… During the election, the Obama campaign, which had assembled a cutting-edge team of data scientists, developers, and digital advertising experts, refused to say anything about how it was targeting voters. Now, members of the campaign are starting to open up about what their team actually did with all that […] Read more »
Predictable in retrospect: The dangers of hindsight bias in election postmortems
The media has undergone a strange change of mindset. Immediately before last Tuesday’s election, many reporters and commentators ignored or dismissed the consensus among forecasters and betting markets that President Obama was very likely to defeat Mitt Romney and acted instead as if the candidates were neck and neck or […] Read more »
Health Care Factored in 2012 Election, But Far From a Starring Role
As predicted, there was a role for health care issues in voters’ 2012 election decision, but Kaiser’s November Health Tracking Poll—fielded in the days immediately following last week’s presidential election—suggests it was a trailing issue rather than a leading one. To keep the issue list in perspective, the November survey […] Read more »
Secret of the Obama Victory? Rerun Watchers, for One Thing
It was called “the Optimizer,” and, strategists for President Obama say it is how he beat a better-financed Republican opposition in the advertising war. Culling never-before-used data about viewing habits, and combining it with more personal information about the voters the campaign was trying to reach and persuade than was […] Read more »
Academic ‘Dream Team’ Helped Obama’s Effort
… This election season the Obama campaign won a reputation for drawing on the tools of social science. … Less well known is that the Obama campaign also had a panel of unpaid academic advisers. The group — which calls itself the “consortium of behavioral scientists,” or COBS — provided […] Read more »
Red Versus Blue in a New Light
… The maps we have made show that the election was not just about red and blue states. … [C]ontrary to what you have heard, there’s only a strong red America-blue America split toward the top of the income distribution. Toward the bottom, the electoral map is a sea of blue. […] Read more »