Voter Data As A Utility – Jon Black (Data Trust)

Jon Black:

They were focused on building a data operation for the party. And that's kind of what led to the data trust in how we operate. You know, we are an entity and again, a utility for the party and not just for one candidate or one individual.

Eric Wilson:

I'm Eric Wilson, managing partner of startup caucus, an investment fund and incubator for Republican campaign technology. Welcome to the business of politics show on this podcast, we bring you into conversation with the entrepreneurs who build best in class political businesses, the funders who provide the capital and the operatives who put it all together to win campaigns. Today, we're joined by John Black CEO of data trust the leading provider of voter and electoral data to Republican and conservative campaigns, parties, and advocacy organizations prior to taking the helm at data trust. John worked with the Republican national committee as a regional political director and director of turnout and targeting in our conversation. We discussed the unique role that data trust plays in the G O P ecosystem. The challenges of maintaining a national voter file and what data he looks to for campaign decision making John data trust. Doesn't always get the credit it deserves. And, and some of that's because you do work behind the scenes. So explain how data trust helps Republicans and their allies win.

Jon Black:

Yeah, absolutely. You know, as you mentioned, we provide conservative organizations, political campaigns the data they need to make decisions. One of the things we do is we, we stay in our lane the best we can, and that is to provide the national voter file absentee and early vote data to individuals. So, so they can make the smart decisions that they do. There's a lot of data firms, campaigns, lot of smart people out there that do specific things with it, you know, we're kind of the providers of the data. So nothing all that sexy about what we do, but we're a utility and it's an important one.

Eric Wilson:

Yeah. That analogy of a utility is, is something I use a lot when talking about data trust and you know, it it's like electricity or, or water, right. It doesn't matter what the business is that those utilities are going into, they need water and they need electricity. And so different bakeries can create different things, but it's the same, same water and the same electricity. And it doesn't make sense, you know, to have multiple providers of the exact same thing. So I, I, I really like that analogy for, for data trust.

Jon Black:

Yeah. I think to take that analogy a step further, no one really worries when they have electrically electricity constantly, but when it goes away, they certainly notice and then likewise, if electricity gets too expensive, then they notice as well. So we find ourselves, you know, being needed but have to have to continue to make sure we are working in the middle ground to make sure that we are helpful to everyone.

Eric Wilson:

And I mean, it is a, it is a national voter file. Talk to us the, the different steps. And, and what are some of the challenges of maintaining a national voter file across all 50 states as sort of this utility for

Jon Black:

The party? Yeah, absolutely. All 50 states plus DC, and we've, we've done a little work on some Puerto Rico and Guam items, which have been money difficult since they don't have some of the organizational structure as, as the states, but all 50 states plus the territories need to be collected. We have a, a very large and very talented acquisition team that spends their time collecting files from across every state. Many states you have to collect by county, which obviously, you know, your Californias Nevadas Arizonas of the world. That can be difficult, certainly. And then it is just inconsistency across the board. I mean, it would be nice if we could just go to one place and say, gimme the, the most updated file across every county, across every state of the country, but it just doesn't exist that way.
We've gotta go through the process of collecting it, verifying the information. You know, redistricting has made things especially difficult this past year. You know, we've got many states that say we are completely done with redistricting and we're like, that's outstanding. And then you go to the, the file, the statewide voter file that they send you in half the counties are reporting old congressional district lines, and half the counties are reporting new ones. Some places have updated congressional district lines, but their states haven't updated Senator district or ledge lines. And obviously they've been approved, but they're just not updated on the file. So a lot of states have different laws, and I think that's the, that's the hardest part, right? It's just inconsistent and it's always changing. There's not a true oversight to this thing. Even in, in states, some states require that you report to the every county report to the state in a certain period of time, some do it on a weekly basis while others just hold on to that month or, or month and a half timeline where they actually provide information, you know, as they go.
So again, you might have one county that was updated in one county that hasn't been updated in two weeks, but it's on the new statewide file. So it's just a lot of, you know, quality assurance. That's what we do, we collect it. And then we make sure that we know what we're looking at how it compares to previous files, how it compares to what the secretary of state says it should say. Making sure that we, we truly understand what's on there to that point, the second hardest part about his education. I just ran through quite a few things, but making sure that our end users and our clients understand the nuance that comes in all these files.

