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.'"

More and More Data...

[ideonexus]

...moving us closer and closer to psychohistory [wikipedia.org].

Re:Ooga Booga! Me Obonga!

[couchslug]

Works for me!

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.

Aren't vote records private / secret ballot?

[girlinatrainingbra]

re: determining factors were basics like age, sex, race, neighborhood and voting record
.

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...

Privacy Violations?

[Tora]

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?