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Obama campaign manager Jim Messina 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 team even worked at a remove from the rest of the campaign staff, setting up shop in a windowless room at the north end of the vast headquarters office. 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to describe their cutting-edge efforts with TIME on the condition that they not be named and that the information not be published until after the winner was declared.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.
Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win
One of the leading narratives of the 2012 campaign is that data trumped all. Nate Silver! The polling was dead on! The blowhard pundits were wrong! The Obama campaign's Internet money machine got people to give lots of money over the summer with George Clooney-dinner enticements tailor made for West Coast females aged 40 to 49! But there's a problem with the celebration: it's not as if the Romney camp did not try to use data. Let's not forget that American business, whence Romney came, has been onto the old 'big data' thing since even before Wal-Mart figured out you like Pop Tarts before a hurricane. In fact, the Washington Examiner reports, they created a software package called 'Orca' that was supposed to be the biggest data gathering and interpretation effort in modern American politics.
Data Doesn't Belong to the Democrats
Before rank-and-file conservatives ask, "What went wrong?", they should ask themselves a question every bit as important: "Why were we the last to realize that things were going wrong for us?"
So many on the right had predicted a Mitt Romney victory, or even a blowout -- Dick Morris, George Will, and Michael Barone all predicted the GOP would break 300 electoral votes. Joe Scarborough scoffed at the notion that the election was anything other than a toss-up. Peggy Noonan insisted that those predicting an Obama victory were ignoring the world around them. Even Karl Rove, supposed political genius, missed the bulls-eye. These voices drove the coverage on Fox News, talk radio, the Drudge Report, and conservative blogs. Those audiences were misinformed. Outside the conservative media, the narrative was completely different. Its driving force was Nate Silver, whose performance forecasting Election '08 gave him credibility as he daily explained why his model showed that President Obama enjoyed a very good chance of being reelected. Other experts echoed his findings. Readers of The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other "mainstream media" sites besides knew the expert predictions, which have been largely born out. The conclusions of experts are not sacrosanct. But Silver's expertise was always a better bet than relying on ideological hacks like Morris or the anecdotal impressions of Noonan.
How Conservative Media Lost to the MSM and Failed the Rank and File
Shortly before 5 p.m. yesterday, Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes assembled his network's election team in a second floor conference room at Fox’s midtown headquarters to discuss the night’s coverage. He prepared them for the worst. “Guys," he told them according to a source familiar with the exchange, "if things don’t go your way tonight, don’t go out there looking like someone ran over your dog." Six hours later, American Crossroads co-founder and Fox News contributor Karl Rove was on-camera seeming to ignore his boss’s orders.
Shortly after 11 p.m., Bret Baier went on-camera to read a script written by Fox’s Washington managing editor Bill Sammon, based on an analysis by the network's decision desk, announcing Ohio for Obama. “That’s the presidency, essentially," Baier said. Instantly, Fox phones lit up with angry phone calls and e-mails from the Romney campaign, who believed that the call was premature, since tallies in several Republican-leaning Southern counties hadn't been fully tabulated. "The Romney people were totally screaming that we’re totally wrong," one Fox source said. "To various people, they were saying, 'your decision team is wrong.'" According to a Fox insider, Rove had been in contact with the Romney people all night. After the Ohio call, Rove — whose super-PAC had spent as much as $300 million on the election, to little avail — took their complaints public, conducting an on-air primer on Ohio's electoral math in disputing the call. By midnight, Rove reluctantly seemed to concede. But his rear guard action seemed like a moment he would rather forget. He had raised hundreds of millions of dollars as the co-founder of the Crossroads PAC and came up short. He never went to the decision desk to apologize.
How Karl Rove Fought With Fox News Over the Ohio Call Rove’s On-Air Rebuttal of Fox’s Ohio Vote Call Raises Questions About His Role (NYTimes)
If you were watching a major news network or following Twitter, you were pretty sure that Barack Obama was your next president by 11:15. If you were instead relying on NYTimes.com and 538.com for the news, you might have gone to bed thinking the election was still up in the air.
