A More Perfect Union, Part 3. This is Part 3 of our in-depth profile of the big data techniques that gave Barack Obama a second term in office. Read Part 1 and Part 2. The March In the summer of 2011, Carol Davidsen received a message from Dan Wagner. Already the Obama campaign was known for its relentless e-mails beseeching supporters to give their money or time, but this one offered something that intrigued Davidsen: a job. Wagner had sorted the campaign’s list of donors, stretching back to 2008, to find those who described their occupation with terms like “data” and “analytics” and sent them all invitations to apply for work in his new analytics department. Davidsen was working at Navic Networks, a Microsoft-owned company that wrote code for set-top cable boxes to create a record of a user’s DVR or tuner history, when she heeded Wagner’s call. By the start of 2012, Wagner had deftly wrested command of media planning into his own department.
The Community But the campaign had to play defense, too. The Legacy. A More Perfect Union, Part 2. This is Part 2 of our in-depth profile of the big data techniques that gave Barack Obama a second term in office. Read Part 1. The Experiments When Jim Messina arrived in Chicago as Obama’s newly minted campaign manager in January of 2011, he imposed a mandate on his recruits: they were to make decisions based on measurable data. But that didn’t mean quite what it had four years before. The 2008 campaign had been “data-driven,” as people liked to say. But for all its reliance on data, the 2008 Obama campaign had remained insulated from the most important methodological innovation in 21st-century politics.
The first Obama campaign used the findings of such tests to tweak call scripts and canvassing protocols, but it never fully embraced the experimental revolution itself. The Obama campaign embedded social scientists from the Analyst Institute among its staff. The expansion of individual-level data had made possible the kind of testing that could help do that. The Flow.
Obama. GOP.