“Senator of Vermont Bernie Sanders Campaign Field Office In Nashua NH 09” by Michael Vadon
The political media is buzzing this morning over the news, first reported by the Washington Post, that the Democratic National Committee has suspended the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign’s access to its national voter file, after its data director allegedly took advantage of a breach in the firewall keeping its data separate from other campaigns’ data to look at the Hillary Clinton campaign’s voter models. The firewall problem was quickly reported by a Sanders staffer to NGP-VAN, the vendor that manages the valuable system, and Stu Trevelyan, NGP-VAN’s president, says this morning that its clients “voter scores” were briefly available across its system until the bug allowing the access was fixed, and no other data was available.
However, now the DNC is insisting that the Sanders campaign somehow prove that it didn’t download any proprietary information from the Clinton campaign, something it denies doing. Sanders’ data director, Josh Uretsky, has been fired by the campaign, and tells CNN this morning that he was just trying to “understand how badly the Sanders campaign’s data was exposed” and that it wasn’t the “first time we identified a bad breach in the NGP-VAN system.”
Losing ongoing access to the NGP-VAN system could hobble Sanders’ field organizing efforts as the campaign approaches the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primaries. But there’s something out of whack about this story, as former Barack Obama 2008 and 2012 data director Ethan Roeder explains to Civicist. The truth is that there’s very little advantage to be gained by the Sanders campaign from perusing its opponents’ voter modeling data, if indeed that is all that it was able to access. If, on the other hand, the Sanders team got its hands on, say, the actual list of voters Clinton’s team has identified has “1s” in Iowa—meaning, the voters who are definitely planning to caucus for Hillary—it would have a clearer picture of its competition there.
Roeder tells me, “As for the strategic value of the voter models, it’s very limited. Pretty much all presidential level campaigns, and certainly the Clinton and Sanders campaigns, build their own individual-level support models and they use the same data to do it—age, gender, race, income, etc. I find it very doubtful that the Sanders campaign could learn anything truly new about the Clinton campaign’s strategy through model scores. But even if they could, all indications here suggest that they couldn’t even export these scores if they wanted to. It’s becoming increasingly apparent to me, the more I learn about this story, that there’s no there there.”
Another Obama campaign veteran who asked for anonymity commented, “It would be very hard to back out of a score to the actual logic behind the model but I suppose with enough scores on enough voters you could infer some things—but in the end after a ton of work, I bet it would just confirm what you already knew. Seeing some counts on how many 1s Clinton has might be interesting or seeing where her support is distributed might give some insight into where to focus energy in your own caucus strategy, but honestly, if Bernie’s team needs that, they are all but dead.”
Update: MoveOn.org’s director of analytics, Milan de Vries, says “The DNC should immediately audit its vendor to ensure compliance. In the meantime, as it investigates the situation, it should restore full access to the Sanders campaign. If, in fact, the data is not secure, then access should be suspended for all campaigns until the problem is rectified.” MoveOn has endorsed the Sanders campaign.
Midday Friday, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver issued a statement that continued to push on NGP-VAN for running an insecure service, but also promising “further disciplinary action” against other staffers who may have accessed Clinton voter information in addition to Uretsky. “Clearly, while that information was made available to our campaign because of the incompetence of the vendor, it should not have been looked at,” he declared.
But Weaver also threatened to sue the DNC if it did not immediately restore the Sanders campaign’s “ability to access our own information, information which is the lifeblood of any campaign.” He said, “This is the information about our supporters, our volunteers, the lists of people we intend to contact in Iowa, New Hampshire and elsewhere. This is information that we have worked hard to obtain. It is our information, not the DNCs.”
He added, “In other words, by their action, the leadership of the Democratic National Committee is now actively attempting to undermine our campaign. This is unacceptable. Individual leaders of the DNC can support Hillary Clinton in any way they want, but they are not going to sabotage our campaign – one of the strongest grassroots campaigns in modern history.”