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Obama, Romney Data Scientists Strike Out On Their Own
dcblogs writes "The self-described nerds of President Obama's presidential campaign last year are back using big data analytics, this time to help Newark Mayor Cory Booker achieve a landside primary win Tuesday in the New Jersey Democratic primary for a vacant U.S. Senate seat. The data scientists from Obama and Romney campaigns recently formed their own consulting businesses within months of each other. The chief data scientist for Romney's campaign, Alex Lundry, co-founded Deep Root Analytics. He gives credit to the Obama campaign's data effort in 2012. But since last year's election, "what you are seeing is a flurry of activity on the right to make sure that we not only catch them, but surpass them," Lundry said. Meanwhile, the co-founder of BlueLabs, Chris Wegrzyn, a senior member of Obama's 2012 campaign analytics department, says last year was turning point for big data analytics in elections. "Usually the nerds in the back room don't warrant a great deal of attention, especially in politics," said Wegrzyn, "but the world is changing.""
Politicians mining the data to see which opinions they need to have during the election to get them elected.
Once elected they continue to do what they really wanted to do anyway.
I don't want scientific advances in getting me to vote for someone: I want scientific advances in governmental process. I want someone who understands that our approach to representative democracy is poorly implemented. I want someone willing to say that our electoral algorithms are totally crap. I want someone to take on strategic voting scientifically, and I want someone who acknowledges the problem of congress failing to pass things supported by > 3/4 of people (thats enough to pull of a constitutional amendment if they got their act together).
If you kick ass at big data, go fix the veterans administration instead of trying to control my vote; that might even earn my support.
There were so many voters that they didn't even know existed.
Anyone with the tiniest bit of intelligence knew Romney didn't have a chance to even make it close, much less win, yet Romney et.al. believed in their make believe statistics. Which is why they where throwing money away in WI and PA where they had zero chance when they were behind in OH,CO, IA and FL, places they at least had a decent shot at.
On the other hand, Obama's team was first class and knew exactly where to spend money, down to specific districts and won easily.
I know who I would hire.
Since the main claim to fame for the founder is failure of the Orca system, why hire them?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
What annoys the hell out of me is that politians can be so scientific when collecting votes but never when actually discussing policy? Then it's always slogans and 'gotchas' and extremely superficial crap. Why never discuss the economy in detail? Get the numbers and try to figure out what they mean?
The media doesn't help much either. Why can they explain these statistics about voters in great detail, but when you see any numbers related to policy it's just fragments to 'prove' some stupid oppinion? Why never seriously analyse the numbers rather using it selectively to blame Bush/Obama/Clinton/etc. and pretend you're actually looking at the numbers.
No it's not. The character of the politician (and the people who vote for them) has remained the same for thousands of years. Bunch of dam carny hucksters they are, and always will be as long as the tactic works. These 'scientists' are just trying to 'improve' the art of book making.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Not sure how you don't think NBC and CNN both airing complimentary movies promoting Hillary while ignoring the ugly facts that would detract from her isn't partisan. I for one am happy the GOP got a pair and did this...screw NBC and CNN. Hillary has done little to warrant being President.
This is absolutely awesome. They are using science to figure out the most effective lies.
Hillary has done little to warrant being President.
Maybe you're eying a different metric. Looking at the numbers, she appears more than qualified.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Um no.
The worst shill is MSNBC, by a lot. However Fox, CNN, etc really are about equal in their bias levels.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/03/18/pew-study-finds-msnbc-the-most-opinionated-cable-news-channel-by-far/
But that's not the whole picture. The fact is they all suck, it's a matter of degree only. The quality of coverage is terrible, and has been driven that way by Fox' tabloid approach.
We should have a draft. We would get a far better representation.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
or, you could just admit you're a Party Apologist who refuses to acknowledge that the left in this country is just as corrupt and incompetent as the neocon right. Get your mind out of that dichotomous rut it's in. There are other options out there.
No, that is argumentum ad populum. I can't believe you said that it's rare for the wisdom of the masses to be wrong. Are you seriously joking? Individuals can be erudite and rational at times, some more than others, but put a bunch of people, smart or dumb, in a room, add some political commentary, and watch them devolve into 8yos. The mob is almost NEVER right.
Fox massages the ego of the neocon right, just as cnn and msnbc massage the egos of the left. By accident, it can turn out that one or the other admits more of the truth as they tow various party lines on various subjects, but it's purely by accident. If you still believe that you're getting better quality information from one or the other most of the time, it's YOUR emotional bias you need to check.
Really, the data people were pretty marginal in the last election - not because they didn't have the data, but because they didn't know the right question to ask.
