Data drove Obama’s ground game

 

By Jennifer Martinez | The Hill

The impressive Election Day ground game that swept President Obama to victory was fueled by a technological edge left over from his initial run to the White House in 2008.

The result was high turnout among specific demographic groups responsible for Obama’s first win — African-Americans, Latinos, young voters and women.

While both campaigns blanketed swing-state television airwaves with advertisements, outside observers said Obama’s treasure trove of data helped give him a notable edge over Republican Mitt Romney.

Obama’s campaign used buckets of data collected through Facebook, email and other social-media tools to target the voters who supported him four years ago and drive them to the polls again.

After laying the groundwork more than four years ago, Obama's camp was able to analyze the data it culled from supporters in 2008 to hone its message and micro-target its ground effort.

Obama's campaign had amassed an email list of roughly 13 million supporters from 2008. That meant it could send out test messages to some people on that list to see which email subject lines or keywords made more people open the messages or donate to the campaign.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, was coming off of a grueling Republican primary battle and had to launch his online and social-media presence during the general election from scratch.

"They had to spend most of their campaign fighting the primary, so the amount of time they had to specifically target and match their message to individual voters and to learn from it was limited," said Andrew Rasiej, the founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, an organization that tracks the intersection of technology and politics.

The Obama campaign "had a major advantage because when you're building big data resources, the longer you're collecting data, the longer you're analyzing data … the smarter the data becomes over time," he said.

  The potent combination of data from social media and its email list enabled the Obama campaign to build a profile of potential voters and frame a compelling get-out-the-vote message, both online and off the grid.

"They train their volunteers to have a message at the door that's targeted toward that person at that very moment,” said Rasiej.

Zac Moffatt, the Romney campaign's digital director, said his 120-person team had to employ a different online strategy than the Obama campaign because it was coming off of the Republican primaries.

"They had more resources and they didn't have a primary," Moffatt said. "There was a substantial outspending of dollars online."

Comparing the two campaigns' digital strategies, "it's more like apples to hamburgers," Moffatt said. "It was a very different process to get here.

"Republicans from 2008 had not embraced digital," Moffatt said. "We had to build a plane while flying it, so we were constantly learning new things."

Still, Moffatt said, the Romney campaign had voter-engagement levels on Facebook that were on par with or higher than President Obama's this past fall.

"What we did in just six months is more impressive than what they built in four years, and I think that's a story that's missed," he said.

An Obama campaign official acknowledged that the head start helped, adding that the campaign was able to build on the platform from the previous election.

The official said the campaign also leveraged a variety of social-media tools to target various demographics. It used the online bulletin board-style tool Pinterest to reach out to women and the blogging site Tumblr to target young voters.

"We were very whimsical on there," the campaign official said. "We were willing to take risks to get our messages across to be relatable to young people using quality design and clear messaging."

An incumbent president will have a leg up on any challenger because the incumbent has more time to analyze the data about his or her voter base from the previous election and first term, according to Rasiej.

"In the 21st century, the candidate with [the] best data, merged with the best messages dictated by that data, wins," he said.

 
 

Read Original Article: The Hill .

 

Voting Problems Have Some Rethinking Our Election Systems

By Bruce Leshan | WUSA9

WASHINGTON, D.C. (WUSA) -- As Americans, we like to think of ourselves as exceptional. And when it comes to our voting systems, we are. Exceptionally bad.

In almost every other democracy -- even Third World democracies -- you get the results almost instantly. An independent national agency usually counts the ballots quickly and accurately with few allegations of fraud or voter suppression.

So why can't we do that?

"This is the longest line that I've ever seen," complained one voter in Dumfries on Tuesday night, and all across America on Election Day, voters felt the system failed them.

"I got up early this morning to cast my ballot," said an Ohio voter. "And now they're telling me my vote doesn't count."

In New Jersey, in the wake of the superstorm, the state let voters cast ballots by electronically, by email, by fax -- there were some problems.

But even in the former Soviet republic of Estonia, on-line voting is now the norm. "The technology is getting smarter, the security is getting better," Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Media told C/NET

Not that it's perfect. If a bank makes a mistake on line, it puts the money back in your account, C/NET's chief political correspondent Declan McCullough says. "If an election is hacked, we really don't have a way to do it over."

