Can Data Mining Win a Presidential Campaign?

Nerval's Lobster writes "According to the Associated Press, Mitt Romney's campaign has contracted consumer-analytics firm Buxton Co. to drill deep into consumer data, with the aim of digging up 'wealthy and previously untapped' donors. (Romney digital director Zac Moffatt told political Website Politico as far back as June that the Romney campaign would 'outsource' its data analytics rather than develop the necessary infrastructure in-house.) In addition to hooking the digital side of their campaign to the Facebook data hose, Obama's election managers have hired a mix of digital directors, software engineers and statistics experts. 'Obama for America is looking for Quantitative Media Analysts, Analytics Engineers, Battleground States Elections Analysts and Modeling Analysts,' reads a want ad on the campaign's Website. The goal: to create data processing pipelines, integrate new data into models, build tools, and generate reports. In an election this close, with a rapidly shrinking number of undecided voters and contested states, a razor-thin advantage created by data analytics could mean the difference between success and failure."

Comments

Re:An election this close?

[bzipitidoo]

a close race is good, it means both sides will go out and vote more.

Participation is good, and insofar as a close race raises participation, that's good. But I don't agree that a close race is necessarily good, not when one side has gone bonkers. I'd like to see the Republicans put out of everyone's misery, and replaced with another party, they're so damned crazy anymore.

Republicans have fallen a long, long way from the party of Lincoln, the party that stood proudly against slavery, while the Democrats talked of maintaining the status quo and trying to compromise, of wimpily avoiding the horrors of war at all costs. Would've been nice if the slavery issue could have been resolved without a savage war. The South knew they could not win if the North was determined, yet they started the war anyway, vainly hoping the North would back down. That was never going to happen, not after the first battles threw the North's manhood into doubt!

There was a time when the Republicans were the sober, prudent, well grounded, fiscal conservatives, firmly tied to facts and sound scientific reasoning, and the Democrats were the woolly thinking, misty-eyed fools would thought they could do such things as declare and win a War on Poverty. Those were Republicans I could vote for.

Now the Republicans are the delusional fools. They paint a seemingly lovely picture of the way the world and America was, and seem unable to face reality and the present. They act like it's still the 1950s, still Happy Days. Nice fantasy, for older white men perhaps, but dangerously wrong. But they press on, favoring actions based upon the thought that 1950's America is still with us now. They've cranked up the production of delusional "facts" to frightful levels. They've turned against the very science they used to cherish, becoming scarily contemptuous of it. This denial of Global Warming is just one of many anti-science efforts they've sullied themselves with. Even on fiscal matters, they've blown it. The War of Choice in Iraq was a huge, huge expense. They refuse to consider any kind of health care whatsoever, even those plans that would reduce all our expenses and get us better health care. They won't hear of even just closing tax loopholes to solve these budget issues that have so exercised them lately. They don't say it outright, but what they promise is to take America back to the paradise of the 1950s, if only we will elect them. The most damnable thing is, that in many ways the world of today is way, way better than those "good" old days they recall so fondly. I'm not crazy about the Democrats, but voting for this screwball Republican party is absolutely out of the question.