Latin America will follow US campaign trends
Separate from the questions of who wins and their policies, the tactics and technology in US political campaigning often impacts Latin America in future elections
Latin American citizens have an enormous interest in the US election. I expect in the months ahead I’ll have a few posts looking at the new administration, its policies towards the region and the impact on security, trade, democracy and the economy.
The newsletter today is less about who will win in the US and more about the impact of the campaign itself on Latin American political tactics and strategy. Due to the sheer amount of money involved and the presence of some cutting edge technology firms, US campaign trends are often leading indicators for how Latin American campaigns will change in the cycles to come.
Voter targeting technology is moving quickly
Latin American campaigns have a lot of room for improvement in terms of how they track supporters, opponents and undecided voters. The best campaign strategists in Latin America have traditionally been focused on media and advertising rather than voter mobilization and strategic targeting of individual persuadable voters. In some ways, this makes sense given higher voter turnout in the region (GOTV efforts have less impact when 80-90% of voters show up instead of 50-60%). At the same time, the improvements and technology for voter targeting in US campaigns can be transferred to the region’s campaigns. It can also have an impact on private sector efforts to win over customers.
As one example, the Trump campaign was able to track the cell phones of supporters who attended rallies via their own app and via other ad targeting technologies that are sold on the market. In the coming years, there will be plenty of discussions of government regulations of those technologies both in the US and in Latin America. Barring some sort of large-scale regulation that looks unlikely, that sort of tracking and targeting effort is likely to make its way to Latin American campaigns.
New polling and prediction models will emerge
While live-caller polls remain the gold standard among the best pollsters in the US, they are also really expensive and response rates are dropping. The US campaign has seen an increase in innovative options (accelerated by the pandemic) for polling including online polls done with systematic sampling and continuous panels that track changes in voter and citizen sentiment. Some of these efforts will turn out to be quite accurate while others will be big misses or may take a few cycles to calibrate.
Latin America has seen the beginning of online polling efforts, but they have been hampered by poor samples and a systemic bias against rural and poor areas. That is something that is likely to change in the coming election cycles.
As with voter targeting technology, Cheaper and better polling has secondary effects beyond politics, with private sector interests in marketing and advertising likely benefitting.
Along with polling, more and better prediction modeling is coming to Latin America. The last few cycles in elections in Latin America have seen an increase in polling aggregators and the start of prediction modeling along the lines of 538 in the US (for a contrary opinion about the utility of these models, see this Zeynep Tufekci op-ed). While the public impact will be seen in the media coverage of campaigns, there is a large private impact in terms of investors and betting markets.
Fighting disinformation in the US will impact Latin American campaigns
The presence of both foreign and domestic disinformation is not new. It played a critical role in the 2016 US election and I spent a lot of time in 2018 covering it in various Latin American elections.
The 2020 US election has seen a public debate about disinformation and the role of social media companies in spreading and stopping it. Some public officials, top campaign strategists, and media outlets have had their accounts frozen or warning labels placed on specific items. In response, the US Congress has demanded answers from the executives of those companies and new regulations may emerge out of this election.
The regulations and internal compliance efforts by those US-based social media companies will have effects on how they monitor and restrict disinformation in the coming Latin American election cycles. The US regulations and norms end up playing a big role on how those same companies will add warning labels, freeze or block accounts, limit viral sharing and regulate political advertising during the Latin American campaigns.
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