# The Election and Data **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [January 6, 2013, 6:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241 "2013-01-06T06:46:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2013, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/21 "2013-01-07T16:01:48Z")
> [@Omg\_a\_Black\_Conservative](#): > > What are you talking about? That’s not “dumping on anyone”. Here’s the problem: this thread is about the Obama campaign’s use of data to target potential voters, not how well informed those voters were or were not. So far, none of your posts have been on topic. If you’re not interested in the subject, don’t post in this thread. ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2013, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/22 "2013-01-07T16:19:49Z")
> [@Omg\_a\_Black\_Conservative](#): > > Wrong. Obama underperformed among higher education and older age demographics compared to 2008 and outperformed his 2008 performance among the undereducated and young in 2012. Obama was able to turn out a startling number of first time voters, who tend to be politically detached and low information. Those are simple facts, whether you like them or not. Nothing I said was incorrect, and what I said doesn’t conflict with what you said; are you just looking for a fight here? Both candidates got lots of “low information voters”, and both candidates got lots of “high information voters”. Obama’s numbers are different than 2008, but he still won by a (somewhat smaller) big margin. These are simple facts, whether you like them or not. I am ambivalent about these facts. ---
**Author:** ![Enderw24](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/ba9def/32.png) [@Enderw24](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enderw24)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2013, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/23 "2013-01-07T16:36:29Z")
> [@Omg\_a\_Black\_Conservative](#): > > Wrong. Obama underperformed among higher education and older age demographics compared to 2008 and outperformed his 2008 performance among the undereducated and young in 2012. Obama was able to turn out a startling number of first time voters, who tend to be politically detached and low information. Those are simple facts, whether you like them or not. higher educated ≠ more informed voter older age demographic ≠ more informed voter undereducated ≠ less informed voter young ≠ less informed voter first time voter ≠ less informed voter Just thought I’d correct those for you. And none of that analysis even takes into account the veracity of the underlying premise of your claims which is X voted for Obama whereas Y voted for Romney. I didn’t bother because it’s really not germane to the conversation. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2013, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/24 "2013-01-07T16:55:57Z")
> [@iiandyiiii](#): > > Both candidates got lots of “low information voters”, and both candidates got lots of “high information voters”. > [@Enderw24](#): > > Just thought I’d correct those for you. Please take this discussion to another thread so we can end the hijack in this one. ---
**Author:** ![Debaser](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3da27b/32.png) [@Debaser](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Debaser)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2013, 5:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/25 "2013-01-07T17:09:38Z")
Time Magazine, when giving Obama the “Person of the Year” recently mainly gave his campaigning efforts credit for it. [Time](http://poy.time.com/2012/12/19/person-of-the-year-barack-obama/4/) > [@](#): > > The goals were the same as ever: more money in the bank, more door knocks, more phone calls, more voter registrations and more voters at the polls. But the methods for achieving those ends in 2012 bordered on the revolutionary. A squad of dozens of data crunchers created algorithms for predicting the likelihood that someone would respond to specific types of requests to accomplish each of those goals. Vast quantities of information were collected and then employed to predict just which television shows various target voters in certain cities were watching at just what time of day — the better to decide where to place TV ads. Facebook, which was an afterthought in 2008, became the new electronic telephone call, employed to persuade more than 600,000 Obama supporters to reach out to 5 million swing-state friends online with targeted messages in the days before the election. > > Read more: [2012 Person of the Year: Barack Obama, the President | TIME.com](http://poy.time.com/2012/12/19/person-of-the-year-barack-obama/#ixzz2HJI3usWm) It’s hard to come up with a better term for people that get swayed by a cable TV ad or a robo-call than “low information voters”. It’s actually quite charitable compared with other names that could be used. However it seems that due to the overwhelming partisan nature of the SDMB we can’t even use that term without mod action. I’m sure when a liberal comes along and insults Romney voters he will be admonished just like OMG was. :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2013, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/26 "2013-01-07T17:17:21Z")
> [@Debaser](#): > > It’s hard to come up with a better term for people that get swayed by a cable TV ad or a robo-call than “low information voters”. […] However it seems that due to the overwhelming partisan nature of the SDMB we can’t even use that term without mod action. Here is a term we can all use: _reading comprehension_. There is no rule against dismissive comments about voters, and all of my mod posts reflected that point. The issue here is that this thread is not about how well informed any particular voters are. That’s a hijack introduced by **OMG a Black Conservative** evidently as a dig at Obama or his supporters. It’s allowed, but it needs to be relevant to the thread topic. The next step here is going to be official warnings since some posters are having trouble following a simple instruction. ---
**Author:** ![Snarky\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a183cd/32.png) [@Snarky\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snarky_Kong)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2013, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/27 "2013-01-07T17:34:56Z")
Nevermind. ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2013, 5:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/28 "2013-01-07T17:42:20Z")
