Hillary Clinton is tailoring her campaign to you — yes, you

Your name. Where you live. Your party registration. That cruise you took last summer. The current status of your "Highlights for Children" subscription.

According to Sasha Issenberg, author of the book "The Victory Lab: The Science of Winning Campaigns," Hillary Clinton’s campaign might know all of this about you — and a whole lot more.

“Clinton is running this state of the art, well-funded campaign … [with] the [research and development] agenda of a campaign that’s planning on spending $1 billion,” he says. “Donald Trump is not doing any of that stuff. He has a coherent, principled distrust or skepticism about these various parts of campaigns that I’ve spent a lot of time reporting on, which in many respects are the parts that have changed the most.”

Using methods that were pioneered by the 2000 and 2004 campaigns of George W. Bush, and further developed in Barack Obama’s bids for the White House, the Clinton campaign has been using big data to get a detailed picture of individual voters and how best to reach them.

Once the campaign has data about you, they then need to determine what that data says about your voting habits. “Where the statistical modeling comes in is sifting through 1,000 data points about you,” says Issenberg, “and [figuring] out which ones tell me anything useful about your politics.”

Using algorithms to weight certain data points, analysts try to place voters into different categories. The two groups they care most about are undecided voters and people who would likely back a candidate, but may not vote.

“The first group is what campaigns call persuasion targets,” Issenberg says. “You know they’re going to vote and you want to change their opinions so that they vote for you.”

The other group is called mobilization or get-out-the-vote targets. These are people who don’t need to be given any more reasons to vote for you, but they need to be nudged, reminded, and cajoled into voting.

Issenberg says that of these two groups, the latter could provide Clinton with her biggest — and least anticipated — edge on election day.

“It is reasonable to suspect that the structural advantage that Clinton has will not reveal itself fully until we get to the point where the only challenge left is to turn out people who might not be that crazy about her,” he says.

“The people who are showing up as Trump supporters in polls will be less likely to vote because they’re not getting that nudge from the campaign when the time comes to fill out the ballot.”

This story first aired as an interview on PRI's Innovation Hub with Kara Miller.