LAUSR

ABSTRACT The last decade has seen the meteoric rise of data campaigning as a central concern of political campaigns. This article offers insight into how journalists and political professionals construct practices of data campaigning as all-powerful despite the limited empirical findings to that effect. Specifically, this research delves into how journalistic coverage of campaigns’ use of data and analytics has often relied on inflated accounts of the objectivity of analytics, the belief that more data necessarily means more and better knowledge, and narratives of objective outsiders – notably geeks, hackers, nerds, and scientists – that situate analytics staffers as strange and different, and as uniquely qualified to access the truth. To do this, I engage in critical discourse analysis of popular coverage of data campaigning in the US in the years 2008–2016. Ultimately, denaturalizing these narratives helps reveal how they contribute to defining this “new” campaign strategy as fundamentally concerned with finding objective answers to solvable problems and are key to political professionals’ maintenance of organizational power.