Ground War: Obama And The Long March

Ground War: Obama And The Long March
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September 20, 2008 05:45 PM

When volunteers sign up to campaign for Barack Obama, they enter the world of e-politics - guided to a web site with a carefully culled, computer-generated list of people who live nearby. The volunteer is instructed to pick 25 people from the list, preferably people he or she knows - or, better yet, actual friends.

The names have been chosen by slicing and dicing a massive agglomeration of government and commercial data, using datamining technologies which identify the magazines, cars, and cookware specific individuals buy; how often they turn up at the polls; the value of their homes; their membership in organizations running the gamut from the NRA to Planned Parenthood; information customers volunteer when they fill out warranties; shopping histories --Target, Whole Foods, Ethan Allen, Sports Authority; and on, and on, and on.

When cross-referenced with the results of public opinion surveys and census information, all these pieces of data can ultimately produce demographic-consumer portraits of voters ranging from guaranteed Obama to locks for McCain and multiple shades of grey in between.

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Traditional Democratic get-out-the-vote techniques usually involved targeting urban and minority precincts and simply trying to get everyone in these neighborhoods en masse to the polls. As more and more voters have dispersed, and as the Democratic Party has gained strength among well-educated professionals, the traditional approach has proven inadequate, especially after Republicans in the first part of this decade made huge gains in figuring out how to identify and contact key voters no matter where they lived - for example, black Detroit voters adamantly opposed to gay marriage, or gun-owning union members.

In 2004, the George W. Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee were light years ahead of the Democrats on this high-tech front. Now, four years later, according to knowledgeable Republicans and Democrats, the Obama campaign has caught up with, if not surpassed the GOP.

Strasma, who declined to discuss specifics about the Obama campaign, contended that in 2006, his firm identified 7,368,609 Democratic voters in strongly Republican rural and exurban areas, along with 23,616,066 likely undecided voters. The numbers of voters similarly identified and classified is substantially larger now. Knowing as many possible names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails of such voters is crucial in the ground war currently underway between Obama and McCain.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/20/ground-war-obama-and-the_n_127981.html