… As he staffed the campaign, [campaign manager Jeff] Roe made the unusual decision to make Cruz’s director of analytics and his pollster the same person. … Roe has granted [Chris] Wilson the most expansive brief of any pollster in either party’s 2016 field: his surveys not only guide Cruz’s strategy and define his message, but drive targeting decisions both online and off, including digital fundraising appeals.
In a party where large-scale volunteer-driven organizations are rare, Roe began imagining that grassroots enthusiasm could make Cruz’s campaign the exception. As he imagined ambitious plans for the early primary states—in which Cruz would reach his vote goals in part by mobilizing Christian conservatives who rarely turned out otherwise—Wilson operationalized the strategy by devising a system where modeling of individual voters would become essential to effective targeting of the phone calls and door knocks that Cruz’s supporters would deliver. CONT.
Sasha Issenberg, Bloomberg Politics