How Obama's data crunchers helped him win
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President Obama's campaign manager hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Senior Obama campaign data crunchers agreed to describe their cutting-edge efforts with TIME
- What they revealed was a massive data effort that helped Obama raise $1 billion
- They remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters
So as they did with all
the other data collected, stored and analyzed in the two-year drive for
re-election, Obama's top campaign aides decided to put this insight to
use. They sought out an East Coast celebrity who had similar appeal
among the same demographic, aiming to replicate the millions of dollars
produced by the Clooney contest.
"We were blessed with an
overflowing menu of options, but we chose Sarah Jessica Parker,"
explains a senior campaign adviser. And so the next Dinner with Barack
contest was born: a chance to eat at Parker's West Village brownstone.
For the general public,
there was no way to know that the idea for the Parker contest had come
from a data-mining discovery about some supporters: affection for
contests, small dinners and celebrity. But from the beginning, campaign
manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind
of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts
might not be the means.
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"We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign," he said after taking the job.
He hired an analytics
department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an
official "chief scientist" for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid
Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other
things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions.
Exactly what that team of dozens of data crunchers was doing, however, was a closely held secret.
"They are our nuclear
codes," campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt would say when asked about the
efforts. Around the office, data-mining experiments were given
mysterious code names such as Narwhal and Dreamcatcher. The team even
worked at a remove from the rest of the campaign staff, setting up shop
in a windowless room at the north end of the vast headquarters office.
The "scientists" created
regular briefings on their work for the President and top aides in the
White House's Roosevelt Room, but public details were in short supply as
the campaign guarded what it believed to be its biggest institutional
advantage over Mitt Romney's campaign: its data.
On Nov. 4, a group of
senior campaign advisers agreed to describe their cutting-edge efforts
with TIME on the condition that they not be named and that the
information not be published until after the winner was declared.
What they revealed as
they pulled back the curtain was a massive data effort that helped Obama
raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created
detailed models of swing-state voters that could be used to increase the
effectiveness of everything from phone calls and door knocks to direct
mailings and social media.
How to raise $1 billion
For all the praise
Obama's team won in 2008 for its high-tech wizardry, its success masked a
huge weakness: too many databases. Back then, volunteers making phone
calls through the Obama website were working off lists that differed
from the lists used by callers in the campaign office. Get-out-the-vote
lists were never reconciled with fundraising lists. It was like the FBI
and the CIA before 9/11: the two camps never shared data.
"We analyzed very early
that the problem in Democratic politics was you had databases all over
the place," said one of the officials. "None of them talked to each
other."
So over the first 18
months, the campaign started over, creating a single massive system that
could merge the information collected from pollsters, fundraisers,
field workers and consumer databases as well as social-media and mobile
contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states.
The new megafile didn't
just tell the campaign how to find voters and get their attention; it
also allowed the number crunchers to run tests predicting which types of
people would be persuaded by certain kinds of appeals. Call lists in
field offices, for instance, didn't just list names and numbers; they
also ranked names in order of their persuadability, with the campaign's
most important priorities first. About 75% of the determining factors
were basics like age, sex, race, neighborhood and voting record.
Consumer data about voters helped round out the picture.
"We could [predict]
people who were going to give online. We could model people who were
going to give through mail. We could model volunteers," said one of the
senior advisers about the predictive profiles built by the data. "In the
end, modeling became something way bigger for us in '12 than in '08
because it made our time more efficient."
Early on, for example,
the campaign discovered that people who had unsubscribed from the 2008
campaign e-mail lists were top targets, among the easiest to pull back
into the fold with some personal attention. The strategists fashioned
tests for specific demographic groups, trying out message scripts that
they could then apply. They tested how much better a call from a local
volunteer would do than a call from a volunteer from a non--swing state
like California. As Messina had promised, assumptions were rarely left
in place without numbers to back them up.
The new megafile also
allowed the campaign to raise more money than it once thought possible.
Until August, everyone in the Obama orbit had protested loudly that the
campaign would not be able to reach the mythical $1 billion fundraising
goal.
