Parties Are Tracking Your Habits

But in the weeks before election day 2004, the suburban mother of two was deluged with telephone calls, invitations and specially targeted mailings urging her to support President Bush.

The intense Republican courtship of Hill, 39, was no coincidence.

A deeper look at her lifestyle and politics reveals a voter who might be persuaded to switch sides. Among the clues: she is a church member uneasy about abortion; she lives in a growing suburb and she sent her children to a private school.

Hill and millions of other would-be Bush backers in closely contested states were identified by a GOP database that culled information ranging from the political basics, like party registration, to the personal, such as the cars they drive, the drinks they buy, even the features they order on their phone lines. The "micro-targeting" effort was so effective that the party credited it with helping to secure Bush's reelection.

In Ohio, which tipped the election to Bush, the Republican strategy helped boost African American support for the president by seven percentage points over his 2000 performance, securing the state for the president. It drew millions of Republican voters to the polls in every battleground state.

Nationally, Republicans said, the targeting produced a 10 percentage point increase for Bush among evangelicals, nine points among Latinos, four points in big cities, three points in labor-union households and five points among Catholics -- all groups that were wooed by both parties.

Both parties have long collected information on voters. But the sophistication of the GOP effort is now so clearly superior that it has given Republicans an edge in an area that had been a Democratic strength: identifying sympathetic voters and getting them to the polls.

Democrats will be especially vulnerable in the next two national election cycles: In 2006, they will have to defend more congressional and Senate seats than they did in 2004; and several states viewed as competitive in past presidential elections are increasingly viewed as GOP turf for 2008.