> [@Debaser](#): > > It’s hard to come up with a better term for people that get swayed by a cable TV ad or a robo-call than “low information voters”. Obviously, the technology of the communication channel is orthogonal to the quality of the information: Maxwell’s equations can be scrawled on a dirty napkin , and the Time Cube rant can be adapted into a beautiful multimedia presentation. Where the communication channel becomes relevant is assessment of which communication channels are most effective at persuading voters, and allocation of resources accordingly. You know, the _subject of this thread_. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2013, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/29 "2013-01-07T18:16:11Z")
New thread started, [How did First-Time Voters vote?](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=678058). ---
**Author:** ![Euphonious\_Polemic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/euphonious_polemic/32/3002_2.png) [@Euphonious\_Polemic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Euphonious_Polemic)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2013, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/30 "2013-01-07T18:27:10Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > The irony, to me, is that this is the sort of direction that advertising has been moving, consistently, for two decades. It is not surprising that the Obama campaign devoted considerable energy to these efforts, but it is very surprising that major business-involved players from the other side, (Koch brothers, Crow Family, etc.), were not pushing their organizations to follow a business model and do the same thing. I read somewhere (can’t remember) that the major business players on the Repub site WERE following a business model. Trouble is, the model was one of “how can we get the most money from supporters, and use the money to enrich ourselves” This is one model of business. The business model the Democrats seemed to be using was different - it was “how can we get the most money from supporters and use the money to get our candidates elected” ---
**Author:** ![Debaser](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3da27b/32.png) [@Debaser](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Debaser)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2013, 7:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/31 "2013-01-07T19:08:30Z")
> [@Steve\_MB](#): > > Where the communication channel becomes relevant is assessment of which communication channels are most effective at persuading voters, and allocation of resources accordingly. You know, the _subject of this thread_. I know what the thread is about. The typical way to win an election is to win the independents. This is what Romney focused on. Obama, using data about the electorate in very creative and effective ways did something different. He reached out to low information voters that tend to vote Democratic but don’t tend to vote often as the base voters on either side. He targeted them very specifically with non partisan advertising that was very effective. This is a paradigm shift that may very well be repeated in the future and is worth discussing. Although, you will note in my cite from the Time Person of the Year article that Obama’s people don’t think that it will be easy for anyone other than Obama to do this. > [@](#): > > How much of this survives for future Democrats when Obama exits the stage? Obama’s advisers are quick to say it won’t be around for others to tap. Too much of the Obama coalition, they say, is about Obama himself. It might reject anyone who tries to take up his mantle in a few years. “This organization is not transferable,” says a senior campaign adviser. > > Read more: [2012 Person of the Year: Barack Obama, the President | TIME.com](http://poy.time.com/2012/12/19/person-of-the-year-barack-obama/#ixzz2HJmqw12y) But to narrow the topic of the thread to just the data analysis portion of the discussion and not allow any discussion of _who_ he was reaching out to makes it not even worth it. The well has been poisoned. No sane conservative poster should touch this thread if they don’t want to be banned. I certainly won’t. ---
**Author:** ![Airbeck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/airbeck/32/6574_2.png) [@Airbeck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Airbeck)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2013, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/32 "2013-01-07T19:20:24Z")
> [@Debaser](#): > > The well has been poisoned. No sane conservative poster should touch this thread if they don’t want to be banned. I certainly won’t. The well was poisoned by OMGABC in the first reply to the OP of the thread. Nice try blaming it on the rest of the thread participants though. You’re just crying because his (and your) attempt to hijack this into a ‘criticize democratic voters’ thread has been blocked. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2013, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/33 "2013-01-07T19:44:20Z")
> [@Debaser](#): > > The well has been poisoned. No sane conservative poster should touch this thread if they don’t want to be banned. I certainly won’t. If you want to complain about the moderation, do it in ATMB, not in the thread. > [@Airbeck](#): > > Nice try blaming it on the rest of the thread participants though. > > You’re just crying because his (and your) attempt to hijack this into a ‘criticize democratic voters’ thread has been blocked. If you must post like this, do it in the Pit. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2013, 7:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/34 "2013-01-07T19:53:13Z")
> [@Debaser](#): > > Time Magazine, when giving Obama the “Person of the Year” recently mainly gave his campaigning efforts credit for it. > > [Time](http://poy.time.com/2012/12/19/person-of-the-year-barack-obama/4/) > > It’s hard to come up with a better term for people that get swayed by a cable TV ad or a robo-call than “low information voters”. It’s actually quite charitable compared with other names that could be used. However it seems that due to the overwhelming partisan nature of the SDMB we can’t even use that term without mod action. Let’s think about who can be swayed, shall we? I think that is actually relevant to this thread, since it has a big impact on how you target ads. A Republican who is absolutely convinced that Obama is a Muslim Kenyan probably couldn’t be swayed, and would be someone I call a low information voter. To be bipartisan, a Democrat who is convinced that Romney is a rich crook who fired everyone the companies he took over would be similarly hard to persuade and similarly a low information voter. On the other hand, an independent who looks at the positions of both sides and finds good in both would likely be an excellent candidate for persuasiveness - yet be high information. A lot of the Obama effort went to convincing voters on their side with minds made up to vote - not to switch. We know the Romney effort to do the same thing crashed and burned. And, as I think I mentioned, the Obama campaign found that some voters leaning Republican were better candidates for persuasion than independents. As for the interesting Time quote, that might be Obama people feeling exceptional. The guy who wrote the introduction to the TR article used some of these methods for the Howard Dean campaign, and before. You need a candidate who excites the techies, of course, but some of this could be institutionalized in the Democratic party. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2013, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/35 "2013-01-07T20:49:15Z")
