The National Rifle Association has rallied gun-owners — and raised tens of millions of dollars — campaigning against the threat of a national database of firearms or their owners. But in fact, the sort of vast, secret database the NRA often warns of already exists, despite having been assembled largely […] Read more »
When campaigning backfires: Did a pro-Obama canvass produce McCain supporters?
In the aftermath of the 2012 election, one rare point of bipartisan agreement has been about campaign tactics: Obama had a significant edge in the ground game, many agree. One piece of evidence for that claim was the Obama campaign’s almost three-to-one advantage in its number of field offices. Still, […] Read more »
‘Big Data’ threatens poll standards
Campaign polling is crossing over into dangerous territory as it meets “Big Data,” the latest craze in campaigning. … The hitch for political pollsters is that these new methods threaten to trample on privacy and confidentiality, as traditionally practiced by survey researchers. [cont.] David Hill (Hill Research Consultants), The Hill Read more »
Data You Can Believe In: The Obama Campaign’s Digital Masterminds Cash In
… 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 »
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 »