Can Data Mining Win a Presidential Campaign? 124
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."
Re:Intelligence winning elections (Score:4, Informative)
Technically there are no caps, but there are Federal Matching Funds which, if requested, impose caps. It used to be almost obligatory to use the matching funds, if only to avoid an arms race for donations.
In the last election, when Obama saw how much money he could make if he declined matching funds and thus removed the caps, he decided to take the larger amount of money and raise and spend money without a limit. This time is no different and so now both campaigns have not even bothered, which has made this the election with the most money spent on it ever.
Re:In Romney's case, no. (Score:4, Informative)
And that is precisely why we need to do away with the electoral college system. The victor should be decided by who gets the most votes, just like every other election in the country.
And no, this does not mean the big states (CA, TX, NY, etc) can sway the election. You are still looking at the total number of votes cast. For example, let's say CA voters cast 3 million total votes. Of those, candidate A gets 1.4 million while candidate B gets 1.6 million. That's a difference of 200K votes for candidate B.
In TX, a total of 2.5 million votes are cast. Candidate A gets 1.4 million votes while candidate B gets 1.1 million votes. A difference of 300K votes for candidate A. For those keeping score, candidate A now has a 100K vote advantage. Rinse and repeat for each state.
In the end, it won't make much difference changing to a "normal" voting process as the victors have also received the most total votes, but it would do away with this nonsense of concentrating on a few select states (PA, OH and FL for instance) and force the candidates to go after every vote. This doesn't mean there won't still be pockets for either candidate(s) in states, but we won't have to hear about winning a state. You're winning the vote.
Re:In Romney's case, no. (Score:4, Informative)
The real live contested swing states [demookie.com] at this time are (in rough order of closeness) Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina*, and Wisconsin.
* - This is the one state that Romney is ahead in. Mathematically, Romney has to win all of them, with the exception of one of Colorado, Iowa, or Wisconsin, in order to squeak out a win.
Say what you will about those states, but they are a fairly representative cross-section of the country. All you are really missing is the NE (New Hampshire almost made the list, but Republicans aren't contesting it)