WASHINGTON — Months before the first primaries, Jeb Bush and his allies are building a data-driven operation to turn out voters in the general election much later — spending heavily on the assumption he will overcome his sluggish start and win the Republican presidential nomination.
It’s a strategy aimed at avoiding a 2016 repeat of the GOP’s glaring deficiencies in using technology to get their supporters to vote four years ago. But it already has hit a roadblock.
Bush and his advisers have abandoned plans to link some of the technology efforts of his formal campaign and an allied super PAC by contracting with a single company. That firm could have provided both groups with the same data on the electorate from which to work — from names and addresses of voters to their hobbies and number of children.
The developments — the plans and the backtracking — illustrate the ambitions and limitations of Bush’s 2016 experiment to expand the role of his super PAC beyond paying for television advertising and into work traditionally performed by campaigns. The value of such data will grow significantly in the general election, when the number of voters Bush would need to motivate grows from tens of thousands to tens of millions.
