The Technological Disparity In The 2012 Election

hellblazer

hellblazer

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Sep 20, 2008
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Not sure if this has been posted yet, but a good read on the differences between the two campaigns.

I like the idea of a centralized structure/database that is being continuously augmented that people could access from across the nation.

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CTO Harper Reed

Obama's in-house organization was huge! He had 200 digital people - website people, social media, etc. He had 50 more developers and 50 more analytics people. This crew made up about 1/3 of all Obama campaign staff! Romney had a small fraction of that.

Obama's people used open source tools and proven designs. "Key in maximizing the value of the Obama campaign's IT spending was its use of open source tools and open architectures. Linux-particularly Ubuntu-was used as the server operating system of choice." [6]

Obama's team changed technologies a lot; they customized; they innovated. They did a lot with cloud computing, while Romney's people used more traditional hosting in Boston and Waltham.

Obama's team did practice drills for major IT meltdowns so they would be prepared. They had a complete copy of their entire infrastructure moved to the West Coast when Hurricane Sandy hit. (This is an incredible feat.)

Obama set up a field office in SF for tech help got 100 volunteers and many did serious work and built real applications.

Obama's team opened up to outside people and the press about what it was doing, both before, and especially after the election.

Obama's people, before they started the campaign tech effort, toured Silicon Valley startups to find out best practices for the things they knew they needed to do. They wanted to be innovative, but they didn't want to do something that was not already working elsewhere.

Obama's people decided that instead of trying to combine third-party software services that were not designed to work together, that they would build their own giant data integration tool that would combine everything every part of the campaign knew about every voter, donor, and volunteer into one giant system that all applications could tie into.

There is no way to overstate how powerful this was. Every email, every phone call, every web advertisement, every website visit, every Facebook connection, and every door knocker would know everything about everyone and could do individual personalization on the spot. This was what "Project Narwhal" was. It is the holy grail of all political activity.

It improved efficiency across the entire country and it probably, over time, won the election for Obama. I don't say that carelessly. (Now you understand what 50 analytics guys can do full-time when they have every piece of data about everybody in America, eh?)
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And to top it off, a detailed presentation on the use of analytics during 2012. Lots of A/B, split subject email testing, conversion testing, etc...

If the Republicans weren't so hopelessly incompetent in the technological arena, they might have been able to overcome the blatant fraud and crime that occurred that fateful November day.
 


hellblazer said:
If the Republicans weren't so hopelessly incompetent in the technological arena, they might have been able to overcome the blatant fraud and crime that occurred that fateful November day.
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The outcome would have been the same thought. The U.S. would still have a shitty president.
 
I'm a bit disappointed, Hellblazer. The full title should have been something like :

The Technological Disparity In The 2012 Election : How Communist Operatives Viciously Forced Silicon Valley Into Brainwashing the American Populace
 
Confuse cause an consequence much?

Do presidents with the biggest budget win more because they have a bigger budget, or is that the most likely to win candidate is going to get more budget BACAUSE he is more likeable and businesses and people like to bet on the most likely to win candidate, therefore giving the most gregarious and naturally likely to win candidates the bigger budget?
 
How dare they run a smart campaign capitalizing on modern technology! Who do they think they are?! This must be illegal.
 
This is sort of like Dumb and Dumber : Electoral Edition.

The Republicans lost because they are retrograde neanderthals and pathological liars. The Democrats won because they understand how democracy works, and it doesn't work for the preservation of liberty, but rather the capacity for everyone to rip each other off.



Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
- HL Mencken



Legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways; hence, there are an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, bonuses, subsidies, incentives, the progressive income tax, free education, the right to employment, the right to profit, the right to wages, the right to relief, the right to the tools of production, interest free credit, etc., etc. And it the aggregate of all these plans, in respect to what they have in common, legal plunder, that goes under the name of socialism.
- Frederic Bastiat



When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
- Frederic Bastiat



A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.
- Alexander Fraser Tytler/Alexis de Tocqueville


Don't think for a minute I am endorsing Romney as a libertarian. He was as big of a fascist as anyone else in government. His problem is that his constituency of people to pay off after being elected wasn't the 50% of Americans unemployed, on welfare, pension or food stamps. Forget the latino vote, Republicans have horrible political-demographic targeting.
 
What made me LOL so hard about the whole thing is that Team Obama was had an open call for data mining specialists since early 2010. They had their system built and tested before the primary season was over.

Team Mitt gave millions to a small firm to build their system; they kept it so secret that they didn't even let their people on the ground test it until just before election day. And sure enough, their shit didn't work and it was too late to fix it. Most of their time was spent back in 2008 moving up primaries in Mitt-friendly states like Utah, Arizona and Idaho so it would look like their guy was on a roll. They did have an online marketing campaign though- they ran "and I'm a Mormon" ads on youtube for about 4 years.
 
guerilla said:
His problem is that his constituency of people to pay off after being elected wasn't the 50% of Americans unemployed, on welfare, pension or food stamps. Forget the latino vote, Republicans have horrible political-demographic targeting.
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They still have a majority in the house, due at least in part to them targeting certain people in the groups you refer to, in regards to those people's concerns with gay marriage, abortion, terrorists, etc.


President Exit Polls - Election 2012 - NYTimes.com

According to that, Romney won the social security vote, with 56% of those 65 or older voting for him.

Romney got 54% among those with incomes over $100,000, which isn't exactly a super majority. Obama won for that group in California and New York, two states with a ton of electoral votes.
 
galacon said:
Sig worthy shit right there, mates.
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You should check out Mencken, of anyone here, I think you would most appreciate his stuff.

Moxie said:
They still have a majority in the house, due at least in part to them targeting certain people in the groups you refer to, in regards to those people's concerns with gay marriage, abortion, terrorists, etc.
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Someone between the two parties has to have a majority. The two parties are indistinguishable on any substantive budget, ethical or foreign policy issue. It's theater, people vote one way, then punish that guy by voting the other way when they are inevitably disappointed by the results of their "political action".

Moxie said:
Romney got 54% among those with incomes over $100,000, which isn't exactly a super majority.
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Romney lost. I suspect he actually lost in a brutal landslide (despite 4 years of fanatical political grassroots activism), but they never report that, because the way to keep suckers voting is to create the impression that both sides votes count, and the elections are actually fairly close.

Anyone who thinks that American federal elections reporting is on the up and up is probably smoking dope.
 
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPzE2VIn4gg]Real Time With Bill Maher New Rules Episode 270 - YouTube[/ame]
 
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