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The Data Crunchers Who Helped Win The Election
concealment sends in a story at Time that goes behind the scenes with the team of data crunchers that powered many of the Obama campaign's decisions in the lead-up to the election. From the article:
"For all the praise Obama's team won in 2008 for its high-tech wizardry, its success masked a huge weakness: too many databases. Back then, volunteers making phone calls through the Obama website were working off lists that differed from the lists used by callers in the campaign office. Get-out-the-vote lists were never reconciled with fundraising lists. It was like the FBI and the CIA before 9/11: the two camps never shared data. ... So over the first 18 months, the campaign started over, creating a single massive system that could merge the information collected from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers and consumer databases as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states. The new megafile didn't just tell the campaign how to find voters and get their attention; it also allowed the number crunchers to run tests predicting which types of people would be persuaded by certain kinds of appeals. Call lists in field offices, for instance, didn't just list names and numbers; they also ranked names in order of their persuadability, with the campaign's most important priorities first. About 75% of the determining factors were basics like age, sex, race, neighborhood and voting record. Consumer data about voters helped round out the picture. 'We could [predict] people who were going to give online. We could model people who were going to give through mail. We could model volunteers,' said one of the senior advisers about the predictive profiles built by the data. 'In the end, modeling became something way bigger for us in '12 than in '08 because it made our time more efficient.'"
creepy.
Plus he seemed to have lost a huge amount of the support he had in 2008.
Don't get me wrong: a win is a win... but looking at it objectively a sigh of relief is more appropriate than a cry of victory.
I don't get involved in politics these days, but I'm still registered as a Republican. As a consequence, I still get political calls and mail from time to time. The one thing I've noticed about how the GOP operates is that they make a lot of assumptions about what I think on various issues. It's like they cannot fathom that I might look at things a little bit differently than the party line. After reading this article, it makes me wonder if the GOP is out of touch with other voters who lean to the right.
It sounds like the Democrats have put a lot of effort into understanding their electorate.
Proverbs 21:19
Can we declare these people to be terrorists yet?
Voters should be checking out the candidates. Not the other way around.
Once people figure out how to do a certain something, other people can do it too.
than a president who understands technology and has been in charge of groups manipulating and using big data.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
....that candidates are winning elections via data mining versus appealing to people with ideas?
It seems like Wall Street's version of capitalism -- just focus on the numbers, not on making a newer widget, and we can manipulate our way to victory.
I know, you can make the argument that sending the right message to the people receptive that message will get you money, votes, whatever, but at the same time it seems cynical and manipulative. It doesn't seem like it's about developing leadership ideas that appeal to people generally and winning them over with charisma and the strength of your arguments.
I wonder how large this database was compared to Romney's Orca. http://washingtonexaminer.com/stunned-romney-supporters-struggle-to-explain-defeat/article/2512861#.UJqIxRh8zOU The article said the system crashed. I'm pretty sure that's the system Karl Rove was looking at when he was on Fox News trying to rebut their analysts' projection of an Obama victory in Ohio. http://www.mediaite.com/tv/karl-rove-causes-fox-news-chaos-by-challenging-obama-victory-projection/
...moving us closer and closer to psychohistory.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
/. editors! You should start to pull your hair out.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
they want you to vote 4 times
Works for me!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Fire up the President ClusterBot. May as well, the guy we got has as much charm and personality as a machine and is inspiring as a vacuum cleaner.
All Hail
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2012/11/cowards-lose.html
To save everyone else the trouble of falling for this AC's link-bait, the site above is nothing but the butthurt ramblings of a xenophobic loser.
The irony of the URL is not lost on me.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
... the data crunchers with the help of the spying on Americans and MSM entertainment control were able to figure out exactly how to manipulate many things to achieve the goal of what they were hired to do. To cause the voters to believe they actually voted the way it was said to have.
Fact is voter turnout was the lowest it has been at least as far back as prior to 1948 election perhaps further back.
