Data-Driven Maintaining: The role of the party and data maintenance in the US context

Abstract

Political campaigning in the US is unique in the global context for its lack of attention to the role of the party, largely due to the centrality and power campaigns, and that is particularly true of the US-dominated work on data-driven campaigning (DDC). This research dives into that invisible work of data maintenance - largely done by parties in the US–to explore the tension between what sorts of DDC tools and activities earn news coverage while others fly under the radar. To do so, it relies upon interviews with party data staffers and textual analysis of news coverage to highlight the importance of the overlooked practices of data maintenance to answer questions about how the data-driven practices of parties versus campaigns differ, how parties are (and are not) covered, and what, in staffers views' contributes to such coverage. Ultimately, this research finds that parties are very under-covered in discussions of data-driven campaigning, and that the coverage that does exist conflates party and campaign actions and ignores key practices of maintenance work, which this work illuminates.