You’re reading it here first: Joe Clements could well be Florida’s Nate Silver, a political data guru with the creativity to make it matter.
While you may not know him by name, if you work in Florida campaigns you’ve probably been touched by his data — or certainly will be.
Joe runs Decision Media Works, a data visualization group that asks (and receives) interesting questions and maps out answers in a way that few others seek to do.
Like, what tailgate cities in Florida have the highest rates of fender benders? (Tallahassee, by a lot). Do higher ratios of concealed carry permits in Florida mean higher rates of violent crime? (Actually, the opposite). Does the number of draft picks taken in a year predict the number of wins the team has that season? (Not for FSU, and barely for UF or UM). And, how does the rise of voting-age Millennials matter for Florida legislative representation? (That’s a big ouch for Republicans).
To Joe, the challenge is not how to derive value from data, but how to share it with others.
“Most people are awash in data right now. What they don’t know how to do is ask questions of the data, or extract value,” Joe explained in a Saint Petersblog exclusive. “If they’re looking at their data at all, they are looking at it descriptively, asking how many men or women do this or that. But that doesn’t begin to touch on the dimensions possible.”
A perfect example: the classic campaign question of “how much do I need to raise to win?” Historically, political consulting has been a gut business, driven by rules of thumb such as “raise what the last guy did.”
Joe’s approach? To collect about 100 variables of data for each House and Senate district in Florida, going back at least a decade, and using these data, create district-specific models to determine which factors and fundraising ratios will best predict success on Election Day.
“A lot of the stuff that is becoming popular in politics now has been around in academia for decades,” Joe explains. “But most don’t know how to do it or how to interpret what they see.”
The fruits of these labors are already in action. Joe, through partnership with ContributionLink maestro Brecht Heuchan, developed these complex models as a tool that ContributionLink uses to advise clients on empirically-based fundraising strategies.
Joe, a native of Kentucky and graduate of Wellington High in Palm Beach, was a Truman and Rhodes scholar nominee at the University of North Florida and is completing graduate coursework in political management and computer science Florida State.
But it is Joe’s experience in political campaigns and in the Legislature that best informs his style: relevance.
“Questions answered. Tough decisions made easier,” the Decision Media Works website reads. And he isn’t stingy with his insights.
Instead, Joe offers web visitors and his email subscribers regular glimpses of the latest in Florida political data. Coming soon, Joe is releasing a Data Intelligence Briefing that describes what looks to be a fairly dramatic shift in “swing districts” by 2018. By analyzing top-of-the-ticket performance in every House and Senate district, Joe suggests we’ll see partisan areas becoming more partisan in the coming years, but with the middle shifting a bit more to the left. Overall this will mean a greater number of districts of interest to both parties, particularly as incumbents term out over the next three cycles.
More political competition means more need for data; and more data — collected, modeled and interpreted soundly — means that political resources can be directed where they’ll matter the most.
Karen Cyphers, PhD, is a public policy researcher, political consultant, and mother to three daughters. She can be reached at [email protected].
