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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."
Is he's good at campaigning. Nobody has ever disputed that nor has he stopped campaigning since he won. He still sucks at presidenting.
Or, you need the opposing party to pick a lunatic. With the Tea Party and the religious conservatives in the GOP trying to smash Romney to bits at every opportunity, the possibility that the Republicans may in fact deliver Obama is victory cannot be discounted.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
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.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
When the President is re-elected, it will be because he's still far more charismatic and interesting than any current Republican contenders. I don't like his politics but I like him more than Romney, Perry, et al.
Are you honestly saying that the Presidential campaign is nothing but a popularity contest which has nothing to do with the merit of their respective political views or actions? I am... totally not shocked, actually. The presidential campaign has become more or less just a popularity contest. Although I'm pretty sure that increasing his appeal to voters is precisely the point of this campaign.
Which is somewhat sad. The only reason data mining like this is useful is if you intend to modify your political basis towards what is popular. In other words, you aren't electing someone based on what their views are, you elect them based on what they think your views are. Frankly, I would rather politicians actually just came out and said what their views are... but apparently, that can't happen anymore. No, politicians will now be elected based on how well they can adapt themselves to what Internet commentators say. That seems to me to be the point of Obama's campaign tools, anyways. Unfortunately, this does not make for good presidential candidates. Good presidents tend to know themselves what needs to be done and do what they think is right, not what the masses think. Because honestly? The masses are idiots, no matter how intelligent they may be individually.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Now, if he hadn't spent the last 2.5 years largely doing exactly the opposite of what he campaigned on, angering his base to no end, he might be able to make better use of all of that data management. No amount of carefully worded campaign e-mails are going to convince me to vote for a President who has normalized extra-judicial assassinations of American citizens by the CIA.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Ron Paul doesn't want to do any of that stuff you mentioned.
Romney, Huntsman and Gingrich should challenge Obama in the Democratic primary.
Strong Mad - 2008: "I PRESIDENT!"
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.
This is my sig.
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.
> 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.
Does anyone else find this a little creepy?
In any case, I think the team may be making an assumption that will skew the numbers. They're not really measuring Obama supporters, they're measuring Obama supporters who are stupid enough to enter the security scorpion pit that is Facebook apps. This has to be a smaller, less technically minded subset of Obama's actual supporters.
Doesn't it?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Forgot to mention his statement on the pre-decided guilt of Bradley Manning, whom the commander-in-chief has illegally kept in jail when he is supposed to be granted a speedy courts-martial. And negative, Obama, the banksters did break the law: many millions of times over in filing millions of false affidavits (that equals millions of felonies) and falsely filing wrongful IRS reports (in violation of tax-exempt REMIC status), and millions of violations of Article 3 of the Uniform Commerical Code.
Likewise, there is a large block that will always vote for the republican candidate even if he is an adulterer, or a drug addict, or porn star, or a tax collector, as long as he says he is a christian conservative now. There is a large block that will always vote for the democratic candidate even if he supports taxing the poor into oblivion. The key then is to identify the districts that enough independent voters to make a difference. Alternatively one can register voters that otherwise would not vote because they know that it really makes no difference. Either party is going to steal from the poor and give to the rich, as was shown with the car bailout that was supported by Bush and Obama.
So the republicans can often win just by, like Perry and Romney do and Bush and Reagan did, pretending to be christian and conservative and racking in the votes. Pray, thank god, tell a teary story, and rake in the cash. However democrats actually have to do work, find the key districts, get the people registered, convince them that helping others is the best way to help themselves(do unto others as you would have them...) and hope that one can squeak by. Obama did a masterful job of this, and, along with the help of Palin, won many districts. This time he will not likely have the help of people like Palin, or Bachman, and at the point of the real election no one will saying Romney is not a christian, so it will be a harder election.
The election, if won by Obama, will be won on the margins, district by district, registering voters in key states. If you do not believe this, then why are republicans making it harder to register voters rather than easier? If one says to prevent voter fraud, then one has drank the republican kool aid and really mean nothing to either party. There are not enough fundamentalist to win an election, so fundamentalist have no individual power.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
ignorant? Ron Paul was a physician. Not only that, but an OB. He's hardly ignorant of reality on this issue.
My stance is that abortion IS slavery. The life of the child is 100% subject to the whim of the mother. Just as the life of the slave was subject to the whim of the owner. Further, if released from bondage, a slave's natural state was to become a free individual, as just a few months down the road, the child's natural state would also be as a free individual. Both enter the state of slavery through no fault of their own, and both had societies at large capable of absorbing them.
The problem arises when you try and narrow down a range of acceptability for the culling of the child. That child might be just a few cells large, but fetal viability fast approaches and the time for making the decision passes quickly. The point is that the state should be the body that decides at what point the process can occur, if at all, or where viability is marked. Most states do limit the activity, but they're restricted from eliminating it completely (except presumably for medical necessity) by the federal law.
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.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.