"The data's the thing/Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king"

Alright.  That's not quite what Shakespeare said.  In Hamlet, Shakespeare's broken prince attempts to gain a reaction from his regicidal uncle by showing the new king scenes in a play that are familiar enough to his ghost father's story of murder.  If he can get a reaction, Hamlet believes he will know what path to take.

It's not quite the same as murder, but there are more than a few databases out there prepared to create and manage scenarios of voter outcome.  Tweaking and analyzing that data can generate enough information to get a reaction out of the best of us.  The goal: how can the Obama campaign change your mind and earn your vote.

If you haven't already done so, you should read Time Magazine's article Obama Wins: How Chicago's Data-Driven Campaign Triumphed.  Warning: it could hurt your head.  In the Time's piece, Michael Scherer writes about the scientists and data people that were hired by President Obama's campaign to be the inside scoop to win the election.  This team was hired and assembled by Jim Messina, and according to Scherer:  "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."

It would seem that what we understand about supermarket sales promotions does, in fact, translate to the world of politics.  Because of research and analysis, the Obama campaign was able to raise over $1 billion.  The two most useful tools to meet that goal were the targeted emails and a program called "Quick Donate."  Quick Donate made it possible for a donor to give again, via text or online, without having to re-enter credit card information.  The people who participated in that program gave about 4 times as much as other donors.

According to Scherer, the data told the "scientists" that George Clooney and Sarah Jessica Parker were the key figures on each coast that could be manipulated as fundraising tools.  Women of a certain demographic would be willing to donate in exchange for a dinner with Clooney (west coast) or Parker (east coast).  The data reveled that buying advertising during shows like The Walking Dead and Sons of Anarchy would target the precise demographic for the needs of the campaign.

Apart from creating donors, another key point of movement for a campaign is "getting out the vote."  Here the data sets were once again ready to rescue the day.  Donors and volunteers who used Facebook were asked to target friends who were voters in swing states.  "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." 

Sasha Issenberg has been talking about the Obama campaign and data for a long while.   In a series of articles for Slate called "The Victory Lab" (and a book of the same name), Issenberg warns that this data wasn't just used to prompt new voters through Facebook.  

With an eager pool of academic collaborators in political science, behavioral psychology, and economics linking up with curious political operatives and hacks, the left has birthed an unexpected subculture. It now contains a full-fledged electioneering intelligentsia, focused on integrating large-scale survey research with randomized experimental methods to isolate particular populations that can be moved by political contact.

All of this information is, of course, designed to teach the campaigns a little bit about who can be persuaded.  In fact, persuasion is the word of the hour for the 2012 election.  In ProPublica's article, we learn about persuasion scores.  These scores allowed the campaign to to focus their efforts on people who may actually change their minds.  

While this technique is not new, it could be argued that since the Obama team mastered it, it may have been the tipping point for them to win the election.  Romney's campaign never fully caught up to the Obama campaign, in terms of technology.  Romney didn't have the staff or the tools in place fast enough to generate the response needed to catch up to the technology game of his opponent.  The result?  A different kind of Shakespearian tragedy for that camp.