Glenn Youngkin: ‍Enterprise Scale Data

When Glenn Youngkin decided to run for the Republican nomination for Governor of Virginia, he was wading into a race with almost no name recognition, no political experience, and opponents who had plenty of both. But he knew he had what was needed to win: a lifetime of business experience building effective operations and a brilliant team with a fresh approach to winning campaigns.

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When choosing a tech stack to power his campaign, Glenn’s team of private sector professionals naturally chose to pass over the conventional campaign tools built by political operatives in favor of a powerful new campaign platform built by software engineers and data scientists from the top tech companies. 

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Enterprise-scale data lake

The first thing Numinar provided was a data lake: a single source of data across the entire organization that held their voter file, commercial file, delegate forms, field tags, survey responses, custom models, and donor records. The CRM provided a unified picture of all the campaign’s data and interactions with every voter across the state. Numinar tracked over 100,000 tags and 25,000 delegate forms and used that data to generate field reports, visualization dashboards, and advanced machine learning models. 

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Because it was a team of actual engineers, Numinar even helped develop custom functionality to meet the campaign’s needs. When the Field Director, Ken Nunnenkamp, asked for the ability to track aggregate statistics by region and identify high-performing volunteers, Numinar delivered the feature within 24 hours.

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Continuous message testing

Besides unifying the Youngkin campaign’s existing data, Numinar could even generate new data. With integrated self-service polling, Numinar sent out over 350,000 weekly call IVRs and 275,000 text surveys to ask primary voters what they cared about. 

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When Ken wanted to understand Glenn’s name ID, level of support, and convention turnout likelihood, he simply wrote his own questionnaire in Numinar’s survey builder and sent it out through Numinar’s call and text apps in a matter of minutes.

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With the results, Numinar trained predictive models in real-time for likely Glenn voters and likely convention attendees across the state. So when the campaign’s COO asked for voters outside the traditional convention universe, Numinar’s AI identified 66,000 additional possible delegates for Glenn outside the standard voter lists that all of the other candidates were using. 

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When he needed to understand what issues voters cared about, the AI identified Election Integrity as one of the biggest issues and provided the campaign a list of over 10,000 voters to send an Election Integrity-related mail campaign. 

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Integrated grassroots at scale 

While the Data team used Numinar to run surveys and build models at HQ, the Field team on the ground was using Numinar’s call, text, and canvassing apps to run a statewide grassroots operation. Over 250 campaign staffers and volunteers used Numinar’s integrated voter contact suite to recruit over 25,000 delegates. 

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In the field, Tom Goodson and Emmanuel Diosdado were responsible for training, organizing, and overseeing canvassers knocking doors across the state. Having used every canvassing app out there, they were pleasantly surprised by how intuitive the Numinar mobile app was. As they put it, Numinar was “very solid, easy to use, and one of the top apps we’ve seen. The team’s responsiveness was great and meant a lot.” 

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With this intensive ground game powered using Numinar’s integrated voter contact apps, collected tags could feed directly into Numinar’s data platform. The data from the field told an encouraging story: Glenn was a popular grassroots candidate from the very beginning despite initial polling and his position was only improving over time. By the week of the convention, the campaign had a 32% increase in vote share from the beginning, made possible by a smart, data-driven strategy and well oiled grassroots operations. 

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Winning a Decisive Victory 

By the week of the convention, Numinar had enabled them to identify the issues that mattered to voters, target segments of new voters who hadn’t historically participated, and reach Virginians across the state with Glenn’s unique message and candidacy. 

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After five rounds of ranked-choice voting, Glenn Youngkin was officially named the Republican nominee for Governor of Virginia. The Numinar AI predicted the outcome of this multi-way primary with a 2.1% margin of error. This was an incredibly accurate outcome. As Tom put it, “I cannot tell you how good your model was. It’s something for you guys to be proud of. I’ve done many of these projects and this was the best modeling I’ve ever seen.” 

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At the end, the Youngkin team won a hard-fought campaign, and did so in an innovative new way using innovative new technology. Their victory showed that even a political outsider could win with a smart, data-driven strategy and strong grassroots energy.