The election came down to about 400,000 votes in a few counties. The question should have been: how do we get the most number of voters in those specific counties to show up at the polls?
Obama's organization didn't matter - he got massive amounts of free press, so his get out the vote drive was pretty much moot. It's always a plus when the press is your shill. Plus, when you get 99% of the black and hispanic vote the rest of the vote doesn't really matter.
Romney blew it because his system crashed, according to reports. But even if it didn't, were they targeting the counties that mattered? I doubt it. Even Romney campaign isn't cold enough to focus on the 10 counties that mattered. But they should have. If they can't drag 700,000 people off their asses and to the polls then he has no business being POTUS.
Every airport, job, and sports bar I have been to plays CNN. I spent a lot of time in hospitals watching over my wife, and that was the only place I saw Fox New (but the TV next to it had CNN.)
I guess it is possible that only Texas defaults to CNN, but based on every stereotype I read here and online, you would assume the opposite.
Plain, old-fashioned dirty tricks did.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You mean besides leaving americans high and dry, and bending over backwards to kiss Obama's ass on every scandal that's come out of his administration.
Om, nomnomnom...
Your righteous indignation is noted. But that's not how the institutional 'contributors' see things.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Forbes? Consider your source.
Ah, the source is Pew Research, not Forbes.
Now, we can debate the merits of Pew if you want, but I highly doubt that, because that would mean actually having an informed opinion about something, which clearly isnt important to the person that said 'consider your source' but got it fucking wrong.
"His name was James Damore."
I'm kind of amazed that so many people here misunderstand what the Obama data was used for. It was not used to change minds, at least not primarily. It was used to identify people who might be persuaded to actually get out and vote and then to bug them until they did.
Besta é tu si você não viver nesse mundo!
"Trying to sway people to a false dichotomy? Fuck you."
Is this what political discourse in the US is like? What's wrong with using good manners while talking to people you disagree with?
Romney and the GOP were living in the bubble they paid to create for their sucker fan base. Their "experts" were telling them what they wanted to hear-- that is for the customers not for the management. They were shocked at the results because their BAD DATA was divorced from reality. They bashed competent people like Nate Silver as being biased -- like they do with their conspiracy theories about all the climate scientists. If it doesn't please them, it just can't be reality! A few people like Rove, I don't think were drinking the coolaid, they just made mistakes as to the effectiveness of their scheming (to put it nicely; far more like cheating) and the other side changed tactics (they didn't notice. they should have. when you stop black people from voting and then they mail-vote or go early or replace the loss of Acorn with other groups... killing Acorn should have been delayed, it was replaced by the time the election came around.)
As far as playing the system to subvert democracy, they continue to invest heavily in that - far far more than the other side does. It's not racism, it is just an easy way to ID the groups they want to steal rights away from. If unemployed people were as easy to predict, they'd have made it harder for them to vote (they have subgroups they do that to already.) Sure the Dems would probably do the same things if they were so desperate; but they've nearly always benefited by HUGE margins with high turn out. Almost no incentive. If we could control the weather, it would be a huge battle for who controlled if rained on election days. Gone are the GOP believers in democracy, it is a war mentality in their party now; where there are no rules or ideals that are more important than winning the WAR. It doesn't take much investigation to see how the fanatics have taken over and even their terminology is war like. They put the opposition into the nearly the same target of hate as the Taliban. Speaking reason around them is akin to saying the world was spherical in a church 500 years ago. It's no wonder old republicans have no party.
Hindsight is 20/20. They can't predict which counties accurately enough and if they do... they change the nature of the situation - it's like time travel, by attempting to change things they impact the future as it develops. It is a complex dynamic situation with a lot of interconnections. Just changing some words in a speech to please one area could cause you to lose many more...
Romney was a bar of soap. He doesn't deserve much blame; they could have sold us another moron like Bush and done about as well.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
True enough on that. After all, all that BS must be tasty. There's no other explanation.
Om, nomnomnom...
Search Engine Optimisation all boils down to, in the end, "make websites that humans want to find, and search engines will tend over time to detect sites like yours". The SEO best-practices change all the time, but the ones which stick around tend also to be general usability best-practices.
There doesn't seem to be a similar rule for elections, ie "make candidates that humans want to govern them, and people will tend over time to elect candidates like yours".
Perhaps this is because nobody has actually tried such a strategy, but I expect it has more to do with the ideas that:
1. having lots of choices and few choosers (the choosers being chosen by the masses) tends to work-out better than having lots of choosers (the masses) and few choices
2. letting people benefit from more than one "winner" tends to work-out better than picking the top choice and throwing out everything else.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All