Eric Wilson:

Yeah. We, it's something we touched on in an earlier episode with Alex named Shefsky from ballot ready. Right. She's trying to put what's on everyone's ballot and then you've got states, counties, cities and you're hitting the same thing here. And I think it's something that a lot of people don't appreciate, which is our elections in this country are, are run in 50 different ways. Plus the district of Columbia Guam and Puerto Rico. I won't forget them this time. And, and then if you, if you wanna truly maintain a national presence and national voter file, you have to understand how all of these work. And so it's not as simple as, you know, some states, you know, it's a file and you go and download it and, and other states it's, it's difficult as you mentioned, I think it's, it's really fascinating. The, these problems, particularly as it relates to infrastructure where you have to impose order on data that is not ordered, not organized, I'm sure like every file is going to be different, even when you get it from these, these different states.

Jon Black:

Absolutely. I mean, if you're collecting by county we're pretty much past the days of PDFs which is a nice, a nice movement towards some technological growth there <laugh>, but, you know, there comes times where you do get PDFs and you do get column columns that are completely different, you know, and one of the things we have to do on our, our end is to your point kind of standardize it and put it in so everyone can access it. And it all looks the same across the board, but ultimately, you know, that creates its own problem because what if one statewide or one county file has a field that is valuable, right? And, and then have you, how do you add that into the mix without disrupting the whole schema, and then also, how do you put that in the mix and then educate the user on this is different, but it only applies to this state or this county. And so there's a lot that, that certainly goes into it.

Eric Wilson:

So when, when you get that data back from a secretary of state or state board of elections, do you do anything else with that data? Are you putting in you know, other information that you may collect?

Jon Black:

Yeah, absolutely. So we collect it, we do some quality assurance checks on it initially, and then, you know, each state, again, unique, not every state has phone number or gender on the file. So we, we run it through a process internally of matching it with consumer data that we have available here which often provides us information that is not readily available. Many states don't provide phone numbers. So we, we append phone numbers. Every time we do a new, a new build. So we, we build states, you know, at minimum quarterly, but most states get a, a build more often than that. And every time we find the new registrants and try to get them a phone number, if they don't already have one from the voter file so we match against consumer data. We run it against people that have moved, right.
The national change of address list. We, we cleanse the addresses to make sure that they are standard across the board. A lot of, like I said, a lot of it's quality assurance, but a lot of it's just adding information. And then we, we pull forward a lot of the information that we've had previously, right? There's a lot of information provided from whether it be the field or whether it be, you know, users out in the states that we, we pull that information forward. So we're not completely deleting information that was there previously in a build.

Eric Wilson:

So with, with all of that data, I'm curious to hear from you, what, what matters the most. So let's say we're gonna put you back in the field, you're running a campaign, you've got the, the usual stuff, the name, address, phone. If you could only have one tag on the voter file to run your campaign, what would it be?

Jon Black:

I mean, that's a, that's a loaded question. Does vote history count as a tag?

Eric Wilson:

It does. Yeah.

Jon Black:

Okay. Then I take vote history. Okay. obviously understanding, and, and again, every state's unique, but understanding who voted when they last voted, how many times they've voted and, you know, many states provide you with primary or they'd provide you with vote types, or did you vote by mail? Did you vote in person? If you can hone down your universes based off of, of that information, an official party or, or calculated party, you have a start.

Eric Wilson:

And that that's a really important distinction. Not every state has voters register as a party. And I think a lot of people are surprised to learn that if you're in a, in a state where you do register a party I live in Virginia where we don't have party registration, so you have to do that, that calculated party. But I, I, I do think to underline for some of our listeners who might not be as experienced with data, it doesn't actually have to be that complex, right? This, this, this vote history is one of the best. And, and I would say the best. And I think you agree with me the best indicator of whether or not someone's going to vote, how they're going to vote, where they're gonna vote. It just tells you so much. And that's why we rely on it so much, but it, it, it's not elaborate. Right. You didn't have to go out and do big data on that. You're just getting it from, from the, from the voter file.

Jon Black:

Yeah. Particularly, depending on the race you're in, you know, do you have the manpower to do on the ground voter ID, work, phones and doors? If not, do you have the resources to pay for, for ID and other things, but you know, that, that vote history tells you who to who's gonna vote. So it's, it's really determining, you know, that that's about as determined as you can get in terms of likelihood to vote, and then you go from there. So I agree. I do agree with you.

