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Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win
Time ^ | 11/7/2012 | Michael Scherer

Posted on 11/07/2012 1:20:54 PM PST by mojito

....[F]rom 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. “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 “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to describe their cutting-edge efforts with TIME on the condition that they not be named and that the information not be published until after the winner was declared.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.

(Excerpt) Read more at swampland.time.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Extended News; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: 2012analysis; 2012electionanalysis; electionaftermath; numbercrunching; obama; obamacampaign; obamawon
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To: ican'tbelieveit
People in other countries, or even democrats in this country, would take to the streets and demand justice. We, conservatives, will roll over. Sigh.

Keeping the people fooled and blinded is why they are hell-bent on collapsing our country.....so it can be reorganized with a social contract and no restrictive constitution.

21 posted on 11/07/2012 2:20:51 PM PST by Erik Latranyi (When religions have to beg the gov't for a waiver, we are already under socialism.)
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To: buckalfa
I am in SC and was robo called several times by the DNC to sign up to provide transportation to the polls in key states, all expenses paid. Brilliant use of old tactics on their end, shame on us for relying on the media for our GOTV effort. Conspiracy theories about fraud being laid aside, the Rats earned the win simply by out working the GOPe, Chicago style politics, they pay all angles to win.

YUP -it was that simple. The GOP would have done far better focusing upon logistics and getting its base to the polls RATHER than worrying about the message that was always destined to be tainted by the leftist media and the direct opposition.

Tea Party success is evidence that the voters are there already and evidence that how the left perceives and or reacts to the message or that what the left defines the messengers as is truly IRRELEVANT to winning an election.

22 posted on 11/07/2012 2:26:07 PM PST by DBeers (†)
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To: Erik Latranyi

ping


23 posted on 11/07/2012 2:39:23 PM PST by Jude in WV
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To: mojito

It really begs the question why though? It seems to me that we should not be getting beat in this regard. I mean the “Orca” deal Romney set up sounds like it was pretty much a vote tracker and nothing more. And if Obama’s team was modeling their vote, they were likely modeling Romney’s vote too to figure out where and how to create doubt and apathy.

In my opinion, if the GOP wants to win a Presidential election ever again, they need to use these data mining operations to figure out how to get “libertarian” America that hasn’t participated involved in the process. Figuring out what argument and how to present it to these folks.


24 posted on 11/07/2012 2:43:09 PM PST by johncocktoasten (Practicing asymetrical thread warfare against anti-Palin Trolls)
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To: Erik Latranyi

The weren’t energized to vote for him, he lost 10 million votes. Problem is they weren’t energized to vote for Romney either. It’s an old political rule, if you can get more people annoyed at your opponent that you you win.


25 posted on 11/07/2012 2:47:19 PM PST by discostu (Not a part of anyone's well oiled machine.)
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To: mojito

It was all done by means of the census addresses, names and so on ...that’s why the census counting was relocated to the White House!! They knew exactly where they could place the false registrations and false votes, IMO. Someone like Rove knows this is the truth but he will never accuse them of it.


26 posted on 11/07/2012 2:47:52 PM PST by Ms Mable
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To: mojito

Very interesting detail that supports my theory of fraud:

The most accurate polls were those conducted by the most liberal organizations: NBC, Wash-Post, PPP


27 posted on 11/07/2012 2:58:26 PM PST by Erik Latranyi (When religions have to beg the gov't for a waiver, we are already under socialism.)
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To: Diogenesis
"One doubts it was “analysis”."

Your point makes sense Diogenesis, but is not the “Occam's” choice. You are paid to analyze a sample of earth from the ground near a chemical plant. Your client asks for your results but you explain that no sample has been delivered. You are told to deliver the sample based upon what you think is reasonable for the region, but no sample is delivered, and you will not be paid without a report. That process was my profession a decade or two ago, but the samples were painstakingly audited at each stage, locked boxes for samples, no human intervention after collection of the sample, redundant databases, etc. etc.

Today absentee ballots are counted mostly by SEIU employees, in rooms guarded by the SEIU. There is no traceable path from a marked ballot to a reported count - by design. Several decades ago the state-by-state tallies were counted by a private corporation, Voter News Service, owned jointly by the major news networks. Do you think the any government agency would be reporting counts in real time?

