At the Obama 2012 headquarters in Chicago, inside a room nicknamed “the Cave,†a team of data analytics experts helped President Obama build the most technologically advanced campaign in American history. And in the election’s aftermath, Republican leaders and strategists vowed to hone their high-tech skills for future Election Days.
This is the new electioneering. Campaigns analyze reams of data â€" like voter files and buying habits â€" to pinpoint potential supporters, donors and volunteers, and, crucially, to marshal votes.
In a special section in The Times on the business and culture of big data, Big Data 2013, FiveThirtyEight’s Micah Cohen finds that part of this new world is unfolding in Blue Bell, Pa., near Philadelphia, where a small company called BehaviorMatrix is hoping to sharpen the Republican Party’s technial prowess by gathering and trying to quantify and measure voter emotion and opinion online. Read more.
