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[b] Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win[/b]
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By [url="http://swampland.time.com/author/michaelscherer/"]Michael Scherer[/url]Nov. 07, 2012[url="http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/#comments"]267 Comments[/url][/size][/color]


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[img]http://timeswampland.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/wviral_1119.jpg?w=720&h=480&crop=1[/img] DANIEL SHEA FOR TIME [size=1]
"The cave" at President Obama's campaign headquarters in Chicago[/size]



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[*][url="http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/four-more-years-obama-wins-re-election/"]Four More Years: Obama Wins Re-election[/url]
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Follow [url="http://twitter.com/TIMEPolitics"]@TIMEPolitics[/url] [/center][/b][/size]
In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama’s campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over [url="http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/#"]cash[/url], for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney — and Obama.
So as they did with all the other data collected, stored and analyzed in the two-year drive for re-election, Obama’s top campaign aides decided to put this insight to use. They sought out an East Coast celebrity who had similar appeal among the same demographic, aiming to replicate the millions of dollars produced by the Clooney contest. “We were blessed with an overflowing menu of options, but we chose Sarah Jessica Parker,” explains a senior campaign adviser. And so the next Dinner with Barack contest was born: a chance to eat at Parker’s West Village brownstone.
([b]MORE:[/b] [url="http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/four-more-years-obama-wins-re-election/"]Four More Years: Obama Wins Re-election[/url])[font=Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]
[img]http://timeswampland.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/485_cover_1110.jpg?w=299[/img][/font]
For the general public, there was no way to know that the idea for the Parker contest had come from a data-mining discovery about some supporters: affection for[url="http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/#"]contests[/url], small dinners and celebrity. But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. “We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,” he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official “chief scientist” for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions.
Exactly what that team of dozens of data crunchers was doing, however, was a closely held secret. “They are our nuclear codes,” campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt would say when asked about the efforts. Around the office, data-mining experiments were given mysterious code names such as Narwhal and Dreamcatcher. The team even worked at a remove from the rest of the campaign staff, setting up shop in a windowless room at the north end of the vast headquarters office. The “scientists” created regular briefings on their [url="http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/#"]work[/url] for the President and top aides in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, but public details were in short supply as the campaign guarded what it believed to be its biggest institutional advantage over Mitt Romney’s campaign: its data.
On Nov. 4, a group of senior campaign advisers agreed to describe their cutting-edge efforts with TIME on the condition that they not be named and that the information not be published until after the winner was declared. What they revealed as they pulled back the curtain was a massive data effort that helped Obama raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters that could be used to increase the effectiveness of everything from [url="http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/#"]phone[/url] calls and door knocks to direct mailings and social media.
([url="http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/06/election-results-photo-gallery/"][b]Election 2012[/b]: Photos From the Finish Line[/url])
[b]How to Raise $1 Billion[/b]
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. “We analyzed very early that the problem in Democratic politics was you had databases all over the place,” said one of the officials. “None of them talked to each other.” 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 [url="http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/#"]consumer databases[/url] 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.”
Early on, for example, the campaign discovered that people who had unsubscribed from the 2008 campaign e-mail lists were top targets, among the easiest to pull back into the fold with some personal attention. The strategists fashioned tests for specific demographic groups, trying out message scripts that they could then apply. They tested how much better a call from a local volunteer would do than a call from a volunteer from a non–swing state like California. As Messina had promised, assumptions were rarely left in place without numbers to back them up.


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Silver_mani LEGEND

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[url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/linksets/2010/07/06/AB67q7D_linkset.html"]Marc A. Thiessen[/url] Opinion Writer[/size][/font]

[b] Obama’s ‘Moneyball’ campaign[/b]
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[b] By [color=#666666][url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/marc-a-thiessen/2011/02/24/ABwzFYN_page.html"]Marc A. Thiessen[/url][/color], [color=#6E6E6E]Published: November 12[/color][/b]
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How on earth did Barack Obama, the community organizer, harness the power of data in the 2012 election like a Bain Capital numbers-cruncher, while Mitt Romney’s data-mining effort crashed and burned like, well, Solyndra?[/size][/font] [font=Georgia, serif][size=1]
While Romney was relying on false signs of Republican “enthusiasm” and “momentum,” Obama was playing a game of political “[url="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393338398/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0393338398&linkCode=as2&tag=slatmaga-20"]Moneyball[/url]” — using an analytical, metrics-based approach to assemble a winning campaign, the way Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s used rigorous statistical analysis to assemble a winning baseball team.[/size][/font]

