The Art of Interest Politics

Mikaela says:
Recently re-elected Mayor Bloomberg just spent $10 million compiling information about NYers interests in an effort to get beyond race and party politics to the interests that unite them -- that can be targeted and exploited.

This is a historic event for a few reasons:

1. It's the most money ever spent on polling.
   
2. It's the most extensive polling ever done.
   
3. It signals a shift away from "identity politics" toward "interest politics."

This goes beyond issues, beyond identity, beyond class or race, to group people based on not only what they care about, but what interest group their values put them in. This is really about re-categorizing people based on interest versus identity, interest versus values, interest versus ideology.

The strategy capitalizes on the idea of a "values voter" and mega-sizes it, parses it, and then ruthlessly targets it for political gain. Of course, that was the point of gathering the data: targeting voters.

Taken in another context, this could signal a radical shift in the political landscape, as well as a potential shift in focus of social and cultural theories. It's been coming for a while now. Seminal theorists in identity politics have argued for the last ten years that the debate should move beyond whether race or class is more important to an understanding that each informs the other to create groupings that overlap based on values. Both Republicans and Democrats have started realizing the importance of values and framing the message around them. That's not so new. What is new is a new grouping of people that categorizes them topically.

Here's what they came up with for Bloomberg:
The New York Times reports that a private firm compiled a vast database after phoning thousands of households, and some of the categories that emerged were as follows (and if anyone knows where to find all of them, please let me know, because this is PROFOUNDLY interesting and important):

• "FANS": Fearful and Anxious New Yorkers -- "lower" and "middle-class" voters interested in security who depend on New York functioning normally -- with social services and a service-based economy that can't survive under stress
• "MIDDLE MIDDLES": Middle-class people who believe that success is all about bootstrapping. Strong, independent leaders who "made" their own success do well with these voters.
• "CULTURAL LIBERALS": Voters who believe government should support the arts, so fiscal responsibility in other areas is important in order to have enough "left over" for cultural activities.
• "HOMEOWNERS": Voters who care about economic security of property values, aesthetics around neighborhoods, interest rates, and taxes.

As a strategy, interest-based grouping is not new. Negotiators and mediators have based their science on this art. It has long been recognized that getting people to negotiate across interests results in stronger, easier consensus than trying to negotiate across positions. Two parties can be diametrically opposed about how to approach a problem, but both can agree about the benefit of a solution. Their interest in solving the problem is the same, even if it won't benefit them both equally or in the same ways.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the political sphere, where politicians must eventually go beyond selling the problem to selling a particular solution. We can see a foreshadowing of how well that worked with the Bush Administration's desperate attempts to sell the public on the wisdom of occupying Iraq for the next ten years, after selling us so successfully on the need to invade in the first place.

Buyer beware.

This trend raises the issue for me of whether it's such a good thing for our politicians to know so much about us -- down to the magazines we read and where we buy them. On the one hand, they're supposed to represent us, so they better know what we're interested in, right? But if they're just going to use the information to target us in a marketing campaign -- "I care about what you care about" while artfully skirting the equally true message "I would try to solve this problem in a way that is diametrically opposed to what you would have me do, and which might actually hurt you in the long run, unintentionally and in more and more cases, intentionally" -- then shouldn't we be scared? Shouldn't we stop answering those surveys? What's the right balance between respresentation and exploitation?

Information is the new currency. It buys you elections now. Who will be "interested" next?