Eric Wilson:

And then the, the it, the other side of that, that razor, I think is that you've gotta be very careful that we we've seen over the last couple cycles. I I've seen some polling in this cycle with primaries that significant portions of the electorate are people who don't have primary vote history. And so, you know, it it's good to have, but, but you can't rely on, on that totally being the case. Some people are gonna show up, they're gonna be brought out to the polls. And, and so, you know, ignore those, those voters at your own peril. If they don't have vote history, John, the, the Democrats do not have an, an exact counterpart to data trust. It's something they've struggled to, to build. That's not to say that we're completely out of the woods in the battle for data yet, but they haven't been as successful as Republicans with data trust. Why do you think that's been so difficult for them?

Jon Black:

Yeah. And, and that's a, that's a great question. They certainly have the, the talent to do it. I think a lot of it's just been priority and they're, they're on their way there, they have some promising leads, it appears to be in a good place. But I think the big thing is, is credit goes back to the, the Republican national committee in, in the mid nineties in like 1995, they actually created an in-house national voter file for the first time. And I think starting that early that long ago, really set the groundwork for this and how it all operated. It also kind of worked the way they set it up. They worked with state parties as partners. And so it kind of built this acceptance and this shared ownership of, of how this process actually works with just a little different on the Democrat side and particularly how the state parties react to some of this stuff.
I mean, think about it if you're at, if you're at South Carolina and, you know, you have presidential candidates coming around every four years, you wanna sell that file for, you know, some Exor in them out, that's a pretty good, big fundraiser for you as a state party. And, and that's one of the things the Dems do see on their end which, which I think is, is truly important, you know, it's different on the Republicans side, but what we did see in 2012, you know, when the Obama campaign kind of ran circles around folks on the data side was that they built a really good operating operating machine that was doing things that quite frankly, you know, we were behind the game on his Republicans, but they built that thing for him. And they built that thing for his campaign, his reelect, and then offa, you know, organizing for America. They didn't build it for the party. And I think when the previous chairs got together and Jerry previous and then chairman Donald took a Nick Daniel, sorry, took over, they were focused on building a data operation for the party. And that's kind of what led to the data trust in how we operate. You know, we are an entity and again, a utility for the party and not just for one candidate or one individual.

Eric Wilson:

Yeah. I think that's exactly the, the reason the Dems have struggled. And it goes back to surprise, surprise the business of politics, the voter files in each of those states are incredible moneymakers for the state democratic parties. And so you've had some very smart people try in and co try to come in and fix this for the Democrats. And, you know, they had the good, the right tech, the right talent, all the money in the world, but they couldn't break through that, that business model. And that's really, what's been holding them back. So I agree with you on that diagnosis. And it's a fascinating case study in, in the business of politics.

Jon Black:

Absolutely. I mean, just the the investment by one of the, the private Dem funders just a couple years ago, they invested something like 20 million into making this thing happen and it just wasn't accepted by the Democrat side. So it's not just a, a product in a a company it's, you know, the people have to get on board as well.

Eric Wilson:

Yeah. And, and I always talk about the, the, our challenge is not with technology. It's not with data it's not with, with money it's cultural, right. That, that is your biggest hurdle to driving adoption of innovation in politics is getting that cultural buy-in. And you can see with data trust across the party, Republicans have cultural buy in on, this is what we need, we're using it, we're behind

Jon Black:

It. Absolutely. And I, I think it's great as well because people are always, always somewhat skeptical as well. When, when one, you know, one thing gets too much buy in, people become skeptical of it. So we constantly have to prove ourselves. And I think we've done a good job of doing that. We continue to improve on that and we look forward to doing what we do better every year.

Eric Wilson:

You're listening to the business of politics show. I'm speaking with John Black CEO of the data trust. John, I wanna touch in to, to why this cooperation is so important. How does syncing this data from multiple organizations help the entire ecosystem?

Jon Black:

Yeah, well obviously, I mean, it creates a feedback loop, right? And, and that's, I think that's the biggest problem with anything that, that we do or have done in the past. You know, we will send out a file campaign or a, a committee or someone will use that file and then all the results of it or all the, the disposition data just kind of stops, right. It just goes nowhere. May, may inform the entity then that's it. What we try and do is work with our clients and provide information to them and then get things back one, because they're paying for data from us, quite frankly, we wanna make sure that they have the best product available, but two, every time we get information back from them, you know, like a phone call whether that phone call call was a complete, or it was a wrong number, it still helps us.
And then it allows us to go back to some of our providers and say, these were all wrong numbers. They've been called multiple times. We need you guys to look into this and provide us with something better. And hopefully, you know, it starts to lower the cost for, for the product that we're getting, or it improves the product we're getting, it's the same, same thing. You know, we treat it the same way that we expect our clients to treat it with us coming back and saying, this was wrong. How do we make it better? And so we do the same thing with a lot of our data providers that we work outside with.