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Marc A. Thiessen[/b][/size][/font][/color][size=1]
A fellow with the American [url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-how-obama-trumped-romney-with-big-data/2012/11/12/6fa599da-2cd4-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html#"]Enterprise[/url] Institute, Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post.[/size]
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According to [url="http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/"]Time magazine[/url], the Obama campaign undertook an unprecedented data-mining effort that helped the president “raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters that could be used to increase the effectiveness of everything from [url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-how-obama-trumped-romney-with-big-data/2012/11/12/6fa599da-2cd4-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html#"]phone[/url] calls and door knocks to direct mailings and social media.”[/size][/font] [font=Georgia, serif][size=1]
The Obama operation (code-named “Narwhal” for the Arctic whale with a long spiral tusk) merged “information collected from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers and[url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-how-obama-trumped-romney-with-big-data/2012/11/12/6fa599da-2cd4-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html#"]consumer databases[/url] as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states” into a single massive database, Time reported.[/size][/font] [font=Georgia, serif][size=1]
The Obama team then fed the data into advanced predictive models that allowed officials to target voters with specialized messages. For example, the Obama campaign could identify the Planned Parenthood supporters living within largely Christian Zip codes and send them e-mails about Romney’s “war on women” without the risk of alienating pro-life Reagan Democrats who might recoil from such language.[/size][/font] [font=Georgia, serif][size=1]
Narwhal also gave the Obama campaign unprecedented insight into how voters were moving as the campaign progressed. Polling organizations such as Gallup typically use a sample of 1,000 voters nationally to follow electoral trends. The Obama team developed a polling-data profile of 29,000 voters [i]in Ohio alone[/i] and used this information to follow how various target groups were trending, how they responded to different messages and how events such as the presidential debates were moving the electorate — so they could respond effectively.[/size][/font] [font=Georgia, serif][size=1]
The system proved so accurate, Obama strategist [url="http://www.politico.com/playbook/1112/playbook9441.html"]David Axelrod declared[/url], that “nothing happened on election night that surprised me — nothing. Every single domino that turned over was in keeping with the model that our folks had projected.”[/size][/font] [font=Georgia, serif][size=1]
What about Mitt Romney? How did the metrics-driven [url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-how-obama-trumped-romney-with-big-data/2012/11/12/6fa599da-2cd4-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html#"]business[/url] executive tap into the power of data? The Romney campaign called its data-mining effort Project ORCA (for the Arctic killer whale that is the narwhal’s natural predator — get it?) and boasted that it would “[url="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/11/romney-campaign-acknowledges-high-tech-election-day-monitoring-system-had-its-challenges/"]ensure hyper-accuracy of our supporter targeting[/url] as we [url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-how-obama-trumped-romney-with-big-data/2012/11/12/6fa599da-2cd4-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html#"]work[/url] to turn them out to the polls.” One Romney official [url="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/11/romney-campaign-enlists-help-of-killer-whale-project-to-get-out-the-vote.html"]even mocked the Obama data project[/url], declaring, “The Obama campaign likes to brag about their ground operation, but it’s nothing compared to this.”[/size][/font] [font=Georgia, serif][size=1]
Well, the Obama operation [i]was[/i] nothing like ORCA — because it worked. According to ABC News, ORCA crashed when its data servers overloaded. “So much data was coming in, the system thought it was under attack,” a campaign official told the network.[/size][/font]

Silver_mani LEGEND

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[b] Obama campaign's investment in data crunching paid off[/b]

[b] No other presidential campaign has relied so heavily on the science of analytics, using information to predict voting patterns. Election day may have changed the game.[/b]



[size=3]CHICAGO — Early on election day, in two tight, tucked-away rooms at Obama headquarters known as the Cave and the Alley, the campaign's data-crunching team awaited the nation's first results, from Dixville Notch, a New Hampshire hamlet that traditionally votes at midnight.

Dixville Notch split 5-5. It did not seem an auspicious outcome for the president.

But for the math geeks and data wizards who spent more than a year devising sophisticated models to predict which voters would back the president, Dixville Notch was a victory. Their model had gotten it right, predicting that about 50% of the village's voters were likely to support President Obama.

[b][url="http://graphics.latimes.com/2012-election-results-national-map/"]EXPLORE: Full election results[/url][/b]

Daniel Wagner, the 29-year-old chief analytics officer, erupted in joy. The model was also projecting that Obama would be reelected. And as the night wore on, swing state after swing state came in with results that were very close to the model's prediction.

For the nation, last Tuesday was election day. For Wagner's crew, it's now known as Model [url="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-analytics-20121113,0,846342.story#"]Validation[/url] Day.

