It sounds like a Rolodex for the 1 percent: two million deal makers, power brokers and business executives — not only their names, but in many cases the names of their spouses and children and associates, their political donations, their charity work and more — all at a banker’s fingertips. […] Read more »
Overwhelming Hispanic Support for Obama Wasn’t Preordained in 2012
… Given the key role that Latinos had played in Obama’s 2008 win, this particular leg of his coalition looked pretty wobbly just a year and a half before Election Day. Little wonder that when pollsters, including Gallup, Peter Hart and Bill McInturff for NBC News and The Wall Street […] Read more »
In Minnesota, Democratic Grandmas Gather Data About Their Neighbors
In Minnesota, Democratic volunteers scour their local newspapers each morning for letters to the editor with a political slant. They pay attention to the names of callers on radio shows. They drive through their neighborhoods and jot down the addresses of campaign lawn signs. Then they feed the information into […] Read more »
Sure, Big Data Is Great. But So Is Intuition
… Big Data, said Professor [Erik] Brynjolfsson, will “replace ideas, paradigms, organizations and ways of thinking about the world.” These drumroll claims rest on the premise that data like Web-browsing trails, sensor signals, GPS tracking, and social network messages will open the door to measuring and monitoring people and machines […] Read more »
Obama’s Data Techniques Will Rule Future Elections
… The scope of the analytic research enabled it to pick up movements too small for traditional polls to perceive. … For the most part, however, the analytic tables demonstrated how stable the electorate was, and how predictable individual voters could be. Polls from the media and academic institutions may […] Read more »
How President Obama’s campaign used big data to rally individual voters
… The significance of [Dan] Wagner’s achievement went far beyond his ability to declare winners months before Election Day. His approach amounted to a decisive break with 20th-century tools for tracking public opinion, which revolved around quarantining small samples that could be treated as representative of the whole. Wagner had […] Read more »