President Obama won an Electoral College landslide and a 3 or 4-point national victory – against the great odds posed by prolonged high unemployment, lack of income gains, a barely perceptible recovery and political gridlock that kept his job approval at just 50 percent at best. He won because he […] Read more »
Obama’s win shouldn’t be surprising
It’s both the most often repeated and ridiculously misleading statistic of campaign 2012: that no president since FDR has ever been reelected with unemployment over 7.2 percent. True, but no one bothers to explain that until Ronald Reagan won by an 18-point margin, capturing 49 states, despite being “weighed down” […] Read more »
Everything We Know (So Far) About Obama’s Big Data Tactics
… 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 »