Our election campaigns should be more like Germany's

On the most technical level is the fact that the campaign, by U.S. standards, was fleetingly short and bargain-basement cheap. No surprise there, except the magnitude of the financial gulf. Merkel spent about $27 million, mostly in public funds, during the six-week campaign — and that was for the entire slate of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU). By contrast, the Obama reelection campaign alone spent $700 million — not including extra cash from the party or outside groups.

More surprising, as emerged in the course of a visit organized by the German Marshall Fund, was the relative absence of the modern arsenal of high-tech campaign weaponry. It has become common for other countries to import the techniques and even the operatives of U.S. political campaigns, but the German way is creakily old-fashioned.

The notion of data-driven micro-targeting is offensive to Germans, for whom the idea that a political party would purchase information about voters’ preferences and behaviors evokes an unwelcome history of overbearing government. Even the most rudimentary of information — voters’ party preferences and records of participation — is unavailable here.