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.'"

Comments

Ummm...

[Nexion]

creepy.

Re:Ummm...

[Jstlook]

Again, I'm going to reiterate my point. I don't care if they spend a billion dollars on a campaign (I prefer my privacy, thanks) on one condition:
Use your datamining to actually get government right. Figure out what everybody wants, and find a solution. If you're going to "run 66,000 campaign predictions a night", how many can you run that analyze the effects of your policies, actions, and decisions.
Cause honestly, it looks to me like government has gotten really good at screwing things up. I'd hate to lose my faith in humanity before I'm dead.

Very interesting

[wcrowe]

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.

Re:Very interesting

[dgatwood]

The rank and file Catholics can’t even agree on the abortion issue.

It's not that Catholics don't mostly agree that abortion is bad. It's that Catholics tend to be a lot more pragmatic as a group than their clergy would perhaps like. There are three factors here:

• Catholics don't universally agree on whether it should be illegal—that is, whether their moral objection to it outweighs the need for a clear separation of church and state—whether they have the right to push what is essentially a religious belief on those who do not share that belief.
• A sizable percentage of American Catholics realize that making it completely illegal has the potential to actually cost lives in some medical cases. That certainly isn't something that the Church as an institution will likely ever accept, but it is a reality that most American Catholics will concede. If your choice truly is whether to abort a fetus (or administer medical treatment that has the potential to kill the fetus) or let two people inevitably die, even most people who are against abortion in general have a hard time stomaching the latter.
• Most Catholics recognize that there are more important issues that are more likely to actually have a real impact on the world. Roe v. Wade is a wedge that Republicans use to try to get votes, but in reality, they almost never actually do anything to try to change it.

That last one is crucial to understanding Catholic voters. The abortion debate is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing—all talk, no action. As long as that remains the case, it makes sense to evaluate the candidates based on issues that they might realistically act upon—health care, civil rights, care for the poor, etc.

Re:All that and he still only squeaked by

[Anonymous Coward]

It simply makes me sigh and wonder again when The American People[tm] will come to its senses and get themselves a voting system that's less paralysable by a mere two parties and effectively disenfranchises just a hair short of half the voters.

But since the message of the founding fathers has been lost in the process of elevating them to sainthood (or rather, by commercialising their vague memory), the answer is probably "never".

Which makes the claims of this country being a democracy (or a republic, or both), all the more bitter.

Re:All that and he still only squeaked by

[jhoegl]

First off, Obama did what he could with a Republican party that wanted nothing more than for him to lose his second term. Dont believe me? They even said this.
Secondly, the Republican party is full of nut jobs and puppets. The last few candidates that the Republicans presented were such big shills (including Bush), that you could clearly see the strings that were being pulled to make them talk.
Third, stop lying to make the Republican party look good. We have something now called the internet, and despite the large amount of false data out there, the real data (and recordings) remain.
Finally, Stop taking the USA citizens for rubes. We are smart, educated, and intelligent, something the Republican Party has feared for years. We believe that even though people can and given the chance, will pull up their bootstraps, sometimes they need help to get started. Not everyone has an extended family, a rich uncle, or someone who knows the right people to get us started. Society is not socialism, it is caring about your neighbors and helping out. THis includes neighbors I dont know and will never meet. I sanction my government to help those that need help, and try its best to find those that would work this to their own personal benefit.

Adapt or die, as some of your party members might say.

Re:All that and he still only squeaked by

[desdinova 216]

part of the problem is that the Republican party is being held hostage by a small fringe who want to put in place a theocracy.

Re:All that and he still only squeaked by

[oodaloop]

Yes, we Americans should get a much more logical political system, like the British. Maybe if we had a House of Lords and a royal family, we'd finally enter the 18th century.

Re:All that and he still only squeaked by

[Anonymous Coward]

Because there are few rational members of that party left. The Republican party caters to the extreme right, just watch the primaries, it was a contest of who is the craziest. The Republican party is dead and it time for a third party to emerge.

Re:All that and he still only squeaked by

[mpeskett]

Important distinction - "A party that wanted for him to lose" vs "A party that wanted nothing more than for him to lose".

When "make sure the other guy loses" is the over-riding objective, above any other goal, you stop doing things that would make sense if you wanted to get anything done, because getting things done might make the other guy look good. You stop doing things that would make sense to advance your own (original) agenda, where it overlaps with the other guy, because agreeing with the other guy makes him look good and might allow him to achieve something.

It turns everything into a game of tribal warfare - no compromise, no co-operation, just blind hate and contrarian obstruction. Being anything so long as it puts the other guy down or makes his life difficult. That's pretty much the impression I get of a good chunk of the republican party for the last 4 years, and thankfully it hasn't proved to be a winning strategy. If all you had to do to win an election was to block everything the incumbent tries to do (then lambast him for never doing anything), then the USA would be stuck fruitlessly spinning its gears forever.

