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

All this shows

[Anonymous Coward]

Is he's good at campaigning. Nobody has ever disputed that nor has he stopped campaigning since he won. He still sucks at presidenting.

Re:All this shows

[Nursie]

And call me old fashioned, but wasn't politics supposed to be about politicians spelling out their policies and views, and us voting for someone whose principles and policies we agree with? You know, a process with some integrity?

Not a whole bunch of refinements based on popular opinion until there's nothing left but a living, breathing popularity poll....

Maybe I'm just naive.

Re:All this shows

[rolfwind]

And call me old fashioned, but wasn't politics supposed to be about politicians spelling out their policies and views

I would say, that for the period I've been alive, that the less politicians show of their beliefs, the more advantageous it is for them. They can be amiable and pretend to agree with you and be just as nice to the next guy with completely different viewpoints. The less they show their cards, the less people can pick out something to pick a fight with.

With the exception of Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, you'll have very few politicians spelling out where they stand and more just dance around it. Listen to debates or townhalls these days, or even past ones - they're an embarrassment. These people should be publicly bitch slapped every time they dance around the question, outright ignore it, or some other scheme where they pander to the electorate without actually really addressing the question. But they get away with it, people reward them with votes, and then bitch afterwards, which is meaningless.

Re:All this shows

[Anonymous Coward]

Because "has views different from you" does not mean "traitor"?

There are complete dickbags on both sides. Being dickbags alone does not make them traitors.

Re:Interesting...

[MightyMartian]

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.

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.

Facebook likes are not enough

[kidcharles]

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.

Re:So which other candidate is better?

[rcb1974]

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

Re:So which other candidate is better?

[anopres]

Romney, Huntsman and Gingrich should challenge Obama in the Democratic primary.

Re:Interesting...

[fermion]

The thing to remember is that there is only a small percentage of people who are going to vote for the person. In Texas perry won against a strong fiscal conservative because, even though has shown he is fiscally irresponsible and more interested in himself than running the state, Perry is the conservative christian candidate. I know many people who were going to vote for White, who were essentially pushed by their republican christian peers to vote for Perry. Texas as a whole does not have enough independent voters and districts to elect a person based on who they are.

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.