Election campaigning and direct marketing If direct marketing tools works for commercial purposes, why should they not be used in election campaigns? Why not gain people's votes by political statements tailor-cut to suite the attitudes and values of a voter? The Republican Party of Missouri, USA, has already tried it out. As the Washington Post reported on 10 October, 2000, the party purchased personal data from the data body company TransUnion and fed them into a computer programme capable of inferring political likes and dislikes from the kind of social, demographic and economic data warehoused by TransUnion. The software is offered by Map Applications, Inc. and has already been successfully used by the arms lobbying group National Rifle Association. The logic of customised reality of direct marketing is finally beginning to directly affect the democratic process, the consumer merges with the citizen.

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