Eric Wilson:

Yeah. And that is so frustrating when you get a volunteer in, and, and, and they're calling numbers and, and getting wrong numbers or the person they're supposed to call isn't there. And, and with data trust with these, we, with these, these data providers, you, you have a really big subscription to then leverage into saying, Hey, you need to fix this to make everyone more accurate. I'm curious with all of that going on, how have privacy laws, cyber security concerns, some state regulations, how is that impacting data trust and making things I would imagine more difficult for you?

Jon Black:

Yeah, it certainly does. You know, I think we're still kind of in the, the infancy of this a little bit of how it's gonna affect a lot of what we do, but naturally, I mean, cyber security in itself, I mean, look at cyber security insurance. I know I have, you know, we've gone up almost three times in cost in the past year, just for our, our cyber cyber security cost insurance, which is obviously not something I love, but as we look like consumer providers, some of them are stripping information from what they used to provide. You know, we have one I won't name them, but they stop providing gender on the file. So we're starting to see things that always work kind of a, an available resource being taken away which obviously, you know, makes you change where you look for information and whether it's a, a, a nationwide standard industry kind of removal, or if it's just that company due to something they have going on internally.
and then the whole other side of that is you take like a California and their privacy laws. You know, they basically have like an opt out from the file. And you have to obviously monitor that to keep that updated. Cause if you don't, then you get to get handed with hefty fines. So it's changing, you know, before that was never an issue, right? It was this person's on the voter file. It's public information go to town. And now you just have to, you're adding additional layers and additional steps to make sure that you're addressing every unique, again, every unique state, every unique provider client in everything that everyone has to deal

Eric Wilson:

With. So that data provider took off gender because of political reasons.

Jon Black:

Yeah. I, they didn't give a truly comprehensive reason. But yes, I would imagine it was due to political reasons.

Eric Wilson:

Well, that's, yeah. I mean, interesting strategy as a data provider to provide less data yes. To your customer. So that in interesting aside there obviously we've spent our conversation talking about data. You and I are big believers in data driven campaigning, but what are some things that data just can't do for a campaign?

Jon Black:

Yeah. I mean I look, data can make decisions for you. And I know everyone says, like, we're gonna be data driven operation, and data's gonna give us our guide and like, that's right. Data guides you, but it can't make your decisions. I can't tell you how many people I've seen throughout the years that say like, I need multiple incoming sources of data so I can review and look. And the next thing you knows, paralysis by analysis, right? It's just, they're frozen. And they're like, well, I've, I've competing data sets. It told me different things. And I don't know what to look at. So no, it, it can't make a decision for you and it, and it can't convey a message. You know, if you do, if you spend enough, it can tell you what the, the proper message likely is. It can tell you who can receive that message, but it, it can't tell you exactly how to convey it. I can put an ad together on what I think, you know, data tells me is the most persuasive thing, but if it's a bad ad, it's a bad ad. It doesn't get the point across.

Eric Wilson:

Yeah. I've definitely learned that one the hard way.

Jon Black:

<Laugh> yeah, I've been there.

Eric Wilson:

Huh? Yeah. But I mean, it, it, I mean, I think that the, those are the, the two things, one, you, you cannot data can't run your campaign for you. It can't totally, de-risk your decision making, which I think a lot of people expect it to do right there, there, there are judgment calls. This is, you know, always talk about, you know, politics is a lot more like poker, a game of imperfect information than chess, which is a game of perfect information, right? You look at a chessboard, there is a correct move. There is a wrong move with poker. You don't have all of the decision points available to you, so you can make the right decision and get the wrong outcome all the time. And so I think there's this misnomer that we've got some sort of computer with all this data, and it just tells us what to do, but you see it time and time again, like, you know, being able to move really fast, make those decisions have buy in, execute on it is really important.
Especially if that data is getting you 75, 80% of the way there. If you're waiting for that last a hundred percent, to your point, you're gonna have analysis paralysis. And then the other thing is, is the, the message, right? I mean, talk about the Democrats, right? They, they have really good tech and good data in some cases, even though it's not as cooperative and collaborative as ours, but when their message just isn't aligning with what voters want to hear, they suffer. So I, I think that's, that's something that we not, not entirely lost in the industry, but something we have to balance, right. The art and science of campaigning.

