Politics and Technology

Over the past few months, President Obama’s campaign team has been quietly employing the services of mathematicians, computing experts, statisticians and programmers. While Obama’s advisers are silent on the role that science is playing in the campaign, his choice of chief scientist tells observers a little about his strategy.

Dr. Rayid Ghani, former head of analytics research at Accenture (News - Alert) Technology Labs, is a leading authority on data mining and knowledge discovery. Ghani is an expert in out-of-sample prediction, which uses small samples of data to create hypotheses that can be used across larger data sets. In 2011, Ghani gave a talk about using data mining in political campaigns. According to Ghani’s talk, the best use of the mountain of data available to campaigns is to try to determine the behavior, preferences and actions of voters.

Data comes to political campaigns from a variety of sources. Most campaigns have cross-referenced names and addresses with information like what magazines they subscribe to, whether or not they own homes and what their credit scores are. When people volunteer information to the campaign via canvassing or phone banks, that information is also added into the database. When all of this data is mined, the Obama team will be able to determine voting patterns so that they can spend their campaign contributions in a smart way.

One use of analytics is to test campaign components and voter messages. Because Facebook (News - Alert) is so much more crowded than it was in 2008, campaigns are not expecting as much free word-of-mouth advertising on that social media platform. However, political campaigns can purchase targeted advertising on Facebook based on a voter’s party affiliation, zip code, age and interests.

Twitter (News - Alert) may also be a great tool to determine which messages or rebuttals are most effective during the campaign. For instance, if the Obama campaign tweets a message that goes viral, then they will know that the message was effective. They can then deploy a more significant ad spend on targeted and proven messaging.

Obama has joined every available social network, from Google (News - Alert) Plus to a new photo-sharing site called Instagram. Both he and his Republican components are tweeting voraciously as Republicans seek to duplicate Obama’s 2008 grassroots success through social media organizing. To win in November, Obama will need as many youth votes as he can get through his online ventures. And he’s betting that winning is more of a science than an art.