Archive for May, 2010

Demzilla is the name given to the 2004 Democratic Party database. The purpose of the database was to amass as much information about potential voters as possible. The goal was to use that information to ensure that the Party’s message reached the right people in the right way, in advertising or fundraising efforts.

Prior to the appearance of Demzilla, the Democratic Party database reportedly contained about 70,000 names, an extremely low number considering the 50 million who voted for Al Gore in 2000.

The Republicans had a similar database, dubbed The Voter Vault. Demzilla is no longer in use, having been replaced by the VoteBuilder system in 2006.

The Democratic Party’s data movement began in the early 2000′s with the development of the now defunct Demzilla. Before Demzilla the Democratic Party’s data collection efforts were very limited and consisted primarily of a database that held names and contact information on some 70,000 voters.

With Demzilla came the true power of knowledge. Each of the 150 million plus names in the database contained upwards of 200-400 bits of information. Race, gender, email address, family member names were all entered into the system. The GOP has a similar system, The Voter Vault.

Since Demzilla, the Democrats have moved on to other, bigger and presumably better data mining systems, but it all started with Demzilla.

Most people understand the concept of demographic analysis. Watch any show on the Disney channel, and you will realize that the advertisements shown there are drastically different than the ads on Oxygen. Political parties are no different.

After the 2000 elections, the Democratic party began developing its first sophisticated database called Demzilla. This program was fully in place by the 2004 election season, and allowed them to collect and analyze all kinds of information on voters, everything from standard biographical information such as race, gender, etc. to more personal data such as your email address.

The suburban mom in Pennsylvania received very different Democratic Party advertisements than the businesswoman from Detroit in 2004, and that’s thanks to Demzilla.

When Terry McAuliffe took over the reins of the DNC in the early 2000′s, he knew that he needed to have an easy way to identify and reach democrats. Enter Demzilla, the multi-million, multi-name database that held the names and contact information on democrats throughout the nation, from the highest level of state chairmen to the local city aldermen.

Demzilla made it possible for fundraising efforts to be made by the flip of a virtual rolodex, and made targeted advertising much more effective by analyzing demographics in a more sophisticated manner.