The New York Times did not project that Obama had won the election until 12:03 a.m. Nate Silver has built his reputation on accurately predicting elections, and it looks as if his model got all 50 states right last night, though votes in Florida and Virginia are still being counted. But if you were looking for commentary from him last night, particularly after the networks announced an Obama win and the Obama campaign started celebrating, he and the NYT were not the place to get it — even though readers were seeking him out. The delay makes some sense: Silver has to be cautious, and the New York Times has to protect its own reputation. It can’t call the election too early and it doesn’t want to risk a Dewey defeats Truman moment. But Nate Silver is the man of the hour, the NYT’s top brand and probably traffic driver yesterday, and he could have brought even more traffic to the site between 11:15 p.m. and 12:03 a.m. if he’d been saying, well, anything. He, or another Times writer, could have written about why the Times hadn’t called the election yet and explained to readers what they were waiting for. But last night the paper was too slow to get in on the action, and readers who wanted a really good sense of how the election was unfolding had to turn to other sources.
Why the New York Times announced Obama’s win 49 minutes after Obama did
Nate Silver was right. The Gallup Poll was wrong. Silver, the computer expert who gave President Barack Obama a 90 percent chance of winning re-election, predicted on his blog, FiveThirtyEight (for the number of seats in the Electoral College), that the President would receive 51 percent of the popular vote as he called each of the 50 states, including all nine battlegrounds. Silver infuriated conservatives with his model, which uses a number of measurements and calculations, including attention to state polls.
Nate Silver-Led Statistics Men Crush Pundits in Election
President Barack Obama’s victory tweet became the most-retweeted message from his account. Twitter confirmed that Obama’s tweet — which read “Four more years” and featured a picture of him and Michelle Obama embracing — earned more retweets than any other message from his account. The message has been shared more than 670,000 times. Those numbers may even give Obama the title for most-retweeted message of all time. By MediaBistro’s Shea Bennett’s reckoning, the victory tweet far outstrips a message from Justin Bieber that had around 223,000 retweets and previously held the list’s top spot.
Twitter activity surged on Election Day, Nov. 6, with over 31 million tweets, according to a blog posted by Adam Sharp, head of government, news and social innovation on Twitter's official blog. The biggest spike in activity occurred at 11:19 P.M. ET, as the major networks and news organizations called the election for President Barack Obama and the number of tweets hit 327,452 per minute.
Obama victory tweet becomes his most-retweeted ever Obama, election break Twitter records (Los Angeles Times) Election Day Sees 31 Million Tweets (B&C) Actually, the Election Didn't Break Twitter (The Atlantic)
Super PACs and other outside groups made possible by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision spent more than $1 billion on advertising in federal races through Election Day, with 10 organizations accounting for more than half the total.
Conservative groups accounted for roughly 70 percent of spending, including more than $440 million on the presidential race alone, a sum that helped keep Republican Mitt Romney competitive in his bid to unseat President Barack Obama. The spending wasn’t enough to put the former Massachusetts governor in the White House — nor was it enough for Republicans to wrest control of the Senate away from the Democrats, despite the proliferation of Senate and House candidate-specific super PACs.
Spending by outside groups topped $1 billion by Election Day
The explosion of outside spending unleashed at the federal level by the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling also rocked state races. Contests for the top executive and judicial spots, in states whose bans on corporate outside spending were invalidated by the ruling, were newly shaped by unlimited cash from out-of-state corporate and union treasuries. The D.C.-based governors’ associations led the way, nearly keeping pace with candidate spending in several close races. Governors’ races in Montana, Washington and New Hampshire were neck-and-neck as voters were besieged by ads financed by outside spending groups through Election Day.
Outside spending makes big difference in state-level races
Political spending on television alone is expected to eclipse $3 billion this election cycle. Online advertising came nowhere near those levels, but it did hit an all-time high, and it will likely finish as the No. 2 medium behind television this election.
The presidential campaigns accounted for most of the internet spending. Perhaps reflecting the Democrats’ outreach to younger voters, who turned out in droves for Barack Obama during the 2008 election, Obama spent $52 million on online ads this year. His rival, Mitt Romney, spent half that, $26 million. That’s according to Federal Election Commission data analyzed by ReTargeter, a San Francisco online marketing agency. Between them, the two candidates spent $78 million online, up 251 percent over the 2008 election, when John McCain and Obama combined spent $22.2 million on digital ads.
Political online spending hits new heights