Carving up the electorate

The big news coming out in the aftermath of the 2012 election is the use by both national campaigns of data mining, using ways to slice and dice the voters into ever smaller, more digestible bites, separating us into smaller and smaller parts.  While the Obama campaign certainly won the battle, both camps (and now many others) are using the technology. 

If success is defined by winning the election, we know the outcome.  But I wonder if we are losing something here.  While I understand the suspicion of "grand narratives" by current post-modern thinkers, I still wonder if we are missing a broader story of what it means to be American.  By breaking us into smaller pieces, by structuring a campaign's message around smaller groups of people and promising them "stuff" (just like retailers), are we not just fracturing into separate interest groups?  While I understand that some may say these groups already exist and all the campaigns were doing is recognizing the fact, by hard coding the separateness into a campaign we are legitimizing and encouraing the separation and losing what it means to be an American.

I'm not sure that's a good thing.