Obama’s White Whale-How the campaign’s top-secret project Narwhal could change this race...
Obamas White Whale
How the campaigns top-secret project Narwhal could change this race, and many to come.
By Sasha Issenberg|Posted Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2012, at 11:28 AM ET
On Jan. 22, a young woman in a socially conservative corner of southwestern Ohio received a blast email from Stephanie Cutter, a deputy campaign manager for Barack Obama. Years earlier, the young woman had registered for updates on Obamas website, completing a form that asked for her email address and ZIP code. For a while, the emails she received from Obama and his Organizing for America apparatus were appeals to give money and sign petitions, and she responded to one that required that she provide her name. The emails kept on coming, rarely with anything an Obama supporter could disagree with, and certainly not the type of hard-edged political message that could scare one away.
But Cutters note was different. She boasted of a new administration rule that would require insurance plans to fully cover contraception as part of the presidents health care reform law, and encouraged her recipients to see the policy as reason to rally around Obamas re-election. Think about how different that is from what the candidates on the other side would do, Cutter wrote. Our opponents have been waging a war on womens healthattempting to defund Planned Parenthood, overturn Roe v. Wade, and everything in between.
It was a message that sat well with the young Ohioan who received it. She was single, liberal, sensitive to medical costsbut she had never told the campaign any of those things, and the one piece of information she had provided (her ZIP code) could easily mark her as the type of traditionalist Midwestern woman who would recoil at efforts to liberalize access to birth control. Indeed, she found it hard to believe that many other residents of her ZIP code would look as favorably upon a rallying cry to defend Planned Parenthood as she did.
Those who have worked with Obamas data say that it is an email that would have never been sent in 2008. The campaign knew very little about the 13 million people who had registered for online updates, not even their age or gender or party registration. Without the ability to filter its recipients based on those criteria, the campaign stuck to safe topics for email blasts and reserved its sharp-edged messages for individual delivery by direct mail or phone call. In those channels, the campaign could be certain of the political identities of those it was reaching, because the recipients had been profiled based on hundreds of personal characteristicsenough to guarantee that each message was aimed at a receptive audience.
This year, however, as part of a project code-named Narwhal, Obamas team is working to link once completely separate repositories of information so that every fact gathered about a voter is available to every arm of the campaign. Such information-sharing would allow the person who crafts a provocative email about contraception to send it only to women with whom canvassers have personally discussed reproductive views or whom data-mining targeters have pinpointed as likely to be friendly to Obamas views on the issue.
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/victory_lab/2012/02/project_narwhal_how_a_top_secret_obama_campaign_program_could_change_the_2012_race_.single.html
Surya Gayatri
(15,445 posts)Social network data-mining is a game changer.
Let's hope our guys are better than their guys.
But then, the truth of the message will always win out in the end.
SG
yurbud
(39,405 posts)The birth control stand is great, but something most of us would have once assumed was par for the course.
We need to see Democrats moving the ball forward and not just occasionally holding the line against regressive GOP policies.