It Comes Down to Data

"Voters may not recognize just how much campaigning has evolved. The house looks the same, he said, but the plumbing's gotten extremely complicated."

Capturing what we do via the web or TV.

This is the data guy who headed up Dreamcatcher: "Rayid Ghani, the man who has been named Obama’s “chief scientist.”

I guess they listened: "Those familiar with Dreamcatcher describe it as a bet on text analytics to make sense of a whole genre of personal information that no one has ever systematically collected or put to use in politics. Obama’s targeters hope the project will allow them to make more sophisticated decisions about which voters to approach and what to say to them. “It’s not about us trying to leverage the information we have to better predict what people are doing. It’s about us being better listeners,” says a campaign official. “When a million people are talking to you at once it’s hard to listen to everything, and we need text analytics and other tools to make sense of what everyone is saying in a structured way.”

A new term, Microlistening: "St. Clair is among more than a dozen developers hired by the campaign to leverage technology to wring out more votes in what Obama’s advisers say may be an election as close as the contested 2000 race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. From Seattle startups to International Business Machines Corp., they’ve left lucrative jobs to mine for swing voters. They've added a new term to the strategic lexicon: microlistening."

“The things we did in 2008 in many ways were prehistoric by contemporary standards,” Axelrod said at a Dec. 7 Bloomberg View lunch. “There’s a lot you can do in the way of more finely targeting voters so they’re getting information that’s useful to them.”

"It comes down to data -- collecting voter information, synthesizing it and making use of it most effectively. The data comes from conversations on the ground and behavioral patterns on the website. Analysts may try to determine how to best target a voter who gives $5 to participate in a raffle to have dinner with the president versus $5 during a Republican debate."