"We're kind of a weird bunch of kids," he said, standing near the Cave, where one wall was covered with a large canvas of a Martian landscape. "I haven't seen the sun in a while. We worked brutally inhuman hours this cycle. Twenty-hour days, often. But they bet a lot on us being right. And it was good to be right."

For years, campaigns have used reams of information to predict voter behavior, relying on a science known as analytics. But Obama's advisors elevated the practice to new heights, very likely changing the way presidential campaigns will be conducted in the future.

No other presidential campaign has so completely embraced this science. The campaign hired a team that topped out at 54 people and invested undisclosed millions in the effort. Analytics helped the campaign efficiently recruit volunteers, buy ads, tailor emails and mailers, raise money, dispatch surrogates — and, most importantly, scour the swing states for hard-to-find voters most likely to support the president.

Political guru David Plouffe and campaign manager Jim Messina made key decisions based on real-time reports from the geek squad, according to many people on the campaign's staff.

"Our entire goal is to make the maximum use of our time and our volunteers' time. And that means using analytics across the campaign spectrum," Messina said after the election. "We invested unprecedented resources to do this because our entire theory was to get as micro-targeted — to get as close to the ground — as we could."

[url="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-national-election-pictures-20121106,0,5501558.photogallery"][b]PHOTOS: America goes to the polls[/b][/url]

Another campaign official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak for the campaign, put it this way: "It's about turning over control to some nerds. And more than any other year, campaign leadership really took that leap of faith."

For campaign professionals, that is a major leap. Politics long has been ruled by truisms, conventional wisdom and intuition, with millions spent based on a murky mix of polling and focus groups. The shift to data-driven decision-making has been gradual and steady — becoming increasingly sophisticated as political parties amass more information about individual voters through traditional means, such as polls, and new ones, such as data mining.

The Obama campaign has made the transition over two elections. In this one, it employed analytics in a far more systematic and thorough way, officials said. But the work was a closely guarded secret. Officials denied requests for interviews with the analytics experts, and when journalists visited Obama headquarters, the team was ordered to shut the Cave door.

Victory opened that door — a crack.

[url="http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-reactions-to-obama-reelection-2012-20121108,0,5792236.photogallery"][b]PHOTOS: Reactions to Obama's victory[/b][/url]

At its most basic, Messina, Wagner and others explained, the goal was to rank individual voters in the swing states based on their likelihood of voting for the president or of being persuaded to vote for him, to volunteer for his campaign and to vote early. The Obama campaign developed separate models for each.

To build the "support model," the campaign in 2011 made thousands of calls to voters — 5,000 to 10,000 in individual states, tens of thousands nationwide — to find out whether they backed the president. Then it analyzed what those voters had in common. More than 80 different pieces of information were factored in — including age, gender, voting history, home ownership and magazine subscriptions.[/size]

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[b] Obama’s ‘Moneyball’ campaign[/b]
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[color=#000000][font=arial][size=2][b] By [color=#666666][url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/marc-a-thiessen/2011/02/24/ABwzFYN_page.html"]Marc A. Thiessen[/url][/color], [color=#6E6E6E]Published: November 12[/color][/b][/size][/font][/color]


[font=Georgia, serif][size=1]How on earth did Barack Obama, the community organizer, harness the power of data in the 2012 election like a Bain Capital numbers-cruncher, while Mitt Romney’s data-mining effort crashed and burned like, well, Solyndra?[/size][/font]
[font=Georgia, serif][size=1]While Romney was relying on false signs of Republican “enthusiasm” and “momentum,” Obama was playing a game of political “[url="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393338398/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0393338398&linkCode=as2&tag=slatmaga-20"]Moneyball[/url]” — using an analytical, metrics-based approach to assemble a winning campaign, the way Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s used rigorous statistical analysis to assemble a winning baseball team.[/size][/font]


[color=#555555][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][size=1][url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-how-obama-trumped-romney-with-big-data/2012/11/12/6fa599da-2cd4-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_allComments.html#comments"][color=#FFFFFF][font=arial, sans-serif !important][/color][/url][/size][/font][/color]
[center][color=#555555][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][size=1][url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-how-obama-trumped-romney-with-big-data/2012/11/12/6fa599da-2cd4-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_allComments.html#comments"][color=#FFFFFF][size=6][background=transparent !important]568[/background][/size][/color][/url][/size][/font][/color][/center]
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[url="http://personalpost.washingtonpost.com/c?add_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fopinions%2Fmarc-thiessen-how-obama-trumped-romney-with-big-data%2F2012%2F11%2F12%2F6fa599da-2cd4-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html"]Personal Post[/url]

