The Data Crunching Prowess of Barack Obama

Hugh Pickens writes "Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, writes that Barack Obama may be struggling in the polls and even losing support among his core boosters, but when it comes to the modern mechanics of identifying, connecting with and mobilizing voters, as well as the challenge of integrating voter information with the complex internal workings of a national campaign, Obama's data analysis team is way ahead of the Republican pack. Alone among the major candidates running for president, the Obama campaign not only has a Facebook page with 23 million 'likes' (roughly 10 times the total of all the Republicans running), it has a Facebook app that is scooping up all kinds of juicy facts about his supporters and inside the Obama operation, his staff members are using a powerful social networking tool called NationalField, which enables everyone to share what they are working on. 'The holy grail of data analysis is data harmonization, or master data management,' says Alex Lundry, a Republican data-mining expert at TargetPoint Consulting. 'To have political talking to finance and finance talking to field, and data is flowing back and forth and informing the actions of each other — it sounds easy, but it's incredibly hard to implement.' Sifry writes that if the 2012 election comes down to a battle of inches, where a few percentage points change in turnout in a few key states making all the difference, we may come to see Obama's investment in predictive modelers and data scientists as the key to victory."

Comments

Someone didn't do enough data collection...

[jeffmeden]

Disclaimer: I am NOT choosing sides in this post.

The notion that the Obama team is the only one in the prospective 2012 race to understand data mining and acting on numbers is pretty shallow. Rick Perry has a well documented (and apparently very well run) data mining team that he has used in the past and would no doubt use again in a presidential bid... More info here: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/rick-perrys-scientific-campaign-method/ and here: http://www.thevictorylab.com/ and in this E-book: http://www.amazon.com/Rick-Perry-His-Eggheads-ebook/dp/B005HE8ED4

Not Necessarily True

[Nova Express]

Rick Perry's campaign, for instance, is well-known for using social-science methods to rigorously test various campaign tools, including controlled experiments on what actually worked and what didn't.

As, as long as we're talking about Perry, you know that "Perry cut firefighters budgets" story that went around a month ago? It's not true. The Texas legislature authorized, and Perry signed, an 80% increase in wildfire fighting and prevention funding for the 2012-2013 biennium.

Re:Not Necessarily True

[TubeSteak]

Texas Republicans wanted to cut the firefighting budget before they moved to increase it.
Even your own article acknowledges that the original budget had big cuts.

It was a bit embarrassing that they wanted to slash budgets while the State was burning.

Because the debates aren't neutral now.

[khasim]

The "debates" are now hosted by the parties themselves instead of the League of Women Voters.

Control of the presidential debates has been a ground of struggle for more than two decades. The role was filled by the nonpartisan League of Women Voters (LWV) civic organization in 1976, 1980 and 1984. In 1987, the LWV withdrew from debate sponsorship, in protest of the major party candidates attempting to dictate nearly every aspect of how the debates were conducted.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_debates
So they're nothing more than a forum for the candidates to issue sound bites now.

Re:So which other candidate is better?

[rcb1974]

Ron Paul doesn't want to do any of that stuff you mentioned.

Re:All this shows

[Nimey]

Ah, someone modded me flamebait. Let me back up those assertions:

1) http://instinctmagazine.com/blogs/blog/herman-cain-asks-for-the-science-behind-believing-being-gay-is-not-a-choice

2) http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/herman-cain-doubles-down-on-his-muslim-loyalty-oath-idea/

3) http://news.yahoo.com/cain-wall-street-protesters-blame-yourself-joblessness-031405246.html

They all want to shove religion down my throat...

[tjstork]

It's just a matter of picking my poison. If I vote left, I get some jackass preaching about saving mother earth and we're all in some syrupy Star Wars Force binding us all together, so I have to give up my money in the name of the cause and join in the mission to get rid of the evil right. If I vote right, I get some jackass preaching about saving culture and we're all god's children, so I have to give up my money in the name of the cause and join in the mission to get rid of the evil left.

Re:So which other candidate is better?

[Machtyn]

Frankly, I see several of the candidates promising to reduce government spending and I only see a few that are wearing religion on their sleeves. Romney is not one of them - in fact, any time he is asked about his religion he side steps the question. That topic has been hashed over plenty by Huckabee in 2008.

Re:So which other candidate is better?

[HBI]

That's so silly that I have a hard time believing that you believe it.

Many evangelical Christians don't even consider Catholics to be Christian, citing the icons and saint worship as idolatrous and polytheistic. They also don't like the liturgy and the pomp of the services.

Gingrich's move was hardly a pragmatic political move, except inasmuch as no one is getting elected as a Republican as an atheist. He had to have a religion so he chose the one his wife liked. I'm sure he believes in a personal God, but I hardly can see him as any kind of religious freak.