Maybe now that's been shown to be a dud they'll start working for the common good of the people being governed, rather than treating ideas (and laws) as soldiers in an imaginary war. Maybe. That is perhaps optimistic though; equally likely they double down on the obstructionist crap, especially given how much the far right has supplanted the centre right.

Re:Ooga Booga! Me Obonga!

[CanHasDIY]

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.

Re:All that and he still only squeaked by

[fiannaFailMan]

Yes, we Americans should get a much more logical political system, like the British. Maybe if we had a House of Lords and a royal family, we'd finally enter the 18th century.

The Queen has a very limited constitutional role that very seldom comes into play. If she did anything outrageous it'd be the end of the monarchy's popularity and the end of the monarchy (the Prime Minister can demand an abdication), so she has to follow the public mood.

The House of Lords can only delay legislation and send it back to the Commons, and its track record of providing corrective feedback and constructive improvements to bills is actually pretty good.

House of Commons Select Committees scrutinize every bit of legislation line-by-line before it can proceed. Is there a similar system in the US Capitol or is it true that most of the people voting on bills in the house don't actually read them?

Members of the British cabinet have to be elected to Parliament, not simply appointed. Nobody gets to be Prime Minister without years of fighting his (or her) way to the front benches, so whoever makes it to the front has a pretty good idea of how the system works by the time they get there.

Since the executive branch is taken from the legislative branch, a government with a decent sized mandate can actually get stuff done. And then of course there's Prime Minister's questions every Wednesday, where the PM gets a good solid grilling. Could you have imagined Dubya surviving for five minutes in a pit like that?

Since the head of state (the monarch) is a different person from the executive leader of the country (the Prime Minister) then people can honour the head of state and be as patriotic as they like while treating their political leaders with utter contempt and ousting them when they put a foot wrong. None of this "don't dare criticise the President in a time of war" nonsense. And if the government really does screw up badly enough then a vote of confidence in the Commons can force an election at any time, no staring at the clock waiting for a 4-year term to finish. And if you do happen to get a decent PM then he (or she) gets to stay in office for as long as the people are content for that government to remain, not be ousted at the end of an arbitrary term limit.

The parliamentary system isn't perfect (what system is?) but it sure as shit has a lot going for it. And since the UK had a female PM before a lot of people on /. were born, maybe you should hold your fire on gloating about how progressive the US system is until Hillary gets back into the White House, this time as President.

Carry on.

Re:Yeah well

[SpottedKuh]

Are you saying that there aren't local governments in the UK? Because that's not correct in the slightest.

Or are claiming that the landmass of a nation determines when it can be successful as a monarchy? Because Canada is larger than the US, and functions well enough with a queen and parliamentary system very similar to the UK.

Or are you claiming that it's population size that determines if a monarchy could work as a form of government? Claiming it doesn't scale with population is as ridiculous as claiming that counting ballots by hand doesn't scale in large populations -- the arguments just make no sense.

Re:All that and he still only squeaked by

[TapeCutter]

Stop taking the USA citizens for rubes. We are smart, educated, and intelligent, something the Republican Party has feared for years.

Well said, I agree with Christopher Hicthens who thought putting Palin up for VP was a genuine insult to intelligence of "the people". Isn't the conservative side of politics supposed to shun shallow air-heads? Are they not supposed to hang on to established institutions rather than openly call for their abolishment? Was Nixon a commie because he didn't veto the clean air act? Was reagan a wetermellon becuse he pushed for and obtained an international cap and trade treaty for sulphur emissions which has been credited with significantly reducing the threat from acid rain?

Having grown up in the 60-70's the Tea Party's sucessful hijacking of the conservative brand name has left me speechless, how border line support for anarchy and a total disregard for well-established facts could be interpreted as 'conservative' is beyond me? Go back pre-911 and have a look at the senior republicans, where are the moderate right wingers in today's line up? - Oh wait....I think I get it now.....you guys just elected a moderate conservative as president, well done! ;)

Re:Ooga Booga! Me Obonga!

[Arancaytar]

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.

Re:All that and he still only squeaked by

[denobug]

I am sad to say my prediction is very minimal compromise in the short term and further purges of moderates, especially moderate Republicans, for the next 4 years. Eventually the Republicans will have to change course, they just can’t/won’t that soon.

For the sake of our country I sincerely hope your prediction is not our future. As a moderate Republican I will have no choice but to keep voting for Democrates, straight down the ballot. I will keep on doing this until more Republican leaders emerges (and survives). I think many moderates (Republican or Democrats) in this country share my point of view.