A polling official walks past voting booths at the Fairfield County Board of Elections Office in Lancaster, Ohio, U.S., on Saturday, Oct. 29, 2016. (Image: Ty Wright/Bloomberg)

The much-heralded use of analytics in the 2008 and 2012 Obama for America presidential campaigns raised public awareness of the value of data and analysis in politics. It wasn’t the start of campaign analytics, but it was a pivotal occurrence in American politics.

Democrats and Republicans campaigning at the highest levels have access to significant data resources through their parties. Both parties provide these candidates with national voter data that’s complete, clean and properly structured for campaign use.

For many small campaigns, it’s a different story.

Candidates running for local office, those not from the two major national parties, and even major party candidates who haven’t yet attracted enough support to meet party criteria for data access are all at a data disadvantage.

Not all political campaigns involve candidates running for political office. Political action such as voter registration drives, issue activism, and petitions, can also use data. Those that have knowledge and resources can go to vendors for both data and analytics, but most such advocacy campaigns do without much in the way of data.

When you heard about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton hiring analytics experts to work within the campaign staff, you were hearing about anomalies. Even the Trump campaign largely outsourced analytics. With few exceptions, campaigns have historically left data analysis to consultants, or done without.

NationBuilder, a Los Angeles based nonpartisan political software provider, set out to make voter data easily accessible to the many campaigns that have neither access to major party databases nor funds available to work with costly consultants and data vendors. They wanted to offer data free of charge. That meant they had to keep their own costs low.

In theory, anyone can get and use voter data. The basics, such as names of registered voters, addresses, and records of who voted in which elections, are public information. But the process of finding the right source, requesting data, getting it organized and using it is not simple.

Although others already offer voter data, licensing from other vendors was not a viable option for NationBuilder, because they would not have been able to meet their own goal of providing data free to campaigns. Jim Gilliam, NationBuilder’s CEO, explained that cost limitations forced the company to create its own national voter database, including data for each US city, county and state.

NationBuilder claims to be the most used political software in the world. They deliberately focus on affordability for campaigns with small budgets. But what good is campaign software without data?

NationBuilder tried at least four different technical approaches to the project, including hand coding a data management tool using open source programming language Ruby. Although the hand coded scripts worked, maintenance was a problem, and only a few staff members who knew Ruby could do the work. After investigating several data management tools, NationBuilder chose Trifacta Wrangler Enterprise.

Developing your own tools using open-source programming languages is popular, and often touted as the only sensible option. But good programming doesn’t come cheap, and building from scratch can end up more costly than using commercial tools.

Doug Stradley, Director of Customer Success at Trifacta, who worked hand-in-hand with NationBuilder and their Trifacta implementation put it simply, “NationBuilder needed and wanted a more distributed, user-friendly solution.” Gilliam spoke enthusiastically about Trifacta, saying that the data processing went far more quickly and easily than it could have using the home-grown approach.

NationBuilder did build its own voter data file. And it does make data available for many types of campaigns, free. If you’re thinking of running for county dogcatcher, campaigning against (or for) a local ballot initiative, or starting a voter registration drive to get ready for 2020, you can request data to support your efforts.

In 2018, 2020, and future years, you can expect to hear many more stories about analytics in politics. And when those elections roll around, you’re going to hear about analytics in more campaigns, at more levels, than ever before.