Obama trailed at roughly under 1 million for most of the tally and then was approx 1.5 million behind Romney in popular vote when declared the winner.
So with less that 50% of eligible voters voting .....the people did not elect anyone. But hey it made for a sports style event with teh last minute tally comeback.
This was not a sports event!
Given the political bias I have seen on slashdot.... I do expect this to be moderated troll.... But that not like our election voting.... is it?
One of their callers let it slip what my "ranking" was. For some reason they think I'm a strong democrat. I'm not sure what they think that means because if the Republicans would ever get their act together and field a Strong Moderate Republican like Powell then I'd vote Republican. Instead they've taken the last decade purging out moderates and acting crazy. Someone failed to consolidate those database though. If they had done it right then they would know they called my home phone, and cell phone. You only have to confirm that I'm voting once, maybe twice. After that I ether am voting or I've been Joshing you. But no, I got about 13 calls from them. Each campaign needs to share data so I don't get inundated by the local legislature, house and presidential campaign. I can't imagine what actual battle ground states actually got since I'm in an area where the winner could have been called a year before the election.
.
Voting record? I thought we had secret ballots in this country and that no one is supposed to have access to individual voters' voting records? Do they mean simply registration records and if they voted in a particular election?
And it seemed worrisome that the government would tabulate this infomation on us so they outlawed it; then they found the loophole that while the gov't couldn't compile the data, private companies could, and then the gov't can look at the private companies' data and still proclaim they never broke the law. "Brave New World", indeed...
Obonga is gonna bankrupt this nation and let the mud races defile white women as your slavery reparations payment, too. Now that he has now political accountability you will see his true colors shine through.
Well, if the alternative is having the nation led by the people a bigoted simpleton like yourself would vote for, I'd say we came out ahead.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
And this doesn't frighten ANY of the privacy advocates here on slashdot? Were this any other government organization people would be screaming to the hills, so why is Obama given a free pass for this sort of privacy incursions?
tora
They care about winning, not getting it "right".
Government has gotten really good at screwing things up because that's all it's ever been good at. But keep voting for more of it and expecting a different result. Maybe one day the spaghetti will stick to the wall.
Lastly, If you have so much faith in humanity, what do you need so much government for?
This sure seems like. Profiling.
...that didn't know how to answer an iPhone, and then blamed the phone's owner?
It's nothing new and has been around for 20+ years. Anytime data is siloed in separate systems, you need to consider this technique.
All the worlds indeed a
This is why you stupid fucks lost.
This is why we no longer have a credible opposition party in America.
This is why we're all screwed.
That's great but Great Britain's like half the size of California (with just under twice the population .. 66mil in UK vs 37mil in CA according to wikipedia etc). There's one government, and it's local.
The US has lots of local governments (that often work quite well, and can recall, etc). The federal government OTOH oversees like 300 million people and a huge landmass.
As an ex-Catholic, this is exactly correct.
There are, I think, a variety of things that go into it. You're very conscious of your religion not being as relevant to the rest of the world as it used to.
Abortion is a Protestant, almost a Fundamentalist issue. You could get worked up about it, but you could get worked up about the Protestants too, but you could actually do what that Yeshua bar Yehosef guy said and shut the hell up about it.
Yes, only squeaked by. Almost 120 million people voted. If around 130,000 of those - ~50K in VA, ~55K in OH, and ~25K in Florida - had switched to Romney, the outcome would have been a Romney presidency. That's less than 1.5% of VA, less than 1.1% of OH, less than 0.4% of FL, and less than 0.011% of the national vote.
Nate Silver tried hard to correct your misconception:
And a close election is what we had. That the outcome could be predicted with fairly good certainty doesn't mean it wasn't close.
Actually the Republicans didn't have a chance in hell.
Romney was actually by far the best they had to offer, probably the best overall since Ike. And that's saying something.
And Obama had managed to piss off a shitload of liberals and moderates, in fact he's a moderate wuss.
The problem is the extreme right: Tea Party, Republican Theocrats, and Libertarians have pissed off people even more than Obama has. I'm really surprised that Romney made as good a showing as he did.
