Ground War: Obama And The Long March
Tho;mas B. Edsall
The Huffington POst
September 20, 2008
When volunteers sign up to campaign for Barack Obama, they enter the world of e-politics - guided to a web site with a carefully culled, computer-generated list of people who live nearby. The volunteer is instructed to pick 25 people from the list, preferably people he or she knows - or, better yet, actual friends.
The names have been chosen by slicing and dicing a massive agglomeration of government and commercial data, using datamining technologies which identify the magazines, cars, and cookware specific individuals buy; how often they turn up at the polls; the value of their homes; their membership in organizations running the gamut from the NRA to Planned Parenthood; information customers volunteer when they fill out warranties; shopping histories --Target, Whole Foods, Ethan Allen, Sports Authority; and on, and on, and on.
When cross-referenced with the results of public opinion surveys and census information, all these pieces of data can ultimately produce demographic-consumer portraits of voters ranging from guaranteed Obama to locks for McCain and multiple shades of grey in between.
Consultants who specialize in datamining contend that, for a campaign willing to pay, they can tell with 90+ percent accuracy whether an individual voter is for Barack Obama, John McCain or, most importantly, on the fence.
Ken Strasma, president and founder of Strategic Telemetry, is performing microtargeting for the Obama campaign. He argues that, in some cases, the predictive accuracy of his firm's modeling of voter profiles is in the 99+ percent range.
(Continued here.)
The Huffington POst
September 20, 2008
When volunteers sign up to campaign for Barack Obama, they enter the world of e-politics - guided to a web site with a carefully culled, computer-generated list of people who live nearby. The volunteer is instructed to pick 25 people from the list, preferably people he or she knows - or, better yet, actual friends.
The names have been chosen by slicing and dicing a massive agglomeration of government and commercial data, using datamining technologies which identify the magazines, cars, and cookware specific individuals buy; how often they turn up at the polls; the value of their homes; their membership in organizations running the gamut from the NRA to Planned Parenthood; information customers volunteer when they fill out warranties; shopping histories --Target, Whole Foods, Ethan Allen, Sports Authority; and on, and on, and on.
When cross-referenced with the results of public opinion surveys and census information, all these pieces of data can ultimately produce demographic-consumer portraits of voters ranging from guaranteed Obama to locks for McCain and multiple shades of grey in between.
Consultants who specialize in datamining contend that, for a campaign willing to pay, they can tell with 90+ percent accuracy whether an individual voter is for Barack Obama, John McCain or, most importantly, on the fence.
Ken Strasma, president and founder of Strategic Telemetry, is performing microtargeting for the Obama campaign. He argues that, in some cases, the predictive accuracy of his firm's modeling of voter profiles is in the 99+ percent range.
(Continued here.)
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