… A.M.G. [Analytics Media Group] was founded in late December by a splinter group of longtime Obama advisers. … The campaign recruited the best young minds in the booming fields of analytics and behavioral science and placed them in a room they called “the cave” for up to 16 hours […] Read more »
From Campaign War Room to Big-Data Broom
… In ways that are often invisible to voters, Big Data — the suite of powerful technologies and digital measurements that has upended so much in the world of commerce — is reshaping American politics. This is the new electioneering. Campaigns analyze data like voter files and buying habits to […] Read more »
PredictWise’s Election Performance
We start with three different types of data … Voter Intention Polling Data … Fundamental Data … Prediction Market Data … One simple question motivates our method, what combination of these three key data types creates the most accurate, relevant, and timely forecasts (i.e., the most efficient and useful forecasts […] Read more »
Why Big Data Is Not Truth
The word “data” connotes fixed numbers inside hard grids of information, and as a result, it is easily mistaken for fact. … The term suggests assembling many facts to create greater, previously unseen truths. … Kate Crawford, a researcher at Microsoft Research, calls the problem “Big Data fundamentalism — the […] Read more »
Obama’s Data Team Totally Schooled Gallup
… But given the collaborative effort and many moving parts of a modern presidential campaign, it can be difficult to isolate the data team’s contribution. One great example, though, is the intricate mathematical models of swing states that [Dan] Wagner and colleagues built that were meant to offer an alternative […] Read more »
Google’s Eric Schmidt Invests in Obama’s Big Data Brains
… For all its acclaim, the analytics team’s main achievement is often misunderstood as “microtargeting” or some variant on wooing voters. This reverses the relationship between campaign and voter at the heart of [Dan] Wagner’s method. Recent campaigns have employed a top-down approach to identify what they thought were vital […] Read more »