The Conservative nutters picked up a few seats in the House, obviously due to gerrymandering, because they lost seats in the senate, something they really can't gerrymander. And that's where the truth shows.
http://www.redstate.com/2012/11/07/about-tuesdays-loss-if-the-archangel-michael-were-on-the-ballot-beelzebub-would-still-have-won/
Organization, Organization and more Organization.
Thanks AC and I think you just made a valid point.
I kind of prefer the refreshing taste of straight-up racism. Much more honest than the veiled and coded kind that every GOP voter (apart from the ones like you) subscribes to.
I imagine that their database helped determine who needed a taxpayer-paid-for-lift to the polls. http://www.redstate.com/briansikma/2012/11/06/federal-job-corps-vans-used-to-bus-voters-in-wisconsin/
The "focus on the numbers" and "fix the perception so we look like we're winning" is the same as:
.
Lowering your cholesterol number by taking a drug like Lipitor. Instead of fixing the problem with diet (eat better food, stop eating the junky fatty food, eat only as much food as needed) and exercise (exercise more, don't sit down in front of the tv so much), people have found a magic pill that lowers your cholesterol reading but does not do anything to actually make your health better.
.
Yes, the drug lowers your cholesterol number, but it doesn't decrease your risk of heart attacks or the risk of any of the bad diseases associated with high cholesterol. Hmmm... So it makes you feel better by giving you a better score? Hey, let's give everybody an "A" so they're all smarter! Hey, let's give everybody an award for being on the softball team instead of actaully giving awards for real achievement.
If you've already got a population that's willing to accept
-- fake awards without earning/deserving them and to accept
-- fakey medical test results that don't really improve their health, then that's the kind of population that will believe anything you tell them in order to get them to vote for you.
Who would have thought that Donald Trump reads Slashdot?
I wish I could say more... yes.
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'
You know what everybody wants: lots of free loot and they want their neighbors to stop living in ways that they don't approve of (a pony is optional but appreciated by the kids). And they want all of that without paying for it themselves and without any restrictions on their own liberties.
And the solution is also simple: as a politician, you pass laws giving people free loot, pay for it by borrowing money (preferably from other countries), and then leave your successor to worry about the mess you made. And if you're really good at it, you manage to deceive both the voters and yourself with talk of "trickle down economics" or "Keynesian stimulus", because that sounds so much better than "corruption" and "buying votes". For particular speaking engagements, you throw in a little ideology like "Christianity" or "progressivism" (all these ideologies are pretty much interchangeable) and get the supporters all riled up with a little demonization of the other guys. Romney and Obama were both equally good at this kind of deception and self-deception, and thus they split the vote pretty evenly.
You don't need high tech to figure this out.
Over the course of the 3 or 4 weeks leading up to the election, I received 7 phone calls from Obama's organization asking for "Anthony". My name is Jim. There never has been an "Anthony" with this phone number, at least not in the last 7 years. Despite my repeated pleas to remove the number from their list, they continued to call - the last being about 7PM Monday. The last caller told me that she had no way of correcting the problem. I hope the administration is up to greater challenges than a simple database update.
And so the 2016 presidential election machine generated gamma waves — those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory — never before reported in neuro- and political sciences — and it called itself the Skynet.
"and voting records"???
Aside from party affiliation from registration records, which says nothing about whom the voter actually voted for in the Nov election, just HOW did the DNC get a hold of individual voting records?
Is the secret ballot a myth?
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Breitbart.com has a story about the Romney Get Out The Vote (GOTV) database that had massive election day failures and did not get out the vote but isolated and rendered ineffective 10s of thousands of election day volunteers. So they were suppressing their own vote.
HAW HAW.
And then they didn't say who they were ! (BTW, Obama actually posts as PresidentObama. He's been a redditor for 2 months and has 3837 link karma and 20,968 comment karma!!! 10 posts 2 months ago to IAmA and 2 posts to politics 4 days ago.)
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.