this a controversial statement????

Two example of how this shows up:
-->Models that used last name to help determine race, where "traditionally Black" last names were an indicator of race.
-->Pollsters who have insisted that race was not that important of an issue to Black voters, based on the data.

The digital space is not immune to this either. If you look at the $$$ in digital -- email, ads, and the firms and consultants who run it -- it is OVERWHELMINGLY white and male. Firms like BPI, BSD, Revolution, M+R, increasingly the TV firms (not an exhaustive list).

This continued to build out in the political tech space -- companies like Get Thru, Mobile Commons, Tatango, and more are majority or all White owners and staff EVEN when they are one of the preferred methods for talking to Black voters.

This extends deeply into the space then and now. If you look at the whole ecosystem of political tech that has developed -- Higher Ground Labs, TMC, the companies inside of those -- there is barely, if any, Black people.

I have friends, mentors, professional acquaintances at many of these orgs. I think many of them do good work and want to do the right thing. I am saying all of this because it is the dominant culture that has been created, and it shows up EVERYWHERE.

And although there has been and are a number of pioneering Black folks in this business then and now, many of them have chosen to leave the institutions considered the most prestigious to take their considerable talents elsewhere.

A huge problem with this White Male Data culture is that it was also aggressively racist, not just a dogwhistle. There was and still is barely any examination of how race interacts with this data in any real systemic way.

The best example of this is the Myth of the White Working Class Voter, the dominant persuasion target of the last 10 years or so. The obsession with recapturing the White male is well known.

But there has been very little, if any, recognition of what we need to persuade that White Working Class Man about. It was race. It was, especially, Blackness. (And immigration, but that's a different thread).

White Working Class men perceived growing Black economic parity/ civil rights gains as a threat to white male superiority. They are angry about the perceived embrace of Black people by the Party. They were Democrats in the mold of old Dixiecrats, consciously or unconsciously.

And this White Male Data culture, increasingly more powerful, increasingly more infallible, used that data without ever examining in any real way how race played a part in the drift from the Democrats by the White Working Class, even though it is at the center of the discussion.

Many, many, many people have tried to intervene in this dominant worldview. "But the data doesn't lie" has been the industry response. An indeed, the data does not lie. But as my analytics friends have taught me, people do lie. Often. Especially about sensitive subjects.

The Political Data industry has lied about their data. They've lied about their analysis. They've lied about "efficiency." They've lied about efforts around diversity and inclusion. They've lied about the changes they are going to make.

And we have created a culture of anti-Blackness in politics that extends to every level of our work. Fundraising, candidates, mobilization, persuasion, staffing, battleground targets, everything.

They give their staff the day off to go to protests. They fire a staffer for tweeting something perceived to be anti-Black. They find their one non Black person to tokenize. And then they avoid doing the real work to acknowledge/change anti-Blackness in our community.

There are still barely, if any, Black people on their mastheads.
They still do not promote their Black staff and trot them out for diversity when they want to land a pitch.
They still promote these harmful views under the cover of the magic crystal ball of data.

Black Lives will matter in our community when we hire Black people, listen to them, pay their firms, support their development, and rewrite the white supremacist code that lives at the base of our data.

I know there's a bunch of you reading this at these firms, so start here:
1) Do you have Black people on your team?
2) Have you given your Black staff a promotion?
3) Do your Black staff have salary parity?
4) Do you have any Black people in strategic roles? (/fin)