A Tale of Two Parties: How Big Data is Polarizing the Country

Emmeline Adkins

ea107017@ohio.edu

 

Big Data, much like how it sounds, refers to massive amounts of data and information, which, due to today's technological capabilities, is growing larger every minute. However, according to the Statistical Analysis System (SAS) Institute, "it's not the amount of data that's important...it's what organizations do with the data that matters." Nowadays, of course, organizations don't have to just mean companies looking to advertise to you, but it can also mean political candidates trying to sell themselves to you.

The problem with Big Data entering the political stage is not necessarily how much information campaign teams have on voters and their interests, but as the SAS Institute said, it's what they do with it. One might think politicians are doing something stereotypically slimy or conniving with the American people's information, but it's a bit more logical than that. The data collected on voters is turned into an advertisement of sorts, but instead of commercial breaks, you're being advertised to every time a politician opens their mouth. Now, politics and campaigns have always been this way, but we have never had politicians and campaign teams possessing this much data on voters in our history, which makes a big difference in how candidates conduct themselves now.

Before Big Data was there to provide the wants of every single American, candidates didn't know everything about their voters and created platforms based off of, generally, what it looked like America needed, what Americans told them they needed, and their own personal beliefs. Americans don't have to tell politicians what they need anymore, and the data being collected is more than Americans would have offered on their own as before. Now, platforms are precisely tailored to the data, which has become an issue as politicians have sought to appeal to more and more radical voters than ever before. In doing so, they have polarized the two party system so profoundly and almost consistently look over the moderates and centrists of their party.

During the 2020 Presidential Election, this was most prominent. One one hand, there was the Democratic Party candidate, Joe Biden, who could not state for sure what his plans were for the future of fracking and natural gas. He was too afraid to polarize his voters from Pennsylvania who receive economic benefits from the business, but too afraid to upset the progressive voters who back the Green New Deal and banning fracking. This created a sort of ambiguous climate platform for him where he would talk about not banning fracking yet he included the Green New Deal on his campaign website. Ultimately, this wasn't new information to progressive voters that Biden wasn't as progressive a politician as someone like Bernie Sanders, but it caused a distrust among the moderate Democrats and centrists.

Photo taken from BBC

On the other side of the political divide was Republican incumbent Donald Trump, who, when asked to outright condemn white supremacy on a national stage, could not without a shadow of a doubt do so. Why? It's a simple matter; he has the endorsement of the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, as well as other nationalist groups such as the Proud Boys, who he even told to "stand by." As former Republican Senator, Rick Santorum said (as quoted in The Atlantic), the moderator of the presidential debate, "was asking the president to do something he knows the president doesn't like to do, which is to say something bad about the people who support him."

The unfortunate effect that Big Data has on the American political stage is more and more candidates are neglecting the needs of moderates in favor of catering to the radicals--even catering to the radicals who are historically violent bigots, something most presidents before this time would not have dared to do in such a public manner. All this being said, there isn't much to do, exactly, about Big Data except to stay informed of how your information is being used to shape the country and even how it is actively being used, in some cases, against you.