Database Mining: The New Ward Heeler

The Republican Party has led in database development for the last 20 years, mostly with the work of former direct mailer Richard Viguerie, with his Moral Majority and Reagan contacts. I remember reading about it in industry journals at the time.

What Obama's campaign has done is made this kind of database scientific. There is no contact that is not followed up on through any of the following means: text message, email, phone, facebook, or twitter. This has been the Democrat's strategic advantage since he entered the race. The way his campaign has stayed on top of technology throughout has been impressive.

When everything is said and done after this campaign, everyone will point out the massive GOTV effort by the Democrats will have provided the edge. But this edge, of people walking their states, would not have been possible without the social networking and database contacts.

I probably received, in the last 2 months, 8 entreaties to phone bank or canvass in battleground states near me EVERY DAY. I had to look to do this in 2004.

FiveThirtyEight.com: Regressions for Politics

Number two on my list (previous post) of technological innovations to political discourse and campaigning this year is regression modeling of polls. The first one that I saw doing something like this, though far more simplistically is realclearpolitics.com (RCP). Basically what they did is took an average of all the polls, without assigning any kind of weighting. This was good to give us a nice and easy quick look at where the polls stood for the election, and washing out, for the most part, the effects of left- or right-lean of polls.

I would check RCP during the primary season occasionally, just to get the sense of where things stood, but they often didn't get the right trends. Around the middle of the primary season, I came across the website fivethirtyeight.com.  At first, I was very apprehensive about the model. My initial reaction was that there would be a propagation of errors that basically rendered the results useless. But the genius of the regression model, wasn't just the polling but the way these polls were weighted, both with lean and with recency.

If you'd like to check out the FiveThirtyEight FAQ, please do so; I will not repeat work that is already excellently explained even if you're not mathematically inclined. I think many of us who were watching this campaign intently, and liked the numbers aspect, really came on board around the time of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. It was at that point that I put 538 on my bookmarks and checked it daily. You will also notice that I now use the 538 widget on my right rail. 

A note about FiveThirtyEight.com is that the statistician in question is Nate Silver, of the baseball stats site, BaseballProspectus.com. Most of you know that I also have a baseball-related blog, Sabermetrati.blogspot.com, and am a big fan of Nate Silver's work on BP, which I reference regularly. I did not realize that it was the same Nate Silver until around early June, and it definitely lended more credence to his fine work on FiveThirtyEight.

My favorite part of 538 is the win percentage. I have been following that number since Obama officially won the nomination. It now stands at 94% chance of Obama winning the election, with a peak about a week ago of 98%.

Tuesday will prove the accuracy of Nate Silver's model; it should be interesting.

Brave New World on November 4th?

The time is finally upon us. After nearly two years of campaigning we are about to elect a new president. This election has kept me so wrapped up in all the technology that I have not even had a chance to add my voice to it. Here are some of the amazing technologies that will forever be useful in future  campaigns:

• Social Media Networking
• Regression modeling of Polls
• Get Out The Vote (GOTV) database mining
• Voting Machine Fraud Blogging
• Trash Emailing
• YouTube Moments
• Mobile Contact

While some of these items are completely non-partisan in nature and merely helped to inform us of campaign status (Poll regression modeling, Voting Machine Fraud blogging), the others were utilized to better advantage in getting out the message for the candidates. Who won this battle? Let's take a closer look.

Social Media Networking

The Obama campaign was on FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn before any of the other candidates during the long primary. I was not on the Obama bandwagon early, but I was impressed that I was being contacted in these areas long before anyone else. Any of us on FaceBook saw how many people were joining the Obama groups steadily over the course of the last two years. How many Obama buttons, Obama Lightsabers, etc. have we received during this time--too many to count?

On LinkedIn, Senator Obama asked my advice on topics facing his campaign and topics facing the country. I didn't fall for it: I knew he didn't send this personally nor do I think he read all of the comments. But I did send in my response when I thought I had something to say about a topic, and I received an automated response--that's better than when I was looking for a job and I would almost never get even the most cursory of automated responses ("Thank you for your interest, we will be contacting you if your resume meets our requirements.").

Between all of these social media items, this might constitute, as Mary Butler Twittered in my feed, his new communications channel after he's elected (IF he's elected). An unfiltered feed to the huge network he's built up and one that can get his message about his agenda out before the Limbaughs and Hannities of the world can lie about.

Are we witnessing the beginning of a whole new way of communicating in the Internet age between our government and the electorate?