As anyone in marketing can tell you, lists are critical pieces of information for anyone doing outreach. They allow you to segment out your contacts into easily identifiable groups and micro-target to those groups specifically. Lets take for example something REI might do.
Say you have a group of young women, 18-35 who are interested in camping. REI would take their massive contact list and break that down to these 18-35 year old women, and send them information that might get them to purchase something — say a tent.
They might further break it down to locale — say women in Washington are more interested in winter sleeping bags than summer ones — great, send them an email about the different specials going on.
You now have a very specific list of individuals that responds well to what you send them, and allows you to better serve their needs or sway their opinions.
This is why lists are an essential tool for any campaign — profit oriented or otherwise, and why what Bernie did was so egregious. What their campaign did this week was essentially take the heart of the Clinton operation.
Both Bernie and Clinton have access to the same contact lists, but each have different information layered on top of it. Clinton’s campaign has literally spent millions on that data — through volunteers, through fellow, through staff hours and things besides — money and time that Sanders did not have access to, things that would confer her an advantage in the primary.
Jeff Weaver took the shortcut. Instead of simply investing in their own operations, they layered Clinton’s over their own. They exploited this bug in a way no other campaign did. Sanders found out what makes Clinton’s voters tick. What they like. What they don’t like. Whether they can be counted on to support her. Whether they might be turned. The Sanders camp spent 40 minutes rifling around in Clinton’s data, setting up lists of their own that they now retain.
This is beyond the pale of any candidate. It is theft, and an egregious one. And now we have Kossacks raising money in Sanders defense. And in defense of Sanders — it doesn’t seem that he knew about it until Debbie Wasserman Schultz told him about it.
This is a horrendous violation of campaign privacy, and one that should not be rewarded in any single way, shape, or form. That this behavior is rewarded is incorrigible.