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[size=1][b]Marc A. Thiessen[/b][/size][/font][/color]
[size=1]A fellow with the American [url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-how-obama-trumped-romney-with-big-data/2012/11/12/6fa599da-2cd4-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html#"]Enterprise[/url] Institute, Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post.[/size]

[right][size=1][b][url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/marc-a-thiessen/2011/02/24/ABwzFYN_page.html"]Archive[/url][/b][/size][/right]
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[size=1][size=1][url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-will-the-supreme-court-answer-monks-prayers/2012/11/14/ec6a30c8-2dcb-11e2-beb2-4b4cf5087636_story.html"][img]http://www.washingtonpost.com/rw/WashingtonPost/Content/Staff-Bio/Images/george-f-will_80x72.jpg[/img][/url][/size][/size]
[indent=2][size=1][size=1][size=1]25][url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-will-the-supreme-court-answer-monks-prayers/2012/11/14/ec6a30c8-2dcb-11e2-beb2-4b4cf5087636_story.html"][b]George F. Will[/b][/url][/size][/size][/size][/indent]
[indent=2][size=1][size=1][size=1][size=1]25][url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-will-the-supreme-court-answer-monks-prayers/2012/11/14/ec6a30c8-2dcb-11e2-beb2-4b4cf5087636_story.html"]The resurrecting caskets[/url][/size][/size][/size][/size][/indent]


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[size=1]According to [url="http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/"]Time magazine[/url], the Obama campaign undertook an unprecedented data-mining effort that helped the president “raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters that could be used to increase the effectiveness of everything from [url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-how-obama-trumped-romney-with-big-data/2012/11/12/6fa599da-2cd4-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html#"]phone[/url] calls and door knocks to direct mailings and social media.”[/size][/font] [font=Georgia, serif]
[size=1]The Obama operation (code-named “Narwhal” for the Arctic whale with a long spiral tusk) merged “information collected from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers and[url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-how-obama-trumped-romney-with-big-data/2012/11/12/6fa599da-2cd4-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html#"]consumer databases[/url] as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states” into a single massive database, Time reported.[/size][/font] [font=Georgia, serif]
[size=1]The Obama team then fed the data into advanced predictive models that allowed officials to target voters with specialized messages. For example, the Obama campaign could identify the Planned Parenthood supporters living within largely Christian Zip codes and send them e-mails about Romney’s “war on women” without the risk of alienating pro-life Reagan Democrats who might recoil from such language.[/size][/font] [font=Georgia, serif]
[size=1]Narwhal also gave the Obama campaign unprecedented insight into how voters were moving as the campaign progressed. Polling organizations such as Gallup typically use a sample of 1,000 voters nationally to follow electoral trends. The Obama team developed a polling-data profile of 29,000 voters [i]in Ohio alone[/i] and used this information to follow how various target groups were trending, how they responded to different messages and how events such as the presidential debates were moving the electorate — so they could respond effectively.[/size][/font] [font=Georgia, serif]
[size=1]The system proved so accurate, Obama strategist [url="http://www.politico.com/playbook/1112/playbook9441.html"]David Axelrod declared[/url], that “nothing happened on election night that surprised me — nothing. Every single domino that turned over was in keeping with the model that our folks had projected.”[/size][/font] [font=Georgia, serif]
[size=1]What about Mitt Romney? How did the metrics-driven [url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-how-obama-trumped-romney-with-big-data/2012/11/12/6fa599da-2cd4-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html#"]business[/url] executive tap into the power of data? The Romney campaign called its data-mining effort Project ORCA (for the Arctic killer whale that is the narwhal’s natural predator — get it?) and boasted that it would “[url="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/11/romney-campaign-acknowledges-high-tech-election-day-monitoring-system-had-its-challenges/"]ensure hyper-accuracy of our supporter targeting[/url] as we [url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-how-obama-trumped-romney-with-big-data/2012/11/12/6fa599da-2cd4-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html#"]work[/url] to turn them out to the polls.” One Romney official [url="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/11/romney-campaign-enlists-help-of-killer-whale-project-to-get-out-the-vote.html"]even mocked the Obama data project[/url], declaring, “The Obama campaign likes to brag about their ground operation, but it’s nothing compared to this.”[/size][/font] [font=Georgia, serif]
[size=1]Well, the Obama operation [i]was[/i] nothing like ORCA — because it worked. According to ABC News, ORCA crashed when its data servers overloaded. “So much data was coming in, the system thought it was under attack,” a campaign official told the network.[/size][/font]
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