Even the tradition of Tuesday voting dates back to the days when Americans had to get to the polls on horseback. Tuesday avoided the Sabbath -- and market day.

Many democracies now have an election day holiday.

Spreading voting out over days or weeks might ease those lines.

Some states now allow everyone to vote by mail -- but the fact that DC, the 50 states, and thousands of counties, all have different machines and different rules only contributes to the confusion. "Our electoral administration system is a scandal," Jeremy Mayer of George Mason University says. "It's an obscenity. We should be embarrassed before the world that Americans waited four hours to vote. That doesn't happen in Canada. That doesn't happen in Australia."

Other countries may have voting scandals -- but nothing like the hanging chads of the 2000 election -- and of course, they're still counting the votes in Florida on Wednesday.

Part of the problem is money. Experts say we're just not spending enough to ensure efficient elections.

And the conspiracy theorists say that may be just the way some politicians want it. Wealthy people may be able to afford to wait in line for hours to vote -- for poor people, giving up a days wages may just convince them to skip the polling place.

WUSA9

Technology Industry Puts Immigration Reform As Top Hope For Obama's Second Term

By Gerry Smith | The Huffington Post

Seth Bannon offers various perks to attract software developers to work for his startup: unlimited beer, a fixed-gear bicycle or $2,000 cash. Yet Bannon, founder of the New York-based social fundraising platform Amicus, still can't get the talent he wants because the top developers are foreign-born and can't secure visas to work in the country, he said.

Now that President Obama has been reelected, Bannon hopes that will soon change.

"Our immigration system is fundamentally at odds with the needs of American startups," Bannon said. "I think Obama gets it. You hear him talk about entrepreneurs more and more."

Obama's reelection Tuesday has renewed hopes in the tech community that the president will prioritize their top policy issue: immigration reform.

Many startups in New York's "Silicon Alley" say they can't hire enough qualified engineers because of a shortage of temporary work visas and green cards. They have been pushing for legislation that would allow more immigrants with high-tech skills to remain in the country. The issue was not a priority during the president's first term. But on the campaign trail, Obama hinted that it would be a priority in his next term.

And in his acceptance speech early Wednesday morning, he said "fixing our immigration system" would be one of the policy issues that he would address "in the coming weeks and months."

But to accomplish that, Obama will need help from Congress, which after Tuesday's election, remains divided. Democrats maintained control of the Senate and Republicans kept control of the House.

The issue of expanding visas for highly-skilled immigrants has faced opposition from both parties. The STEM Jobs Act, which would have granted more visas to immigrants with math and science degrees, was widely supported by the tech community. But it failed to pass this year in part because Democrats demanded more comprehensive immigration reform.

And expanding visa programs are politically controversial: Critics claim they produce an influx in foreign-born workers who depress wages and make it more difficult for American-born workers to find jobs in high-tech fields.

Over the past four years, Obama has received high marks from the tech community on some measures. He recently signed laws, for example, that will allow entrepreneurs to use “crowdfunding” to raise capital. But they've expressed disappointed that he hasn't accomplished more.

"He hasn’t done as much on tech as we would like but he's clearly leaning toward many of our policy goals," said Andrew Rasiej, chairman of NY Tech Meetup, which hosts monthly gatherings for tech entrepreneurs. Besides immigration, those goals include increasing investment in research and development and science and math education.

In a letter he sent last month to NY Tech Meetup, which has more than 27,000 members, Obama said he planned to recruit 10,000 math and science teachers over the next decade and train 2 million workers for high-tech jobs.

Now that the election is over, some are optimistic that Obama will give more attention to their top policy issue.

"We think the president was sincere in his talk about the need for immigriaton reform in the second term, and we think he'll have a receptive House and Senate who want to look at that issue as well," said Mark Heesen, the president of the National Venture Capital Association, an industry group.

One factor may help explain the tech community's optimism that Obama will prioritize their issues in his next term: the industry made sizable contributions to his campaign. Obama raised $7.1 million from members of the tech industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Another reason is that Obama got other major policy priorities -- like health care reform -- done during his first term, allowing him to tackle the issue of expanding visas in his second term, Bannon said.

"This president is a fan of the entrepreneur community and he realizes it’s a problem," Bannon said. "I'm hopeful we'll see leadership from him on this issue."

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