Without trustworthy data the prognostication about the meaning of elections is meaningless. This is not conspiracy theorizing, this is engineering. Reliable data transfer is well understood, and our voting system, ignoring dead or illegal voters, is absolutely, and intentionally, unaudited. It is a process maintained because if the public understood that representation was a myth, they would be less likely to produce to support the public sector. The public sector, government and its dependents, long ago decided it needed assurances for its survival, since government dependents produce nothing other nations or individuals would willingly pay for, except for our military, and Saudi Arabia is certainly paying us protection money, albeit money collected from our taxpayers who buy oil while this government prevents us from eliminating our dependence on Saudi oil..

The old mechanism, still used in many countries, is simple and ingenious. Precincts were sized to allow a local count after closing of the polls; 300 to 1000 ballots can be hand counted in a few hours. Paper ballots were counted in the presence of representative of each party, each resident s from the neighborhood of the precinct. Ballots were locked and transported to a guarded repository until confirmation of the election results. The count from the local precinct workers was the count submitted to attorneys general. Locked boxes were only unlocked in the case of a challenge.

Today, absentee ballots are counted by SEIU employees, who are often guarded by SEIU guards who, legally or not, prevent observers from even entering the counting rooms. Government workers were previously helpless to protect their jobs from voters. Now, they report the results that guarantee their jobs.

With computers, whose source code has been rendered secret by the courts, a selection at a touch screen or a black line read by a computer scanner is simply a charade. Naive voters assume their selection has meaning, but precinct workers are no more than ushers in a theater. Voting is disconnected from voters at the front end. No one at a precinct has any idea what becomes of those few bytes presumably thrown into a pile of votes for one candidate or a measure. That blind trust has allowed the corruption of our republic. How can anyone believe that Holder, Obama, Ayers, Jarrett, all with open communist parents and in-laws, would not use the fatally flawed election system to achieve the goals they honestly proclaim?

One can only guess that governments assess what they can get away with and adjust the reported counts to affect public policy. That is an opinion, That votes are not reliable data is undeniable. Some precincts may have integrity, but without the ability to verify anything, voting is meaningless.

People must make decisions to protect themselves and their families. That is the simple reason that voting has been corrupted. Government, the individuals employed by it, want what everyone wants, a good life and security for themselves and their children. Government entrepreneurs are using their regulatory and confiscatory power to make their lives better, at the expense of the private sector. Until more people insist upon verifiable voting, we will migrate more and more to dictatorial socialism. Ironically, besides Israel, Mexico and Spain have verifiable elections. There are probably other nations that do, but so did the US fifty or sixty years ago.

Citizens are wasting time and energy attempting to interpret the results of a fictitious election process. Those who determined what would be reported have probably established results designed to shape the opinions, to prepare the populace to accept their plans. We may never confirm that the state-run media are fed the interpretations the government wants. Media figures will not usually confess to reporting opinions fed to them. That is all conjecture, but the complete lack of an audit trail, the complete lack of verifiability of our voting process is a certainty. One may need the confidence from having tried to design verifiable systems to know that, but most can understand that being able to look the precinct workers from your neighborhood in the eye when you cast the paper ballot they will count later in the evening depends upon the human instinct to trust neighbors. The truth today is that the SEIU employee may or may not choose to dispose of your ballot that may cost him or her the income that feeds his family. You will never know. These Acorn (yes, they are still there) and SEIU people are government dependents you will never see. It is about trust, and government doesn't trust you to vote to keep providing the resources it redistributes.

28 posted on 11/07/2012 3:08:26 PM PST by Spaulding
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To: Erik Latranyi

Ping


29 posted on 11/07/2012 3:20:47 PM PST by AdamBomb
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To: Erik Latranyi

The CIA has been fixing elections across the globe for many decades now. America elected the head of the CIA as VP in 1980 and everyone elected since then has been one of his good buddies or sons. Probaly CIA agents, everyone of them.

So yes I think it is possible


30 posted on 11/07/2012 3:25:02 PM PST by winodog
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To: Galtoid
"They simply went into certain urban neighborhoods, found the stupidest people they could, and had them vote early."

And had them vote early multiple times.

31 posted on 11/07/2012 3:54:07 PM PST by StormEye
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To: AdmSmith; AnonymousConservative; Berosus; bigheadfred; Bockscar; ColdOne; Convert from ECUSA; ...
Note: this topic is from 11/07/2012. Thanks mojito.

32 posted on 01/10/2013 8:24:00 PM PST by SunkenCiv (Romney would have been worse, if you're a dumb ass.)
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