There was a satire on the WSJ opinion page the other day titled To All My Dear, Needy Friends in Politcs (behind the paywall). In it Francine Zorn Trachtenberg recounted the personal social media missives she got from so many famous Democrats who treated her like an old friend as they asked for her money or vote. She ended her piece saying she intends to reply to all her new friends with a request they they help her out on LinkedIn -- "I know they'll be glad to hear from me."
It's funny stuff, and she made a good joke of the things the Obama campaign did to get voters to the poll. But the campaign wasn't a joke, it was a well oiled political machine upgraded for the 21st century with expensive technology and huge databases. Time.com provided a glimpse at the gears in Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win. Excerpt:
The new megafile didn’t just tell the campaign how to find voters and get their attention; it also allowed the number crunchers to run tests predicting which types of people would be persuaded by certain kinds of appeals. Call lists in field offices, for instance, didn’t just list names and numbers; they also ranked names in order of their persuadability, with the campaign’s most important priorities first. About 75% of the determining factors were basics like age, sex, race, neighborhood and voting record. Consumer data about voters helped round out the picture. “We could [predict] people who were going to give online. We could model people who were going to give through mail. We could model volunteers,” said one of the senior advisers about the predictive profiles built by the data. “In the end, modeling became something way bigger for us in ’12 than in ’08 because it made our time more efficient.”
We've known for quite some time that our personal lives are no longer secret and that some businesses use that information to try to sell us something. Nevertheless it is a bit unnerving to acknowledge how efficiently the Obama machine used that information to manipulate his electorate. Are Republicans doing this?
Via Econlog.
In the grand pattern of things you actually receive an A+ with regard to effort and hard work. Where exactly you actually confused me personally was on your facts. As people say, the devil is in the details... And it could not be much more accurate here. Having said that, let me reveal to you just what did deliver the results. The article (parts of it) is very persuasive and this is most likely why I am taking the effort to opine. I do not make it a regular habit of doing that. Secondly, although I can easily notice a jumps in reason you make, I am not convinced of just how you seem to connect the details which help to make your final result. For right now I shall subscribe to your point however trust in the future you link your facts much better.
Posted by: HQQMWMMPVAFWDCFE | August 29, 2018 at 12:13 AM