The stealthy, Eric Schmidt-backed startup that’s working to put Hillary Clinton in the White House

An under-the-radar startup funded by billionaire Eric Schmidt has become a major technology vendor for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, underscoring the bonds between Silicon Valley and Democratic politics.

The Groundwork, according to Democratic campaign operatives and technologists, is part of efforts by Schmidt—the executive chairman of Google parent-company Alphabet—to ensure that Clinton has the engineering talent needed to win the election. And it is one of a series of quiet investments by Schmidt that recognize how modern political campaigns are run, with data analytics and digital outreach as vital ingredients that allow candidates to find, court, and turn out critical voter blocs.

The 2012 [Obama] campaign’s analytics team constructed a complex model of the electorate to identify 15 million undecided voters that could be swayed to Obama’s side. They drew on databases which compiled a comprehensive record of voters’ interactions with the campaign—Facebook pages liked, volunteer contacts, events attended, money donated—and assigned them a score based on how strongly they supported Obama.

Democratic political operatives and technologists … tell Quartz that the Groundwork has been tasked with building the technological infrastructure to ingest massive amounts of information about voters, and develop tools that will help the [2016 Clinton] campaign target them for fundraising, advertising, outreach, and get-out-the-vote efforts—essentially to create a political version of a customer relationship management (CRM) system, like the one that Salesforce.com runs for commerce, but for prospective voters.

Campaigns, companies, and governments are assigning us scores and ratings for everything. They're building models of our personalities and psyches and refining algorithms to evaluate our relative worth to them and predict our behavior.

What's in those "massive amounts of information" about voters that The Groundwork is capturing? When it comes to data collection, we know that places like Google, Amazon, or Facebook know no restraint. How much of what we do and say on political sites is being watched and by whom, with or without knowledge or cooperation of owners?

At some point $177,000 from the Clinton campaign is going to seem like small change for such a valuable tool. Modified versions of tools in this vein are well-suited for surveillance. Marketed to Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other repressive regimes, they can be the subject of contracts worth millions or even billions.

Other prospective customers:
China — got to hone the back-end that generates that citizen score?
Israel — except they'll probably already have gotten it, by hook (Congress passes a law giving it to them for free) or crook (see Jonathan Pollard and Larry Franklin)