… You may chafe at how much the online world knows about you, but campaigns don’t know anything more about your online behavior than any retailer, news outlet or savvy blogger. …
What’s really new in politics today is not the data itself but how campaigns make sense of it. Cheaper and more plentiful computing power allows campaigns to process far more information than ever before to look for patterns, trends and correlations.
The science of modeling is a modern-day application of a practice that has been around for nearly 200 years: polling. [cont.]
Ethan Roeder (New York Times)