"We had big fights
because we wouldn't even accept a goal in the 900s," said one of the
senior officials who was intimately involved in the process. "And then
the Internet exploded over the summer," said another.
A large portion of the
cash raised online came through an intricate, metric-driven e-mail
campaign in which dozens of fundraising appeals went out each day. Here
again, data collection and analysis were paramount. Many of the e-mails
sent to supporters were just tests, with different subject lines,
senders and messages. Inside the campaign, there were office pools on
which combination would raise the most money, and often the pools got it
wrong.
Michelle Obama's e-mails
performed best in the spring, and at times, campaign boss Messina
performed better than Vice President Joe Biden. In many cases, the top
performers raised 10 times as much money for the campaign as the
underperformers.
Chicago discovered that
people who signed up for the campaign's Quick Donate program, which
allowed repeat giving online or via text message without having to
re-enter credit-card information, gave about four times as much as other
donors. So the program was expanded and incentivized. By the end of
October, Quick Donate had become a big part of the campaign's messaging
to supporters, and first-time donors were offered a free bumper sticker
to sign up.
Predicting turnout
The magic tricks that
opened wallets were then repurposed to turn out votes. The analytics
team used four streams of polling data to build a detailed picture of
voters in key states. In the past month, said one official, the
analytics team had polling data from about 29,000 people in Ohio alone —
a whopping sample that composed nearly half of 1% of all voters there —
allowing for deep dives into exactly where each demographic and
regional group was trending at any given moment.
This was a huge
advantage: when polls started to slip after the first debate, they could
check to see which voters were changing sides and which were not.
It was this database
that helped steady campaign aides in October's choppy waters, assuring
them that most of the Ohioans in motion were not Obama backers but
likely Romney supporters whom Romney had lost because of his September
blunders.
"We were much calmer
than others," said one of the officials. The polling and voter-contact
data were processed and reprocessed nightly to account for every
imaginable scenario.
"We ran the election
66,000 times every night," said a senior official, describing the
computer simulations the campaign ran to figure out Obama's odds of
winning each swing state. "And every morning we got the spit-out — here
are your chances of winning these states. And that is how we allocated
resources."
Online, the
get-out-the-vote effort continued with a first-ever attempt at using
Facebook on a mass scale to replicate the door-knocking efforts of field
organizers. In the final weeks of the campaign, people who had
downloaded an app were sent messages with pictures of their friends in
swing states. They were told to click a button to automatically urge
those targeted voters to take certain actions, such as registering to
vote, voting early or getting to the polls.
The campaign found that
roughly 1 in 5 people contacted by a Facebook pal acted on the request,
in large part because the message came from someone they knew.
Data helped drive the
campaign's ad buying too. Rather than rely on outside media consultants
to decide where ads should run, Messina based his purchases on the
massive internal data sets.
"We were able to put our
target voters through some really complicated modeling, to say, O.K.,
if Miami-Dade women under 35 are the targets, [here is] how to reach
them," said one official. As a result, the campaign bought ads to air
during unconventional programming, like "Sons of Anarchy," "The Walking
Dead" and "Don't Trust the B—- in Apt. 23," skirting the traditional
route of buying ads next to local news programming.
How much more efficient
was the Obama campaign of 2012 than 2008 at ad buying? Chicago has a
number for that: "On TV we were able to buy 14% more efficiently ... to
make sure we were talking to our persuadable voters," the same official
said.
The numbers also led the
campaign to escort their man down roads not usually taken in the late
stages of a presidential campaign. In August, Obama decided to answer
questions on the social news website Reddit, which many of the
President's senior aides did not know about.
"Why did we put Barack
Obama on Reddit?" an official asked rhetorically. "Because a whole bunch
of our turnout targets were on Reddit."
That data-driven
decisionmaking played a huge role in creating a second term for the 44th
President and will be one of the more closely studied elements of the
2012 cycle. It's another sign that the role of the campaign pros in
Washington who make decisions on hunches and experience is rapidly
dwindling, being replaced by the work of quants and computer coders who
can crack massive data sets for insight.
As one official put it,
the time of "guys sitting in a back room smoking cigars, saying 'We
always buy 60 Minutes'" is over. In politics, the era of big data has
arrived.
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