Winning the Georgia Runoff: The importance of data

The Presidential Election may be over but the work of political organizations continues as they race to get as many Georgians on the voting register as possible in time for the cutoff on December 7.

What’s going on in Georgia?

We’ve been watching what’s going on in Georgia with bated breath at Lighthouse List. Essentially, Georgian State Law requires a Senate candidate to receive at least 50% of the vote in order to be confirmed. So far, neither of the state’s two Republican senators have reached that goal, causing a runoff.

On January 5, Republican Senator David Perdue will face Democrat Jon Ossoff whilst Democrat Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock will be up against Senator Kelly Loeffler, a Republican. The key dates are for your diary are:

December 7 - Deadline to register to vote in the federal runoff election
December 14 - Early voting to begin
January 5 - Runoff election day

Why is the Georgia Runoff so important?

The stakes couldn’t be higher in Georgia. With President-elect Joe Biden due to take power on January 20, one key question remains: how much power will he be able to wield in Washington to push forward his agenda? Given Democrats’ control of the House, if they also manage to win a majority in the Senate, Biden would largely be in a position to reverse Trump-era policies as he sees fit. Should Republicans, however, manage to hold the Senate, they would have more opportunity to influence Biden’s agenda.

Expect then a hard-fought race ahead, with plenty of campaign dollars spent from organisations across the political spectrum, intent on getting their message heard by the masses.

Where does data come in?

There are two key tasks for political organizations over the new few weeks:

Ensure their target audience is registered to vote.
Get their message home and encourage their audience to come out to vote for their chosen candidate on election day.

Both of these tasks rely on data - particularly registered voters and non-registered voters. If your Georgian voter database is out of date, you won’t be able to communicate effectively with your audience. Or maybe your voter database only consists of traditional postal data, whilst your rival has access to email data and digital audiences, making them much more agile and efficient in their communications. The result? You could be at a significant disadvantage.

For political organizations who want to level the playing field, they should consider speaking to an experienced data provider, specialised in political audiences, for advice on how to make these few weeks’ of campaigning count. At Lighthouse List, we have a wealth of political audiences based in Georgia ready to license, segmented by political party and by candidate.