CASE STUDY
Cassidy for Senate: Leveraging Analytics
Targeting Through Analytics
Facing re-election in 2020, incumbent Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) partnered with i360 to build an intensive data-driven campaign starting in January 2020.
The Cassidy campaign used i360’s full suite of data, voter contact, and analytics tools to build their entire campaign around what the data and metrics were telling them. The i360 Deep Dive was the foundation for the campaign’s ground game and targeting strategy, starting with turnout projections, target universes, and issue breakdowns. For their field staff and volunteers, the Cassidy campaign leaned on i360’s closed-loop suite of grassroots tools – i360 Call, i360 Walk, and i360 Text – to provide seamless, user-friendly voter contact abilities that were fed back into actionable dashboards and nightly model re-scoring.
The i360 Analytics Team partnered with the campaign to translate their survey research data into highly targeted universes. The survey research team identified a segment of the population as “Bill Cassidy Targets” who were not supporting Cassidy on the jungle ballot but who were favorable in other ways:
• Approved of Cassidy or had a positive image of him
• Approved of or was voting for Trump
• Generic GOP supporter
• Voting for Cassidy on a head-to-head ballot
”360's partnership with Sen. Cassidy's campaign is a prime example of i360's ability to push beyond what's been done on campaigns previously to allow data to be a key driver behind every campaign decision.
i360 matched the Bill Cassidy Targets from the survey research sample to the voter file and analyzed the distribution of model scores, particularly Affinity, Trump Approval, and Trump Ballot. i360 then used that analysis to build a segment that extrapolated the survey research data to find similar targets across the entire electorate.
From there, the campaign focused its resources on that new targeted segment – everything from TV to digital to addressable satellite to texts and calls. i360 continually measured the progress of the Bill Cassidy Targets to ensure that the Senator’s support held steady in subsequent survey research, which it did. The campaign saw the percentage of these persuadable voters shrink in their survey research, suggesting that the campaign was hitting the right targets and seeing success.
Ultimately, Sen. Cassidy won re-election with an impressive 59.32% of the vote, easily avoiding a runoff.
