Yuhas Featured in WSJ Article
Democrats, Playing Catch-Up, Tap
Database to Woo Potential Voters
By Yochi J. Dreazen
"In the final week before the election, Democrats pushing to convert their lead in the polls into control of Congress are pinning their hopes of success on an increasingly common tactic for pumping up voter turnout: microtargeting."
"Copernicus's chief scientist, Ben Yuhas, likens microtargeting to searching for a needle in a haystack—over and over again. The spreadsheet on a single voter from one of the states where Copernicus is operating contains more than 500 rows of information, ranging from whether a prospect lives in an apartment or house to commercially purchased data on the type of car the voter drives. Mr. Yuhas has developed mathematic formulas based on such factors as length of residence, amount of money spent on golf, voting patterns in recent elections and a handful of other variables to calculate the likelihood that a particular American will vote Democratic.
Last week, a Democratic congressional campaign locked in a tightening race in a battleground Midwestern state asked Copernicus to identify Republicans who could potentially be swayed into voting Democratic, and the issues likeliest to win them over. Copernicus crunched the numbers and came back with its answer: Tens of thousands of Republicans who the company predicted to be abortion-rights supporters didn't have strong partisan affiliation with the Republican Party. Now the campaign, which Copernicus declined to identify, is making a play for those voters."