How Data Crunchers Helped Obama Win Election

The 2008 presidential campaign set out by Obama's campaign team marked the first time that campaign strategies were based on quantitative data instead of hunches and subjectivity.  With the success found in 2008, Obama's campaign team decided to invest even heavier in data analytics for the 2012 election. 

Getting Money
With all the success found in 2008 using big data analytics, a major weakness also became apparent.. Too many datasets.  So one of the first tasks to tackle for Obama's campaign team going into the 2012 election was merging all these data sets into one huge data set as well as expanding the data analytics team 5 times as big.  Going into the 2012 campaign the goal was set to raise $1 billion dollars, a seemingly large amount of money.  They accomplished this however by strategically targeting possible donors through emails and attractive fundraising events.  An example of this strategy came "In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama’s campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney — and Obama." A very interesting approach to say the least.. The same was done on the east coast and Sarah Jessica Parker was the celebrity chosen to use at a fundraising event.

Swing Voters
In order to gain insights in behaviors of swing voters, the campaign team obtained huge amounts of polling data in swing states.  This proved to be a huge advantage as they were able to allocate resources more efficiently.  They also dipped into social networks such as Reddit and Facebook because they found these to be very successful in swaying swing voters.  Another unique marketing strategy that came from their big data analytics was the decision to target ads during tv shows instead of the past method of airing ads between news programs. 

With the huge success Obama's campaign team experienced in 2012 data mining and using big data analytics, a new way of quantitatively developing campaign strategies was born and should prove to be the norm going into the future.


http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/2/