… Democrats are banking on the belief that they can better identify potential supporters, motivate them and get them to the polls — in essence, reshape the midterm electorate to make it look more like the electorate in a presidential year. To try to do so, they will for the first time fully employ the sophisticated tools and techniques used in Obama’s presidential campaigns to aid Senate and some House candidates. …
The groundwork for the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote operation began in earnest months ago in the offices of Civis Analytics, in a seventh-floor loft of an old office building in Chicago’s Greektown and in a townhouse near Washington’s Dupont Circle. Under contract to the DSCC, Civis Analytics started to model the electorates in states with the most competitive Senate races.
Civis is a descendant of Obama’s 2012 campaign. One of its founders is Dan Wagner, who began as a volunteer in the 2008 campaign and by 2012 was overseeing the sprawling data and analytics operation that helped guide many of the decisions in the campaign’s effort to find and turn out as many voters as possible. CONT.
Dan Balz, Washington Post