The opportunities and limits of microtargeting cross-pressured voters
2026-03-17
Technological advancements have ushered in the promise of targeting potentially persuadable voters with personalized messages. One class of persuadable voters is those who are cross-pressured: they identify with one party but agree with policy positions of another. For political campaigns, targeting cross-pressured voters usually involves working with commercial vendors to infer voters’ party identity and policy positions. The effectiveness of microtargeted messages thus depends on the accuracy of those predictions. We analyze the accuracy of a leading US commercial vendor’s predicted policy positions using an original 2017 survey ( N = 397) asking voters their actual positions on 20 issues. We find a strong negative relationship between cross-pressure and predictive accuracy, at both the issue- and individual-level. Issues on which voters are cross-pressured are predicted with less accuracy. And the percentage of correct inferences about a voter’s positions decreases the more cross-pressured they are. While persuadable voters are a valuable target, reaching them is complicated by the difficulty in predicting their party-atypical stances.