> [@Debaser](#): > > The typical way to win an election is to win the independents. This is what Romney focused on. Obama, using data about the electorate in very creative and effective ways did something different. This was a data issue, but I don’t think it was a creativity issue. The Obama campaign understood who the independents were and Romney’s campaign did not. The Romney campaign thought the self-described independents were moderates, and they felt that if they were polling well in that group, they were likely to win. Obama’s campaign understood that this group leaned to the right because it included a lot of former Republicans. ---
**Author:** ![Dangerosa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/22d042/32.png) [@Dangerosa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dangerosa)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2013, 11:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/36 "2013-01-07T23:49:00Z")
We were just having this conversation with our middle schoolers - but about direct mail. My husband got a fund raising letter from the Romney campaign “as one of the country’s most influential Republicans” the letter said. My hubby is a Democrat. He is listed as an Obama donor, as well as a donor to a dozen other Democratic candidates in the past few years. He gives to Democrats not even in our district. He’s registered as a Democrat to caucus and vote in the primary. This isn’t hard to find out. Nor does he have a name that its easy to say “oh, we were talking about the other guy.” So the Romney campaign didn’t clean whatever list they bought. Moreover, we can’t figure out where they would have sourced such a list. And they certainly didn’t write the letter with the source in mind. But hey, its a fundraising letter, right? What is he out, bulk mail postage to one guy? Except it became a facebook post, and a tweet, and my husband has 1000 followers, and other people said they’d gotten one too and they too were money giving Democrats. And it got retweeted and cross posted. And that if Romney couldn’t manage to target direct mail, how competent could he be. And through the miracle of social networking, not cleaning your list turns into a joke for 10,000 of my husband’s closest friends (most of whom, of course, he doesn’t know). On the other hand, Obama’s campaign spent a lot of time trying to figure out which letter should go to which individual based on all sorts of information. Their fundraising letters were very successful because they did a good job targeting them. Here is another article on the Obama data machine: [http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/07/tech/web/obama-campaign-tech-team/index.html](http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/07/tech/web/obama-campaign-tech-team/index.html) ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2013, 4:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/37 "2013-01-08T04:19:18Z")
> [@Omg\_a\_Black\_Conservative](#): > > Obama got low information voters to vote for him. Nothing all that complicated about it. One of the best parts about the election was listening to all the people on facebook or in person (there were more than one) who had GEDs or were high school dropouts talking about how if the public were more educated about economics they wouldn’t have voted Obama. The tears of broken dreams and sadness as conservatives watched their country slip away were the most nourishing to my people. The article the OP links to says that it was a tight race until the end. It wasn’t according to 538. It was a race with Obama with a wide margin for the last year or so. Even at the worst (a week after the first debate) Obama was still at about a 60% chance of winning on 538. That article claims the Romney camp was disorganized, which it was. I’m sure that gave an advantage to Obama, but how big I don’t know. It could’ve just been a few hundred thousand votes that were swayed by this strategy. Obama still won by several million. Back in 2008 Mark Penn was the wunderkind strategist for Hillary Clinton with a specialty in microtargeting. It didn’t help her win the primary, in part because the liberal base didn’t like her voting for the Iraq war. ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2013, 6:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/38 "2013-01-08T06:30:47Z")
Shouldn’t we make a distinction between low information voters (by which I mean people who don’t pay much attention) and bad information voters (who pay lots of attention to sources that fill their heads with shit)? ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2013, 6:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/39 "2013-01-08T06:59:25Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > The article the OP links to says that it was a tight race until the end. It wasn’t according to 538. It was a race with Obama with a wide margin for the last year or so. Even at the worst (a week after the first debate) Obama was still at about a 60% chance of winning on 538. The article said that the polls showed it to be a tight race, which they did. From the TR article, I suspect that the Obama people knew what was going on just like Nate did. Maybe better, since they knew their get out the vote strategy and they were monitoring how the early balloting was breaking in terms of voters for them vs against them. (And they also had more computers.) The TR article noted a certain tension between the old style pollsters and the modern analysts, by the way. What I’m curious about, and which I guess we’ll find out when the books come out, is whether the Romney camp really believed that the polls showed them ahead or if that was just putting a good face on an increasingly bad situation. ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2013, 11:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241/40 "2013-01-08T11:54:55Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > The article said that the polls showed it to be a tight race, which they did. From the TR article, I suspect that the Obama people knew what was going on just like Nate did. Obama’s team and Nate knew the situation from… drum roll… the polls. Ergo, the polls did not, in fact, show it to be a tight race at all, but were misinterpreted to that effect in some quarters (primarily by the punditocracy and the Romney camp, both of whom have motives too obvious to require comment). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-election-and-data/646241.md?page=3)