Jon Black:

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, there's still a human element to all of this, right? Like even if you're doing a modeling project and you're using predictive scores to tell you where things are today, like there's still human, there's still decision making that has to get made and how you treat some of this information. You know, it, it just exists. And so like I, like you said, you know, I just can't do everything. You do have to make some decisions that that help guide your way.

Eric Wilson:

So John, you've been at this a while. I'm curious, is there a, a problem or a challenge that you've seen out there maybe in your new role at data trust that you think would make for a really good startup company or app or, or piece of software?

Jon Black:

Yeah, it's, I mean, I I've certainly had my, my battles since I, since I've started both here and within the, the political field, I think more so here, and I've always kind of known it cause I've had a background in, in data, but one is, is kind of like a training startup specifically for data. I, I think we get to, you know, everyone kind of forgets the nuance in the file which creates a lot of question marks. I think everyone says, I know how the national voter file works and this is easy. And they move on to like the advanced, you know, the modeling side of things or the microtargeting or the, you know, whatever you wanna call it. And I think we, we kind of get away from just the, the blocking and tackling of what is in this data.
How do you use it? What is the proper thing? So I'd love to see a startup that would actually dedicate themselves to training on how we use this stuff and the nuance that comes with it. That's more of just a pipe dream for me. I think another one which I've, I've thought of more over time is like that holistic CRM. I think that everyone's kind of addressed and many people have said they fixed over time until they haven't, but it's not just, you know, like how do you make things accountable, right? How do you keep all your campaigns materials in one place? Right. Finance is always separate. Voter contact is always separate. How do we put it into one place, paid voter contact? How do you put that into one place? And then at the end of the election, you know, how do you put in your, your vote history when it comes?
And so you can actually run your vote history against your paid voter contact and your donors, and how many donors Don, how many donors voted how many people you contacted, turned out, you know, did your paid phone store texting have any impact on this? And then, you know, particularly to the degree you can, you know, on the digital spending and the TV spending and the connected TV, like how can you pull that in to see, you know, based on where you ran your ads, how did turn out affected? There is no one comprehensive solution for that. You know, I talk about it and maybe it seems simple. I don't know when I talk about it, but, but you know, we, we just leave a lot of learning on the table. And I think a tool like that, one where we can keep everything in place and two, it would give us a lot of insights and accountability on what we've done as campaigns, committees, and organizations on our spending efforts would, would be great. I mean, I think some of the big organizations can do that in house. But too many campaigns go go by you, you know how this works, Eric, if you win, you did everything right. And if you lose, you know, you didn't and then we move on to whatever comes next. So some, some kind of tool that gives us a little a little after action would be I think an ideal type of tool.

Eric Wilson:

Yeah. That's a the, that got my wheels turning. So we'll probably chat further. <Laugh> about those ideas course. Just so people know how to find you. So most candidates on the Republican side, if they want to take advantage of data, trust data, the easiest thing that they can do is go to their state party and get access to G O P data center. Isn't that right?

Jon Black:

Yeah, that's correct.

Eric Wilson:

And so if you're, if you're on the IE side or an outside group, and you wanna work with data trust, they come to you

Jon Black:

Directly. Yes. That's, that's correct. You, you know, we work with the RNC and the RNC handles a lot of the state party and other hard dollar type committees. If you will. We specifically try to stay out of that because of our relationship and our services for the RNC. And, you know, we focus very much on the, the nonprofits and the conservative organizations and the packs and others that, that we try to be helpful with.

Eric Wilson:

I feel like it's like one of those one, one small trick ads, because when I tell people like, oh, well you can go get a, a, a free voter file from the, the G O P data center. If you're a candidate, they're, their mind is blown because they think that they have to pay thousands of dollars for it. And, and that is that's your data. They obviously supplement it with their own. So I'll include links to data trust as well as the G O P data center in, in the show notes. I wanna say, thank you to John for joining us today. He's very busy running this huge organization, getting ready for a big campaign here, appreciating you, making the time data trust is doing great work. I love working with them. If you enjoyed today's episode, I wanna encourage you to share it with a friend. It'll make you look smarter and remember to subscribe to the business of politics show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you've been listening for a while and you like it, go leave that rating and review to help us reach more people. And with that, we'll see you next time. Thanks for listening.

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