The 632,650 people who will decide the election

With only days to go until Australia heads to the polls, Oliver Rees crunches the data to find out where the parties should focus their last campaigning, in a piece that first appeared in Encore.

Of all the major issues and topics this Federal election, it’s not carbon tax, leader-knifing, misogyny or boat people that holds the key. It’s crime. And footy.

Let me explain. We all inherently know that most elections are only decided by a small number of people, but in the era of advanced data analytics, we have  the opportunity to understand exactly who those people are and how to reach them to make a real difference in this final week of the election.

Imagine for a moment instead of political parties these are brands and they are fighting like hell to reach quarterly sales targets and there’s only a week to go. What should they do?