There are a couple of interesting threads not about how President Obama’s campaign was able to, er, mirco-target its messages almost to the individual voter in the process of winning the election.
First, I’ll be starting a new thread shortly, assuming the mods okay it. I know I was and still am getting almost daily emails from the Obama people and the DNCC, and I think it would be interesting to find out if you folks are getting the same messages, ones slightly changed, or whole different sets of messages based on some criteria that maybe we can suss out. This would involve publishing their emails and looking for any differences between what we’ve received.
Second is a question. Obama and can do a great deal of good for himself and his party if he and they can scale down the same kind of data mining and analysis to work for individual Congressional districts. And my question is, is this practical? Aside from the problem of gerrymandered districts with what amounts to a pre-selected voter pool, the options for reaching individual voters are significantly less simply due to the smaller media pie in a limited geographic area. Or, this is my assumption. Perhaps, with all the new media and the internet, this can scale down to regional or even local levels. If anyone has some expertise on this question, I’d love to hear some thoughts on it.