… 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 »
Obama’s coalition, campaign deliver a second term
… Obama’s campaign, the most data-driven in the history of American politics, tweaked the electorate in enough places and enough constituencies to eke out victories in virtually every battleground state that had looked competitive on the eve of the election. Nothing was inevitable about the president’s victory. But against the […] Read more »
A Vast Left-Wing Competency
… Those who went into the polling business on the left were political consultants, too, but many of them also possessed serious scholarly credentials and had derailed promising academic careers to go into politics. Now that generation—Stan Greenberg, Celinda Lake, Mark Mellman, Diane Feldman, among others—preside over firms that see […] Read more »
Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win
… On Nov. 4, a group of senior campaign advisers agreed to describe their cutting-edge efforts with TIME on the condition that they not be named and that the information not be published until after the winner was declared. What they revealed as they pulled back the curtain was a […] Read more »
A Draw on the Economy, a Win on Empathy – and the Face of a Changing Nation
Barack Obama neutralized Mitt Romney on the economy, beat him on empathy and again turned the curve of America’s demographic change to Democratic advantage, winning a second term despite an unemployment rate that posed a major threat to his 2012 campaign. Deeply vulnerable on an economy that 77 percent of […] Read more »
Obama Wins by Marrying the New Democratic Coalition With the Old
President Obama won a second term by marrying the new Democratic coalition with just enough of the old to overcome enduring economic disenchantment and a cavernous racial divide. In many places, particularly across the Sun Belt, Obama mobilized the Democrats’ new “coalition of the ascendant,” winning enough support among young […] Read more »